031 - Master The Art Of Storytelling: How To Use The And, But, Therefore Technique

Storytelling is one of the cornerstones of content marketing, which is why I was excited to have Danielle Hennis, presentation coach, join me to share the and, but, therefore, storytelling framework. 

Topics included:

🔹What the And, But, Therefore storytelling technique is, and how to use it.

🔹Our brain's rational and instinctual sides and why tapping into both is essential  

🔹Why creating a story arc is important. (Imagine a movie with no drama) 

🔹How to keep your audience engaged, virtually or in person.

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🔷 Thank you for listening. I hope you found this episode insightful, educational, and inspiring. If you did, don't forget to hit that Follow to keep learning and growing with us.

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For additional insights, follow Annette Richmond and Black Dog Marketing Strategies on social media.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:45

Hi, I'm Annette Richmond. Welcome to Content Marketing School, where we will dive into content marketing strategy, specifically for coaches, consultants and entrepreneurs. Discover how effective content marketing can elevate your brand and grow your business. And if you enjoy the show, don't forget to hit that follow button. Well, hello out there. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Wherever you are joining us from, I'm Annette Richmond. This is Content Marketing School, and I am so excited to have Danielle here with me today. So I found you on Innovation Women. It's a speakers group that we both are members of, and I was looking for speakers and I started watching your sort of speaker reel and I was like, oh my gosh, she has got to come on my show because this is such a fabulous topic and something that I think people are just not really aware of. So for anyone who doesn't know who you are, please tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Speaker 2: 1:53

Yeah, thanks, annette, I'm excited to be here. So I am a presentation coach and graphic designer. So I I started as a graphic designer and I work a lot with researchers. Specifically, I work with people from all folks of presentations, and I started when I was working for the research company just seeing a lot of presentations come my way from researchers and they'd be going to a conference and it would be as you expect most conferences slides are. They're kind of just full of text, especially bad because it's you know, there's this idea in academia they have to show everything, and so there tends to be kind of this overwhelming amount of bullets that tends to be on those.

Speaker 2: 2:35

And at the time I went to my supervisor I was like there's got to be, there's got to be something that we can kind of put together to explain, like why this isn't a great idea.

Speaker 2: 2:44

And she gave me the green light to go ahead and I spent basically a year doing research on peer-reviewed articles and how the brain works and how we learn, and created my first workshop and I did the workshop for the organization and it grew and evolved and changed over time and what I learned grew and evolved and changed over time and now I have my own business doing workshops and helping people make better presentations, and ultimately, just when you have a presentation that you're giving, a lot of times people feel really nervous about it, and feeling confident comes from not just like the way that you're standing and speaking, but also the message that you're saying and whether you know that it's sticking with the audience and helping and resonating with them, and so I find that if you can shift the way you're presenting, it oftentimes is going to connect more with your audience and that's going to make you feel more confident.

Speaker 1: 3:36

Yeah, no, I love that and, as we were chatting before, one of the reasons I'm so excited for this topic, I had told you that I studied writing in college and I also studied psych. So this is such a really interesting topic for me and I know it will be for others as well, and again, so you know, let's, let's jump right into it. So one of the things that you started talking about and you were just mentioning the research is the idea that there are kind of these two sides of the brain, and one is the rational and one is more emotional, and I think you also said instinctual, which has been around for longer, and you started telling this story about, like the elephant. So if you could just talk a little bit about that, because I, you know, I thought it was fascinating, something that I certainly was not familiar with.

Speaker 2: 4:25

Yeah, so the idea comes from. If you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow that's kind of the I would say the people who are not reading peer reviewed articles that's your access point. It's a great book. It's also very, very dense. It's about you know this thick and they call it System One and System Two, which is not exactly the most catchy of titles.

Speaker 2: 4:46

So Jonathan Hite, who is a psychologist kind of, took that idea and turned it into an analogy about an elephant and a rider and he said, basically, your elephant is the instinctual side of your brain. It's been around a lot longer, has a lot more weight, has a lot more pole, but we think of ourselves as the rider sitting on top of the elephant and we think, because we have reins and because we can kind of steer the elephant wherever we want to go, that the rational side of our brain can do whatever we want because we can control the elephant. But the elephant isn't going to be controlled for very long. Right, you can convince the elephant to do something, you can kind of entice the elephant with like rewards or whatever systems you're working with, but ultimately the elephant only has so much attention and it's going to only pay attention for so long.

Speaker 2: 5:30

And so it's really important when you're communicating messages whether that's in a presentation or in an email, or you're talking to colleagues, just in general, you're talking to your children like that you remember that we have to do these two systems in our brain and that you may think, oh, this makes the most rational sense in the world. But if the rider is not listening and the elephant is taking over, then the elephant just wants like quick gratification, checking something off, responding to urgency. They're not looking for long term results. That's the rider. So you have to speak to the right side of the brain. That makes the most sense.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Wow. So I want to tell you, as I'm looking around, I'm looking and I'm seeing some reaction from the audience. So if you are out there listening, please do put your comments. We will be able to see them here in the studio and if you have questions, perhaps Daniel will be kind and respond and answer them for you. And as I was watching your presentation, you started talking about sort of the and and and story, and this is what and I'm going to ask you, obviously, to explain it. But this to me, is the story, the way of telling stories that we all kind of know, that we're. If you haven't studied writing or anything, this is something that we think is how to tell a story. So tell us a little bit about that and why this maybe not such a great idea.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Yeah. So Randy Olson wrote this book called Houston. We have a Narrative and I I highly recommend it, if you, especially our more technical fields, because it he used to be a marine biologist and then he went to, basically became a Hollywood film producer in the biology field, but still like, went from this very like technical, analytical side of presenting information to a much more Hollywood-esque cinematic side of presenting information. And so he wrote a book about kind of that transformation of how you go from one side to the other, because ultimately your audience regardless of who is in your audience we only have so much bandwidth and so even if your audience is technical, they still only have a certain amount of spaces in their brain to hold information, or working memory can hold about four pieces of information at a time, and so if you're in a conference, those are likely already full or being filled right, and so if you can use storytelling, you can really connect with your audience on a much On a much easier level. It's going to be easier for them to remember it because it bypasses that working memory system, because they don't have to work right. It's something that we're used to, hearing stories and understanding it, so it can immediately bypass that working memory and go into your long-term memory if you present it in a story format. But oftentimes we present stories like and and and.

Speaker 2: 8:02

So for example, I, when I was working for the previous research organization, I was doing workshops and after my first workshop someone came up to me and said, hey, we have this really big presentation that we're presenting. Can you come and help us? And I did and we won. So that's and and and right, like there's a beginning, a middle and an end. There's a story. It's more of an anecdote. You know there's not really much intrigue for the audience in terms of why they really care. It's like, okay, that's great for you, but you know, ultimately it's not that exciting the story right. So if I take, keep the first and that's your setting. So you want to keep that first and to kind of understand where you were, what was going on, who the characters were, what type of motion you're experiencing, all of that.

Speaker 2: 8:51

So if I started off and said, you know, I was working for my previous research organization and I was presenting my first workshop and I was really nervous because I had done all this work in it, but I didn't have a PhD and I'm presenting to a bunch of PhDs and technical folks about how they should present their research better, and I just felt like they were going to, you know, not pay attention, because I didn't have the same level of experience that they did. And then, after the workshop, someone came up to me and said hey, we want to have you come talk to us. So now this is that right, and that's actually a lot more ends, but that's okay because that's my setting point, right? So I've set the ground. You now know who I am, what I was experiencing in that moment. And then my butt, which is this rising conflict, can be essentially whatever is relevant to the audience or the story I want to tell. So it could be my butt.

Speaker 2: 9:42

Since I said that I was nervous, that's my setting, that I went into that not feeling confident, right, I went into it never having done a facilitation, never having been a leader in much capacity of many things, never having to work with a lot of different subject matter experts that had a lot of different opinions and trying to get them all on the same page, like, I could talk about any of that, but mostly talk about how I didn't feel comfortable, right, and you can choose the butt right.

Speaker 2: 10:08

So if I didn't but I didn't feel comfortable because I didn't feel like I had expertise, and so you build that up right, like you build up that conflict about how I didn't feel comfortable, all these things happened, people were arguing with me.

Speaker 2: 10:19

I didn't feel like I was able to get the room to work together. So is the following action so that I resolve it right? So I used an analogy basically at the time and said basically we're pitching a presentation and when you pitch a presentation, it's very similar like a marriage proposal. That if you go into the marriage proposal and you say I am the greatest person that you are ever going to marry and so therefore you should marry me. No one wants to be proposed to that way, right, and that's what you're doing when you go pitch and you're like we're amazing, you should give us money. And if you go into the marriage proposal and you say we should get married because you make a lot of money, I make a lot of money, we can save a lot of money on taxes if we get married and reinvest that into our retirement, okay, sure, but not very exciting, but you know okay.

Speaker 2: 11:11

It's practical right. Some people might be really moved by that, but most people are not going to be that moved by it because it's just raw data without any emotion. And that's oftentimes what happens when you're presenting a really technical piece of information, because you're, you've kind of removed the emotion from it. And so the analogy that I gave was like if you go try to propose to someone that you want to say you are amazing, you're talking about the audience, right. You're saying you're amazing, I can't imagine my life without you, and that you're the person I want to be with long term for my future. You're talking about a journey together, you're telling a story with that person. And then, by having that idea, we were able to all work together, we are able to come up with a better plan for the presentation and we won the proposal. So, thinking about kind of how do you transform your and and and to finding your conflict, which could be anything, based off of what you want the message to be at the end, right?

Speaker 1: 12:05

Yeah, you know I love it because it's all about the story arc, having have a story and having an arc to it. And I know I mentioned to you before we went live that you know I studied writing in college, one of the screenwriting, all kinds of different types of writing, and so you know I am that person who is screaming at the TV. If I'm watching a detective show, I'm like, ok, that's the guy that did it, why can't you see I'm here and they never seem to hear me, or at least they don't listen to me, which is really annoying. And so you know, and it's the same thing if I'm going to the movies and say I'm watching, I don't know, indiana Jones, which was another one, came out and it's him and he, you know, he's looking for this.

Speaker 1: 12:49

I forget what they were looking for. They were looking for this thing that like you can travel through time with I forget what they called it and he's looking for that. And then he travels to here and he meets his friend and they look a little together and then they go someplace else and they find it. That's kind of like the end, end, end, right, but not the story arc. So so if you can talk a little bit about and it and it is you want to, because otherwise people just don't remember, as you were saying, it's just kind of like OK, not, but not interesting, can can you talk a little bit about that? And then I'm going to bring a question on our screen.

Speaker 2: 13:26

Sure, yeah. So I think it's all about finding the but that's relevant to your audience, and then the so will naturally resolve that but right and so, with the example, I haven't seen the Indiana Jones movie, but we're just going to make something up.

Speaker 1: 13:41

Right, so it's like the same.

Speaker 2: 13:42

Yeah, you know they. He goes, he he's looking for this special toy tool, whatever it is, and he finds it and he wins right Versus. He's looking for this special tool. He goes into this cave but he falls down a pit of snakes and, oh no, what's gonna happen now? There's now a conflict, right? And so there's now this thing that you're now curious about how this gets resolved. And so you can build up that conflict. It doesn't have to be just one, but the main thing is that you need that conflict, because otherwise I don't really care if he won, because he didn't resolve anything, right, he wasn't struggling through anything.

Speaker 2: 14:19

So what is your conflict? That you're telling in your story? And it's about finding, like, especially if you're going for a job, talk right, like. So you're giving a presentation to try and get a job. You're oftentimes telling your origin story or some type of story there, but why does that matter to the interviewer, right? So the conflict should relate. So it could be that you weren't great at your job the first time that you had it, but you worked your butt off and you tried to get better at it and you studied on your own and then you ended up succeeding at this really big contract that you had and now you're better at whatever you do. And now the interviewer is like, oh, this person's a really hard worker and they can do all these things. So it's about finding, like, what matters to the audience and how you can relate that conflict to your own story.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Oh, absolutely. You know, it's job seekers trying to get the job, it's people like me trying to get the clients. I mean, it's all about that and you want to have some interest. So we have a sort of a question from the audience and I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, hu-ching, and I'm not even gonna try your last name. So thank you for your question. And she says my writing professor said writers are always at the lower point, like our voices aren't as important as the designers during the content design process. What do you think about that? So what do you think about that?

Speaker 2: 15:49

I would argue that everybody in the creative field and I don't really love that term, but that's what they use in the industry so writers, designers, the marketers they're always at the lower point, everyone's at the lower point, because the client doesn't bring you in until the very end. They don't bring anyone in until the very end typically. So if I am working with something that requires it to be disseminated and given out to the public and I wanna have that information, I should ideally be going to the people who are going to be writing it, designing it, marketing it at the very beginning, because that's gonna shift how I talk about it. But oftentimes it's not happened until a couple days, maybe a week or two, before it actually has to be printed or sent out or shown on social or whatever ends up being, and so it's more a matter of like educating the people that you work with on the value that you can give and also finding those people who are the bright spots, basically that they see your value and that they can work with you and having them also advocate for you as well, because ultimately, anyone who works with people who help communicate is gonna do better if that communication is part of the integral process of how you talk about it, right?

Speaker 2: 17:10

So just using the researcher example, because I have so much experience with the researchers, if you're doing research, don't come to the writers and designers and marketers at the very end. Bring us in when you start having the results, because we can help you design it in a way that communicates that. We can help you write it in a way that communicates that. We can help you market it that way. But if you come at the very end, then you've already kind of essentially decided how best to communicate it and that might be great, but it also could be tweaked, and so oftentimes there's ways in which you can improve everything and it's just doing a disservice to the message if you don't talk to the people who help with that at the beginning. Oh sorry, you're muted.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Thank you, thank you, sorry about that. So yeah, it's really interesting. There's so many, you know, so many sort of facets to the whole delivering the message, coming up with the message, working with people and one of the things that I would love if you could share and I'm assuming when you're talking about the presentations and of course, there's that death. By PowerPoint, I mean my PowerPoint presentations have like three bullets and each bullet has three or four words and that's pretty much it, or an image or something like that.

Speaker 1: 18:31

But you go to these presentations and it's just writing, writing, writing, and I'm sure not only is it boring, but people are reading while you're speaking and it's like you don't even need to be there. So my question for you is and I'm gonna kind of say this, applicable to whether you are doing something virtual or if you're doing it in person, I would imagine a lot of the same factors apply of the way you should do things. So can you give me some maybe three, like common mistakes that people make when they're going in to give a presentation, either virtually or in person?

Speaker 2: 19:15

Sure, yeah, I would say the first one is and the first one is not thinking about the audience, right? So I mean, first and foremost, if you don't think about who you're talking to, you're not going to communicate the message properly. Uh, and that's more important than just. I think sometimes people are like okay, well, what I thought about the audience? What do I do with that? Or I see no value in thinking about the audience. And so I'd say, for the audience, thinking about who the audience is is vital, because it changes what stories you tell, what words you use. If, whether you use jargon or not which I would argue, always try and avoid jargon regardless. But, uh, what images you show, how you present that information, what graphs and charts you use, how you're actually explaining it, what metaphors, analogies, all of that goes into the audience. And If you're not thinking about the audience, then oftentimes you're making the presentation for yourself and you're not in the audience. And if you're making it for yourself, unless the people who are clones of you are in the audience, it's not going to resonate with them. And so it's important to think about who you're talking to so that you can shift your message to them. And with that I highly recommend thinking about, like what does your audience want, what do they need, what are they expecting and what are they resistant to? Because if you can think about those four questions, you're oftentimes going to be able to shift the way you present it in a way that at least aligns with something that they can get on Board with, especially if you're presenting something that they tend to be resistance towards. You really want to spend some time thinking about how you can craft your message to get them to say like little yeses along the way until they get to the end when they say a bigger yes. Because if you're talking about something that's resistant like if you're going in talking to CEOs and you're basically telling that they're running the company wrong, they're going to resist that message, right. So you can't just go in and say you're running the company wrong. But you could go in and Say you know, I've talked to some of the employees and I've heard some issues around these things that they're already aware of, right. So you get them to say a little yes to that right. And they say and I think if we can tweak this, that could lead to bigger tweaks along the way, which would save money and Save time and have better happy workforces and blah, blah, blah. And you keep going up and up and up. So they get these yeses and then, like, the big plan requires a lot of work, but they've already said a little yeses along the way, which makes it easier for them to say a big yes, right, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Speaker 2: 21:39

So, first and foremost, thinking about your audience.

Speaker 2: 21:41

The second thing is people, when they make presentations, oftentimes open PowerPoint and just start typing, and that's oftentimes the worst way to make a presentation.

Speaker 2: 21:53

So you want to spend some time thinking through how you're going to make the presentation before you even open PowerPoint. So I don't care if you take out a blank sheet of paper, you open up a word document, you take out some sticky notes, do whatever it is that works for you, but brainstorm what you want to talk about after you know who you're talking to and how to best communicate that message. So it's twofold, it's what are you going to say and how are you going to say it to your audience? So it might be that you're communicating a message and you're going to communicate it completely differently into two different audiences. So it's both. Like my outline of what I want to talk about and then how do I shift the outline for the audience. Once you have that outline, you want to make sure that it aligns with you know best practices of how people's working memory works and all those other things which I talk about a lot of my presentations, but ultimately you want to start strong, and strong people remember first and last most.

Speaker 1: 22:45

So you want to make sure the first and last are the most important.

Speaker 2: 22:47

And then you're going to take that and pull it into PowerPoint After you've already thought through, like, how I'm going to communicate this. You want to think about how do I visually show this? And if it's something that you're doing for a one-off presentation that you're never going to use again, at least choose the most vital messages and make them visual. So if you're like running a meeting and you're saying you know it's not worth me spending A couple hours on making this presentation, I would first off argue then why are you holding the meeting? Because the meeting should be there for a reason, right. And if you're trying to convince people to do a different process or to Change something that they've been doing, you're trying to persuade them. And persuasion does not come through death by PowerPoint. It comes through you emotionally connecting with them. What you need to then know who your audience is and how best to communicate them, why they're resisting that change and how to persuade them. Right, like that stuff that you'd still have to think through.

Speaker 2: 23:45

But then ideally, you would then come up with a visual way to represent what you're saying. As you're saying it, show it on the slides and then you are speaking to it, because we can't read and listen at the same time. There's a lot of sides to this. We can't do it. You can listen and then read, and listen and then read, and it feels like you're doing both, but you can't do both, and so you have to choose. What's more important, I would argue, if you're presenting you, speaking is more important. That's why you're there, otherwise you could write an email. There's no reason for that to be up there speaking otherwise, right? So yeah, it's about kind of going through that process making sure that you think about how to best Communicate to who you're communicating to, and then show them that, while you're speaking to them in the way that best represents how they need to be heard, listen to talk to.

Speaker 1: 24:34

So so one thing I want to ask you about and it's something that that I recently Um adopted, and I, you know, I have never had Text heavy PowerPoints. It's, you know, a few notes and but, um, one of the things that that I read recently is that if you have, if you have an image on the on your slide that it's better to have a person there Than something more abstract. So, for example, if I have a slide and I'm giving People three tips on how to do videos, how to do short form videos, my, the image I have Also on the slide might be, you know, a smiling man creating a video, um, and rather than have like pictures of a camera or something like that. So what, what is that? Is that good thinking or or not? I would say it depends on what your goal is.

Speaker 2: 25:27

So we are more likely to stop scrolling on social media if there's a person and there's a lot of research that shows that we find faces and we look at faces and we look where faces are looking, and those don't have to be real faces, like that works for cars and benches and books and everything else that could have a face. So it's about deciding does your face matter more than the slides, because you also have a face right and do you want the audience to be looking at you or do you want the audience to be looking at the slides? And so I'd say it kind of depends more on which face matters more and also how. There's ways in which you have this kind of ebb and flow in presentations and you wanna make sure that you're you don't wanna have, slide after slide after slide of kind of an abstract idea. You wanna break it up a bit, and so if you've just shown a couple of abstract ideas, it probably makes sense to bring in a person, but you also wanna bring in what matters most for what you're talking about, and so I would say that you know, if that idea of the video was a really vital piece of information, then it may make sense to pull their attention to that slide where the person, the spidely person, is then having like a video camera that you're showing.

Speaker 2: 26:47

But if you have any text on the slide, you have to be really careful about where the person is looking. So if I'm standing here and looking up here, your eye is gonna go up here and you're gonna look at whatever's written in the corner. If there's nothing written in the corner, you're gonna come up and you come back to my face. If the text is over here, you're not gonna look at it because I'm looking over here. So you wanna make sure that you're also adhering to like how we follow with our eye movement too.

Speaker 1: 27:13

You know, when I create a PowerPoint myself, I you know my goal with the slide is to have something there and it's just maybe you know a couple of not even talking points, but just a couple of phrases that are going to be. You know what I'm talking about. It's not to have people necessarily looking at the slide, but if they look up there they can see, oh, if they've zoned out, oh, okay, she must be talking about video. I see video up there in the slide. So, but anyway, I want to. I just wanna bring this up. And then Nikki says that I love the tip on showing and verbally communicating at the same time. So that's the idea. I guess that you can't really do both at the same time.

Speaker 2: 28:03

Yeah, and there's two main theories in psychology that talk about this. There's the dual coding effect and the multimedia effect, and basically they say the same thing that we cannot process spoken words and written words at the same time. And that's why, if you've ever tried to like write an email and talk to someone at the same time, you end up writing what you're saying or saying what you're writing and you can't really process both. But if you've ever been in a meeting where you're really bored, you can like doodle on a piece of paper and still hear everything that's saying. It's not competing with it, so you're able to kind of do these two processes at the same time.

Speaker 2: 28:37

And in graphic design I can listen to a podcast or an audio book as I'm designing, if it's just visuals, but as soon as there's words, I can't process the audio book and the words at the same time.

Speaker 2: 28:49

So I have to stop, and so you'll see this in your own self. But it's also about remembering that's the same for the audience. So if you're putting words on your slide and you're expecting your audience to read them and listen to you, they're not gonna be able to do it, and so then they're either reading ahead or they're not reading at all and they're just listening to you, but typically they're gonna read ahead because we tend to like want to read the text on the slide. So I would say, if you're gonna include text on the slide, it needs to be critical, so it needs to be like the main point and it needs to be short and concise and it needs to be something that they can read and then come back to you and ideally you're pausing so that they can read it and then come back to you without reading and then not listening to what you're saying, and then come back and having this what you said.

Speaker 1: 29:31

Yeah, so I'm curious if that also means why? Cause I find that I listened to a lot of podcasts and I found that that's what I'm doing. If I'm cooking or taking a shower or something, I'm listening to podcasts, and they're mostly business related. But is that why I feel like I'm learning better when I'm listening to a podcast than when I'm watching somebody talking on a video?

Speaker 2: 29:56

It could be that it depends on what you're doing when you're watching the video, because I will say also with podcasts, because you don't have the other message, like you don't have the visual component it just changes how we're paying attention to it and how we, as the presenter, rely on our slides, and so if you're not relying on slides and I'm just speaking, then you're hearing the intonation of my voice, cause I'm speaking normally. If I've memorized the slides or I'm reading the slides, then you don't have that same level of intonation anymore and so it's more engaging for the audience that way. But there has actually been some interesting studies that came out last year about how they did some sales calls and if people use emotional words, so like they're describing something with adjectives, basically so that you can visualize it, then audio only actually works better than hybrid.

Speaker 1: 30:56

Oh, okay, so Well, I mean, this is fascinating and the time is flying by, so I just wanted to pull up your LinkedIn profile so people can see where to find you, and are you open to connecting with people on LinkedIn? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 31:14

Please connect with me. I'm running a five week workshop on how to get better presentations. If you're curious, there's links in my LinkedIn profile and I would love to connect with anyone that wants to hear more about presentations or graphic design or anything else.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Yes, and make sure that you mentioned that you saw Danielle here on the show with me, so she has that reference point. So one of the things that I want to I always ask my guests because I ask some questions. Our conversation kind of goes where it goes, but what is something that you would like to share that you think is beneficial? And I haven't asked you and we haven't discussed. The floor is yours.

Speaker 2: 32:02

Well, currently I've kind of been diving deep. This is not. I don't know if this is where you wanted to go, but I've been diving no wherever you would like to share.

Speaker 1: 32:10

It's up to you, sure.

Speaker 2: 32:13

I've been diving into AI over the past couple of years, as a lot of people have, and I've been looking into how we can use AI in presentations because a lot of times, the way I see it is just basically perpetuating bad practices. It's taking a bunch of texts, putting on a slide with some images and it's not really thinking through how do I present this to the audience that I have in front of me, and so I've been kind of playing with a little bit and being like, okay, well, if right now what we see is all this perpetual bad practicing, how do we still engage with this? Because it will save time if we do it properly, but in a way that makes us better as a presenter. So I've been kind of playing with that. Ultimately, what I've found is that you still have to go through the process that I described earlier, but you can use AI to help, and so I would say, if this is something that you're interested in I'm kind of discovering this on my own as I dig down the rabbit holes of AI but if you're interested, please connect with me and I'm happy to talk about it. But essentially it's you know. You have to be the driving force behind it. You have to make the outline and then use your language, large language model, your LLM, like chat, gpt or Gemini or whatever you're using, to basically help construct analogies and metaphors and stories to connect with your audience, so like they can help you with that more connecting process with your audience If you can explain who the audience is, which you first have to figure out, and then you create outline, which you have to do, but then it can help with that process of connecting it with the audience.

Speaker 2: 33:46

So it doesn't have to be all on you, because some people are great at this and some people this is not where their zone of genius is, and so it's about kind of using those tools to help you. And then you can also use generative imaging, like Firefly right now is still free with Adobe. It's trained on Adobe stock, so hypothetically the creators who put the stock in there are being compensated. I have no idea what that looks like, but at least like morally I feel a little bit better working with their system than like mid journey, because mid journey doesn't really compensate anyone for what they did but regardless. So kind of using that to kind of generate imagery that works. But it's about thinking through like that same process. You make an outline, you think about how to connect it to your audience you can use AI for that and you think about how to visually show that which you can use AI for that as well, and then it can shorten your steps significantly, but you still have to do a little bit of the front end work.

Speaker 1: 34:42

Okay, well, thank you very much. I'll tell you, I've been listening with this and since I'm back here with doing the producing as well, I'm not able to take notes, but I will be watching this again and taking down some notes so I know people in the audience have learned. I'm sorry I didn't get to bring up everybody's comments. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I so appreciate it. And for everyone else, we've had people here the entire time. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a great rest of your day and I will see you next week. Tonguelively southern viewers.