Let me ask you, would you ever type up an important memo to go to your boss, colleagues, clients customers, and then just hit send without running it through spellcheck editing? It really would you just dictate it once and send it out as he is? I'm guessing that's a no. Here's the thing. If you ever stand up and give a presentation, and you haven't looked at it on video and gotten feedback from others, you're essentially tossing out your rough draft. rough drafts are by definition rough.

For really important text memos in any organization. Quite often, you're going to want a boss to look at it a lawyer, the head of investor relations or public relations. It's not just your gut on how it works. But when it comes to giving presentations, you can also test here's my advice if you're giving a presentation to five or 10, or 20 clients or customers or prospects on Thursday. Get one or two colleagues together at lunch on Tuesday. Give them your presentation.

We talked a little about getting feedback, and an earlier lesson, but really be serious about this. Test your presentation in front of them. And then ask them that, what do you think they're gonna say, oh, you're wonderful. Ask them. What do they remember? If they can't tell you exactly the messages that you care about the most that you planned in advance that you actually wrote down?

Then you didn't communicate? Because I gotta tell you, it's never the audience's fault. Your audience in real life is doing this. It's because there's something more interesting here than what you're saying that's your fault, not their fault. So you need to test test your slides to make sure they work you want to go in to your next presentation, with actual empirical evidence. that it works.

It can be done. It cost nothing. Now, there may be times when you don't have people right there, get your best video that you did in the earlier exercise and email it to people. Don't tell them what you're going to ask them. Just email it to them, ask them to look at it and then call them up and ask them over the phone. What do they remember, you can always test any presentation and it will make your actual presentation much, much stronger.