Scott Stiefvater: How to Speak Better Without Scripts

Disclaimer: Transcripts were generated automatically and may contain inaccuracies and errors.

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Scott, Stiefvater. Thanks so much for jumping on. Yeah, thank you for having me, Damon. You said my name perfectly, which is already a big accomplishment. Thank you. Yeah, we were joking for hit record that you probably, you know, you were kind enough to put the pronunciation here and I was joking. You probably never had to do that ever before in your life, right?

Never. Oh, my gosh. I can’t tell you. Um, what a, I don’t know what one of my ancestors did wrong, uh, life, but I, but Stiefvater clan has been cursed. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I often get, um, the listeners have heard me joke about this, how I I’ve been married for 13 years and my wife has a twin brother and he refuses to call me Damon.

He’s like, I don’t care. It’s Damien. No matter how many times he’s like, whatever, it’s my thing. And you know, and, and at the office, I’ll pick up the phone and I’ll say, this is David. And they’re like, Hey David, well, my name becomes Steve I’m. I’m hoping that you’re not going to be cursed with this.

Probably just jinxed me by saying, I bet I did it. Just it’s this thing. Well, I’m excited to talk to you today. Yeah. So you work with business leaders to create compelling presentations and excuse me, what’s interesting. What’s timely about this for me is given the economical circumstances that are going on in the world right now, I’m doing a lot with just helping others and, and a lot of other, um, you know, online.

Uh, experts or people with social proof, they get on there and say, Hey, I’m going to help. But really like, there’s a price tag attached to it. They walk you into like a thing. So I’m just out there doing a lot of presentations, totally free with no intent to convert anybody. And so I’m excited to see what I can take away from this to make the presentations more compelling so I can help a broader audience.

So, yeah. I’m excited to see what you have to say before we get into it. Maybe give us a quick background and actually let’s start with the usual two questions. So question number one is what are you good at and what are we going to learn from you today? So I’m good at helping people talk well. Okay. And your con laughing because that was a very precise then.

And you’re done. I’m done. That’s it? That’s it’s true. I mean, I could go on and explain why I’m not really a communication skills guy, because I don’t teach other skill sets other than. Skillsets associated with talking. I call myself a presentation, one guy, but what’s a presentation other than a conversation where the rules of the game have one person talking more than the others.

It’s all about talking. Alright, question number two. What are you not so good at? I’m not always good at walking the talk like, well, we were just talking about exactly. You’ll see that. Uh, you mentioned something that you’re giving these presentations as a gift. You’re not giving presentations right now to serve yourself.

You’re you’re out there serving others. And that’s really interesting because that is one of the foundational principles of my approach, which is I think people speak well. They talk well when they have a self oriented internal setting. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess the best way to understand it is to think about the sort of me oriented setting, which is, Oh my God.

I’m so worried about how I’m going to come across to this audience. Am I going to look good? Will I look like an expert? Am I going to be professional? Am I going to have confident and comfortable up there? And. The paradox of it all is if you go in and you’re complete service to the audience, so those things come to you, right?

Yeah. Um, there there’s a gentleman. I want to talk about a little bit later, but he just is the epitome. Well, I’ll just put out his name and then maybe we can talk about a little bit later. Cause I don’t want to derail the conversation right now. Um, but are you familiar with speaker Marcus Sheridan? No, no, I’ve not heard the name and he’s, um, we’ll, we’ll leave it at that.

And, and I’m interesting to see he, he’s probably one of the best speakers I’ve seen live. So I’m interested to see the points that you talk about what makes a good presentation and see how they

align with him. So, um, w what’s your background and how’d you, how did you get into this world? Oh, God, I was a teacher for 13 years and I talked a lot.

Um, I taught video production for many of those 13 years, about 10, 10 of those 13 years. I was a video production teacher among other things. And then I left teaching and my life raft was video production. So think of video production as visual storytelling. And then that led me after five years of doing video production.

It led me to work for a company called Duarte. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the name, Nancy Duarte, she’s an author. She owns a wonderful company and Silicon Valley. I would call them the global leaders in presentation, design and development. And, um, I just thought, God, you know, I love video production.

I love visual storytelling and I want to. I teach again though. So in working for Duarte, I got to do that. I flew all over the place and, and taught workshops, helping people to craft and, um, craft their content for presentations and also design slides for those presentations. Um, so that’s where I really pivoted.

Into the presentation world directly. The interesting thing. And so the story goes is that at that time I was steeped in a mainstream presentation culture that I would describe as right. And recite it’s. Yeah, create a content script of some kind. Usually it’s embodied in a slide deck. Sometimes people use the presentation notes to actually script a talk track.

Um, but now once I left, after six years of working for this wonderful the company, um, I began working with another coach who called himself brain-based and he applied some psychological principles. And my epiphany in working with him was. Our design for talking is primarily conversational. We’re not designed for this sort of weird, um, idea of what a presentation is today, where slides are always there.

Um, you’re always starting with an agenda and your credentials, you finished with Q and a, all these things are sort of lumped on artificially onto this thing that in its essence is a conversation. Yeah. And that’s changed things for me. Yeah. So do you have, um, so it sounds like the goal is to be very natural in the presentation now, now in doing that, I assume that you still also have like rules, even though you get, you got fluidly.

Yeah. Well, there’s one rule in the presentation world, which is. Presentation is a conversation where the rules of the game have one person or party doing most of the talking because that’s really the only rule really it is. Now, if you desire to make an impact on your listeners, then there’s of course a whole set of principles.

That you can follow. But I do is I offer principles that I guess you described just a second ago is more organic or natural. My constant mission is to try to figure out what’s our natural design for talking and how can we work in concert with that design more effectively? Because I think if we do the artificiality of sort of the main stream presentation paradigm will.

Hopefully will melt away. So the concepts that you help others with and their presentations, do these apply to, uh, you know, business owners and presenting internally, or do these apply to people presenting in front of third party groups or all of the above and anybody. And these are just practices that that should be embraced by anybody presenting in any capacity.

Yes. Yeah, the answer is absolutely. Yes. And, and, and this is, what’s interesting. The take the public speaking concept, right? We have this idea of there’s there’s public speaking coaches, and I don’t, you know, I may use that term to describe me just so people kind of have a point of reference, but it’s a weird idea of public speaking.

Cause in public speaking, we separate public speaking as a skillset from just speaking. Yeah. And then you have to ask what, when does just speaking become public? Isn’t it always public if you’re not talking to yourself. So any time look at it, when I’m working with people, you can always apply it to any situation where you’re speaking to others.

There’s modifications. Of course. I mean, in some situations. It’s truly a presentation, which means the rules of the game have one person or one party speaking more than others or talking more than others. Got it. Um, and you may stand on a stage in front of a thousand people, but that’s not as different as, as most of us think than sitting.

At a table and talking to one person, it really isn’t. Yeah. Yeah. Now I believe that. Um, so, so now that we kind of have a little, uh, dividing line between what we’d say public speaking versus just speaking what’s one Oh one, where do we start? Oh gosh. Well, I think the place to start is to recognize the technology that’s truly in the way.

And people have bemoaned the pain of presentations per year. So, you know, they’ve come up with the term death by PowerPoint. Somehow this software became this evil, you know, thing, but there’s another technology. There’s another technology that’s far more pernicious and gets in the way and, and undermines us.

And that’s the technology of writing. So we’re in a literate society where we read and we write, and the individual in that society, we begin to think of writing as a natural thing, but it’s not, it’s a technology, it’s a technology. We’ve, we’ve been speaking. As human beings to one another for tens of thousands, but most of human society, he hasn’t been riding until the last 200 years.

And what happens is our writing mind gets in the way when we come into a situation, that’s a speaking situation in its essence. And it’s our writing mind that has this creating these content scripts. It’s just that. The slide has sort of become this, um, safety net almost well, it’s a substitute for an essay, you know, it’s a content script and that’s, I think where we start, when you start to look at the problem as, Oh, okay.

I write and I read and that’s, I’m an illiterate society and my mind has certain. Attitudes and habits because of that. And I’m not aware of those attitudes and habits. They’re like the air I breathe because I’ve just, I’ve grown up reading and writing. When you look at it that when you go, Oh, writing can really be a problem.

In speaking situations, if we let the undone unintended consequences get in the way, then you start to open your eyes and go, Oh, okay. Now I can question. Why is it that I opened up PowerPoint? First thing. When I’m planning for a presentation, why do I feel this urge to put a lot of words on my slides? Why do I feel that I have to protect linearity of my script so that I’m, I’m obsessed with time when I present, Oh my God.

I got to get all my slides and I’ve got to get all of this in. Within my allotted time. And then of course, people race through their content, which means quality goes down. You see where I’m going? Yeah, for sure. So what happens when, so here I am the listener and I say, okay, this makes sense. I never thought about writing, getting in the way before.

But as you just pointed out, that’s where you always start. So where does the new speaker, where do they reset and where do they start instead? Yeah, that’s a great, very important question. I’m not saying don’t right. I’m just saying guard against the unintended consequences of writing it to some degree.

It means pretend a little bit that writing is okay. Discouraged. So the three things that I would write down. When you first start planning a presentation and most of my, you know, compatriots out there other presentation coaches would agree. Write down your goal. No, finish the sentence by the end of this conversation, or by the end of this presentation, my listeners will and then write down some audience analysis and don’t fool yourself.

You can’t know an audience days before you meet them, even if you know them well, because everybody changes from day to day, their state of mind changes. So, but some good audience analysis and thinking about what really matters to this group, what matters to the people in this group? Write that down. And then the last thing you want to write down is the idea.

What’s the idea. You’re trying to, the big idea that you’re trying to transfer to people. I like, I like to tell people, write it as an if then statement. So you write something like if you embrace. Our natural design. So this is an example. If you brace embrace our natural design for talking, then you’ll become a much more impactful speaker.

Okay. So that’s an example of an idea that you might want to transfer in a presentation. Certainly that’s an idea. I tried to transfer now you’ve written all those things down. Now think of the presentation really as more of this. A set of smaller ideas within the big idea. There’s no linearity to it. You just put these small ideas within the bigger idea.

And when you get to the presentation, which is again, it’s a conversation you can go anywhere you can Zig and zag, you can move in a curvy fashion to the small idea. That makes sense in the moment as you relate to the audience. So how does, how does the presenter reference, um, you know, cause, cause, cause it.

I imagine a lot of people are gonna go, okay, well, I need some, some sort of chronological order to this, as I tell my story. And then on the other side, you’re saying let’s be abstract with it. And so I could see it going. Yeah. But South way is totally fine. But what about, how do they go? Okay. Well, yeah, my story starts over here and I want to get to over here.

I can’t necessarily like. Zig and zag in between, like I can’t present the first. Yeah. Well, you know, you brought up something here. You’re good. Damon. You’re good. I’m paying attention here. The funny thing is we don’t always tell stories, but the world has come to recognize the power of a story. Funny thing is in talking, you know, a story is that one vehicle.

Presentations that’s linear. I mean, it’s not linear in that you have to be chronological like this happened, then this happened and this happened and this happened, that’s horrible. Storytelling. Storytelling can go out of order and that sort of stuff. But when you craft a story, you do create some linear delivery, but people have gotten confused because, um, great thinkers in the presentation space have said, presentation is a story.

Tell your story, which again, Implies that you gotta be linear about it, that you have to own the stage. It’s one way you’re going to do all the talking. Okay. So what I would say is that let’s come up with an example. If I am going to give a presentation and in my mind I have one big idea. And within that big idea, I have a lunch of small ideas.

I’m going to call them downloads for now. They’re just ideas that I can easily access from my memory and talk about. Okay. I go in and you know, it’s a live event. I meet some people that might be in the audience. I talked to the organizers and I’m beginning to get a sense of what is appropriate, what my listeners need me to begin with when I get up and talk.

And let’s say, it’s a story. So then I go, okay, well, I have this download. It’s a story. I like to tell about how I did this or how we got into this, or it’s a customer success story, whatever it is. And I get up and I deliver that story. It could be three, five minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but then my mind changes from, let me get through this linear story thing into.

How does my audience ingesting this idea? Reacting? Yeah. I mean, a story is just a vehicle for an idea. It’s the, one of the best vehicles to get an idea into somebody else’s mind, but you’ve got to care so deeply about getting the idea in not telling the story, but using a story to get the idea and that you will watch your audience.

You gauge them, you read them. And then you react and respond, let them affect you. And that may mean, Oh, well now I’m sensing, I’m going to go to this idea and jump over here in this big. I do bubble. So we’re talking to the newbie speaker and in their mind, before we started talking, they’re saying, okay, I am going to script 100% of my presentation.

And then, and then now we’re telling them don’t. And so when you gave the example of walking into a crowd a few minutes before you talk, filling it out at that point, How much of your presentation. So we’re not at a hundred percent. Do you come in at like 50% of ideas? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let, let, let me say something else by the way.

Cause I think, um, there’s something else I imagine your listeners are wondering as well. How do I secure the content? If I don’t have a script, the script tells me what I’m going to say and the order in which I’m going to say it. If I don’t have that, then how the heck do I, you know, What if I go up there and just bladder say the way to prepare is to prepare as if writing was an impossibility, secure your content, get it in your mind by vocalizing, by talking.

You’ll see, when I prepare for a presentation, I talk either out loud, a lot, and that this may drive people around me. Crazy because yeah, talking to himself again, he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s cracking, he’s losing it, but I’m not really doing that. I’m, I’m actually shaping the idea in my head by talking. And the words change and they evolve a little bit, but I never feel obligated to lock it down.

Now you can do that in your head too. You know, we can sub vocalize, we can talk through our content in our head and then create these little downloads of content that are secure in our mind. And then in the presentation, call on them in a moment. Now you asked the question, which is 50% of it’s scripted or, you know, to what degree is, is my content set, I guess that would, let’s be realistic.

That would, it would depend on the context of the presentation. Yeah. So if I go and I, you have a presentation to an executive team where I’m. Proposing, you know, pitching an idea that should be very fluid, but people get so freaked out about it. They want a script. Oh my God, I don’t want to get interrupted.

So let me write the perfect script and maybe I’ll get out of this meeting unscathed, you know, but what your audience needs, there is mostly conversation, mostly unscripted stuff. You need to know your stuff. So it’s important to be prepared, which means it’s important to vocalize a lot too, to secure the ideas, but then you’d go in there and you might talk for two minutes just to set the foundation for what you you’re gonna converse about.

Right. And then you launch into a conversation. Now, a Ted talk is different. When you’re standing on a stage and the rules of the game say this audience is not even going to participate because in part of a Ted. Yeah. Right. And we have video, you know, and all that sort of stuff, then things change a little bit in the course, it becomes more scripted.

Um, does this, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think that it brings up another good point that we can elaborate on is that another problem, if you go in totally scripted and the audience starts participating, which hopefully they do and you get interrupted, you’re derailed now. And now you just like your whole thought process, like you were worried about screwing up.

Now you will screw up because the whole trajectory VR scripted presentation is now gone. Yeah. Again, that’s this assumption and take the executive team presentation that I was just referring to. It’s God, don’t get derailed. Don’t get derail that I’ve crafted the perfect content script, this wonderful linear thing.

And if I’m derailed, it’s all gonna fall apart. What if you flip that? And said, um, not derail me, but let’s take a curve. Let me accept the curve. When our ego based mind is all involved in the, Oh my God. They’re gonna ask a question for which I don’t have an answer. Well, first of all, it’s not fair for anybody to ask anybody to come and give a presentation about stuff they don’t know anything about.

So. You should have a lot of answers if they ask you to talk about it and they should be fair enough to give you time to know those answers and whatever, give you the resources to know your content. Um, but if in the course of a presentation to an executive team, you go into conversation and they ask a question for which you don’t have an answer, isn’t it okay to say, well, I don’t have the answer to that question, but I can get it for you.

Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, I’m just giving you an example, but the underlying principle is it’s weird that we fear derailment. What if you invited it? What if you invited what it really is the essence of a conversation, which is spontaneity. Yup. Yeah. And that’s, that’s when you’re going to expose your real expertise and your real personality, and those are the things that people need to understand.

You got to embrace because when you go into a lot of people say, well, I don’t want to, I don’t want to do this thing or talk about this thing because I’m quirky. Well, that’s why you should do it because that’s why you’re unique in that or why you can show your expertise in that tangent. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you mentioned quarry, it’s funny.

Yeah. Be, be your strongest. You be your best you in the act of conversing in the act of talking. So if you’re quirky, be quirky, you know, if you can, some people are so good at conversation. But then they lock themselves out of it when they present. It is the silliest thing. If you think about it. Yeah. You know what a good example is, is one of, one of a real respected presenters is Seth Godin.

I’m sure. I’m assuming you know who Seth Godin is. He’s one of my mentors. I mean, I’ve read a bunch of his books. Yeah. And he has like zero outline when it comes to fruition. I mean, he has an outline, but he was at this private mastermind here in park city, Utah, like a year ago. And I got the chance to meet him and.

When he got up on the stage, it was just like tangents left and right. And just totally random conversation. But that was more impactful for the majority of that room than if he was just like here’s facts. Here’s data, here’s facts, here’s data, because then you absorb it better. But it was really funny. I can’t remember.

It was Amber, one of the other presenters. Um, actually there was another presenter, um, who was a big social media, influencer and Shonduras. A lot of people know him and he just gets straight up on stage and he’s like, I got no presentation, because if I’m going to give you a slide deck, I suck. So let’s just start.

Here’s my background. Here’s what I want to teach you. Where do you want to go? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the question is how good is that experience and what would you write? What would it have been like if you decided to get up there and just try to pre-prepare some scripty like thing and deliver it. Yeah, well, a lot of this sounds like it gets back to like business basics, which as you said, who’s your audience?

Who are you talking to? So it’s identifying your buyer persona. So what is your persona and your avatar, and then speak to that audience. So in a lot of ways, it seems like in addition to being conversational, just know who you’re going to have the conversation with. Well, but, but here’s some important, you said the avatar and this is the weird thing.

Um, Part of this mode that we were just describing where people go up and say, you know, I’m not going to do the linear script slide thing. I’m going to just talk to you, um, is not just showing your expertise. Which is some sort of element of power. You know, you, you, you know your stuff. So you come across as having presence and authority and all that wonderful stuff.

But the other thing that really suffers when you’re in the Lockton linear mode is connection because people, you see this in Ted talks, watch their eyes, some Ted talk, they differ. But for most Ted talks, you’ll see that people’s eyes are darting all over the room as they speak. They’re making eye contact, which basically is code for pointing their pupils toward faces.

But they’re not looking at anybody. They don’t see their audience. They’re just obsessed with their script. So the connection there, there’s some connection going on through voice and other things. But the level of connection is stunted as. A business leader. When you are trying to gain the trust of investors, trying to gain the interest of partners, trying to gain the trust of customers, it’s important that they be yeah.

And that you see them an avatar doesn’t do that. And avatar is an idea of who they are. It’s still like a script it’s in the past. You can create the perfect avatar, but the person in front of you today is unique. The people in front of you today are all unique and different. They don’t fit an avatar. And if you’ll allow me, let me, let me give you one more example.

I know that I don’t want to dominate too much here. If I gave a presentation two months ago before this whole Corona virus thing happened. And I tried to replicate that presentation in its perfect form today. I will tell you the audience that I’m speaking to, even if it was the exact same people are not the same because they’re in a different state of being, yeah.

People are more anxious. People are. I’m concerned about the future and that changes them. So to think that an audience can be fixed, that you can create a persona and that they’ll always be that it’s just a myth. Yeah. Now, given what you just brought up the whole coronavirus thing and social distancing and people, the increase of remote work and digital work, let’s put that in one bucket.

And then in the other bucket, we have, um, the discussion that we had about. Minimizing visuals, we’ll say, you know, focusing on the fluidity of the conversation and not getting locked into a script. So how do you marry that in this new forced digital environment where you, you don’t get the me on stage and the grandiose or whatever movements that we’re now lacking.

So does that change the visual requirements? Okay. I’ve thought about this a lot. I I’ve thought about this a whole lot. Lately. Look at just three weeks ago, I was using a teleconferencing or video conferencing platform and I was having a conversation with someone in Transylvania, Romania, and because.

There was light. In other words, I could see this person’s face and see their reactions to me and all that. We developed an incredible rapport. We could have been in the same room almost really. So the first thing to acknowledge is that this technology is incredible. I always say it’s like having a conference, a phone conference call, but with light.

So even before we got on and recorded this podcast, I asked you to keep your, your camera on and you were cool, man. I’ll keep my camera on. That’s fine. But the reason is, is because I think our brains organic. Design is that we try to include light in all of this, but I want to see you respond and react, not just hear your voice, but it helps for me to see you and you and I can develop more rapport that way.

I mean, facial expressions have a lot to do with this experience of rapport. Is that. Why do you think that is so on that same topic of right before we hit record. So, as I mentioned in that discussions, some of the guests come on the show, Hey, let’s do video like yourself. Other ones are like, eh, no video.

Um, and you may not have, may not have an answer for this, but why do you think that some people, um, approach the conversations? So. Dramatically different that they feel more comfortable without video, because I agree that you can absorb more things with video. So any guesses or assumptions on why other people go the other way?

Yeah. Well, I’m going to get into some, um, Some touchy area here. I think I referred earlier to this sort of self-oriented meet oriented mode that most of us exist in. I think it’s very default for everybody. So we worry about how we look. I mean, how we come across, you know, even with our voice or with. How we actually literally look to people, um, to, yeah.

People who are stuck in that sort of self-oriented or ego Bay based mode, they come across as, um, no, it all alls, you know, they walk powerfully across the stage, but they never really connect with the audience. They own the room, so to speak power and all that sort of stuff. But the flip side of that, and it’s, it’s.

Just the other side of the same coin is people who are self-conscious. So they’re stuck in their head and they’re worried about, well, I don’t want people to look at me. I hate how I look on camera and all those things. You’re all in both cases, the speaker is just protecting their ego. Yeah. Yeah. So insecurities so insecurities, but I would say, look, if you can flip and say, I’m not here for me, I’m not here.

Uh, So that I look good. I’m here in service of the listener. Then you’d turn on your camera because you’re listening to seeing your facial expressions. And all that stuff is very, very important. Senior hand gestures. You can see mine, I’ve been watching yours and they’re a part of this whole incredible inner action that we share.

You do that. And it’s harder for some than others because you have to get ready and get dressed up and comb your hair and all that. Not today. I wasn’t gonna say anything. It, I was gonna pretend you weren’t. No, that’s the first thing I said is I said, Scott, Hey, I won’t leave you hanging on video. I’m a little homeless looking today.

So what you’re saying in my humble graciousness, that I am an amazing, uh, speaker, because I set aside my lack of looks today. Yes. Yes. You know, and there’s something about your messy hair that it says something. It does no, but really turn on your camera, please. Stop giving it’s really for you. It’s it’s everybody thinks, you know, um, I held this online.

I told you I, I held this online event last week where I called it an online conversation and I sort of set the rules ahead of time. Please expect to turn your cameras on yet. When I, I think I had 25 people total come on more than half of them never turned on their camps. And it was like, people are like, well, I got a blade and I didn’t get right.

I can kind of get that. Some said it’s because they’ve got kids running around and that it would be a distraction to others. That’s cool. I get that. But I think for a lot of people, it’s that I hate how I look. Yeah. I’m like give yourself a break, man. When you turn into a gift, giving generous kind of mode, this other base mode, you can kind of let yourself free of that stuff.

Yeah. Hey, are you familiar with Russell Brunson? Got it. Stop asking me these questions. I feel like I’m out of the know, you don’t know what you’re talking. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Well, um, you ought to look into Russell Brent, so he he’s the one he built a company called click funnels and I use click funnels.

Okay. So he’s the guy that I click funnels. And so if you’re familiar with click funnels or if you’ve read any of their material that Russell’s produced, it’s very much like the first thing you said at the start of our conversation was. You know, when you talk to an audience, kind of think of the, finish the sentence by the end of this conversation, you will X, Y, Z.

And so Russell Brunson has a book called expert secrets and he’s like, half the book is like, That here’s how you, here’s, how you naturally create an outline that should answer these things. And it’s all about like building a tribe by solving their problems and answering it naturally. So you got to look into that bucket.

I think it would, it would, um, Compliment all of your, your thought processes and your, your processes very well. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn’t surprise me. I mean, he’s kind of on the sales side of things in a way, right. Click funnels is really as kind of a sales tool and I, and that’s what I find people in the sales realm and I’m talking masterful salespeople, they’ve recognized the right and recite nature of presentations.

A long time ago. And so that’s when, so when marketing handsome this back with this very carefully written script and stuff like that, they’re the ones that go look, I can’t, you cannot expect me to go. You go into a room with prospects and to drag them through a linear set of slides and a talk track with very real writing language.

Yeah. So I find that salespeople have, um, Sales and marketing can be totally different. Yeah. And people, and I would say marketing tends to be the more literate. And I don’t mean literal. It’s not the right thing. It’s the more writing kind of oriented thing while sales tends to be the more oral or, or speaking side of things.

And there’s always this tension between the two. And I think. It would go away a lot. If we understood that marketing, when they, particularly, when they’re writing ideas down that are going to be spoken, they have to change the way they think. And I don’t, that just doesn’t happen. I see a lot of marketers.

They write talk tracks for presentations. That sound a lot like a blog or sound a lot, like some kind of quippy. You know, sales or marketing material for some written piece. And you got to understand that, that the people in the sales side, they’re having a conversation. So you can’t give them a script.

You have to give them ideas and give them the freedom to move within among those ideas. As long as everybody shares the same big idea, everything’s fine. Yeah. Um, so as we kind of sort of wrapping up, there’s one thing that keeps coming to the back of my mind, it’s a little off topic, but I feel it’s still really relevant.

So I was watching, uh, whatever show, um, escape from which mountain with my kids. That’s an oldie, but a goodie. Yeah. And so we’re, we’re watching the trailer and I’ve noticed this a lot lately. I don’t know why I just started really paying attention to like, anytime I see an older trailer, I can see the clear.

Black and white night and day difference between all the trailers and newer trailers. So the older trailer on this movie was, um, it wasn’t even a trailer like older eighties. Movies they’re they’re clips from the movie and trailers now, or like montages. And so I’m watching this, I’m showing the trailer to my kids and it’s like this 30 seconds.

And that’s where the kid is. It sounds like you’ve seen that where the kid. And like the first five minutes of the scene is about to get in a fight and the kid starts flowing up the baseball glove and things like that in front of the little bully’s face. And like, it’s just like this little, like 20, 32nd clip it doesn’t tell you the story of the show.

It doesn’t tell me where the show’s gone. Doesn’t tell me what it’s about. It was telling me anything other than just like this 32nd clip. And I’m in my mind, I’m thinking my kids are going to hate this show. They’re not going to watch it because they can’t even tell what it’s about. We watch a trailer now.

And it’s like you said, it’s, it’s not chronological. It’s like, this thing happens and then this other great story and this other little five second clip. Right. And then it just, it’s just, you know, I found that relevant, but you know, off topic a little bit about relevant to the conversation. No, I mean, the, one of the weird spaces that we’re in now is that with the internet and video, we create.

I’m with this guy, Michael on-calls second orality. Uh, people do this on LinkedIn. Now when they record themselves talking, they do a talking head there talking, but they’re not really talking because there’s no discernible listener. There’s no one there. They’re talking to a camera, you know, an object. And then you.

Post that online and broadcast it out to the world. Right. And you never get anything back in that situation. You never, well, let me correct myself. You don’t get much back, at least not in real time. You don’t get anything back from your listener. They, they view it and experience that at another time they can get something back.

By way of commenting on your posts, but it’s not a real conversation. Um, I find that very interesting because look, the talking heads are fine. You know, sometimes you can share a pretty good idea, but don’t confuse that with a real conversation. A real conversation is two or more people creating an event that can’t be replicated.

No. It only happens once and it’s, if it’s done well, like we’re, hopefully we’re doing right now. It’s a relationship. We are creating a back and forth, even if you weren’t to talk to him and just by my reacting to your body and your facial expressions and how you move and all those things would inform how I talk.

We have a relationship that I would describe as connection. Yeah, you cannot have that in, by posting the talking head. You can’t have that. If you’re giving a presentation in front of a thousand people and you are in your head, head focused on a content script, you cannot have a connection. And that’s really what this all comes down to.

I want people to connect. Yeah. And, and to end on that note, I’ll, I’ll continue your point. Um, cause I do a lot of content on LinkedIn and I do a decent amount of videos and the, I agree that even though you don’t have like a conversation and it’s one sided, the. The videos that do get more engagement, more views, more comments are the one that still take the same concept that you’ve given today that are just talking naturally not following a script.

I was watching a video this morning on LinkedIn and the guy, you know, I’m sure there was a lot of great advice in there, but I just like checked out because he was puking on how to do these amazing things. And it’s just so unnatural that I was, I was out. And, and how many times do you see presenters in that mode?

Yeah. Yeah. Even when there’s people in front of them. Yeah. That it’s very artificial. I have one friend who, uh, he was consulting another guy on videos and he’s like, dude, you’re too dry. He goes, next time you’re on camera. Pick your nose. He’s like, why would I do that? He’s like, just do it. And so, so sure enough, like, you know, a minute into his thing, he’s just like, and then he, and then I’ll send people like, did that guy just pick his nose?

And then now, now they’re engaged. Now they’re commenting. And then he had like, you know, better retention rate and all that. Well, let’s just, I’m just going to say this. Let’s not try to script people. Pick your nose. That’s the secret is picking your nose. That’s a technique. Let’s just stick with the principle behind it, which is be human.

Yep. Yup. There we go. All right, Scott Stiefvater, I appreciate jumping on learning from others. I’ll give you the last few seconds to tell us how we can find out more and whatever you want to throw out. Oh gosh. Well, I would say go to my website just in give you the URL, but it is my name. So it’s impossible.

So Damon, um, hopefully you’ll post alongside this. Um, A written version of the link to my website, which is www.scottstiefvater.com. Yes. Come and visit if you want to talk well, or, you know, some people that want to talk well, I can help. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. Yep. Thank you, sir. Have a good day.