Public Speaking presentation skills. These are soft skills. Sometimes you never really know what's going to work. You're on one day, you're off the next timeout. I'm sure you've heard that. I've heard those things.

And let me tell you, that is absolute garbage. That is baloney. That is complete nonsense. There's nothing soft about public speaking your presentation skills. It is every bit as quantifiable as any aspect of physics, mathematics or chemistry. You can in fact, test these things.

If I'm an engineer, and I designed some bridge, I'm going to want to test it before human beings are going over in their cars and collapses to their death. I can't just say well, let me wing it that day. I had an off day building but no, you test your bridge. If you're an engineer, guess what? You can test your presentations. You can test yourself speeches, here's how to do it.

Take the video that you just made, that you're now confident, you look your best and sound your best. Email that video to two or three people who are similar in mindset to the audience, you're going to be speaking to send it to them, and then call them up or text them. Here's the thing. Don't ask them what they think. Your friends that your colleagues they're gonna sell. You are great.

You were fine. Good job, very professional, completely worthless feedback. That's not what we're after. You want to ask them? What stands out? What do you remember?

How would you summarize this presentation to a colleague who didn't hear me? And here's what you're listening for? Did they tell you the five or fewer ideas, the messages you really cared about? When you prepared this presentation, can they throw them back in your face, maybe a different order? That's fine. different wording.

That's Fine. But can they in fact, remember your messages and talk about them and throw it back? If they can't remember your messages, guess what you failed. If you're using slides, ask them what slides they remember. If they say, Oh, well, the slides were really professional guess what means your slides were useless. They can't remember your slides, throw them in the trashcan.

You need to find out what stories they remember what messages they remember what slides they remember. And do they feel compelled to take the action you wanted them to take when you started this whole process? So test this now sometimes you could be in an organization office. You could test with three or four colleagues at lunchtime. Or in the morning while people are having coffee test in front of live people get feedback. Get we're not so much concerned about them saying, Well you touched your pinky wants You said one arm, people are going to give you a lot of advice.

I would disregard most of it. But what you do really want to pay attention to is what do they remember? Remember the biggest problem most people have when they're giving a speech or presentation. It's not that they freeze have flopped sweat, and are so scared. It's a disaster and they made a horrible impression. biggest problem most people have is they made no impression.

They stood up, dressed professionally, they went through the presentation smoothly, professionally. Two minutes later, no one remembers anything of what they said you don't want to do that. So that's why it's critical to test and advance. When Ted picks great speakers quite often, the speakers spoke at a TEDx first and tested out the material show there was demand showed people like it show the audience right assassinated. Al Gore before he gave his famous TED talk on global warming, gave that speech thousands of time for years before it attracted a huge audience on Ted and then turned into a movie. So test your presentation on your audience, a sampling or a subset of your audience in advance.

Because when you see that the speech you've prepared and delivered, two or three people who didn't know it was edited in advance, can understand it and remember it. Then when you're going in to give the real speech. It's virtually impossible. To be nervous. You're going to have confidence, but confidence based on reality, confidence based on legitimate proof. That's what we're after.