Present Like a Pro: The 4 Brain Hacks Used by Top Performers [Social Intelligence Brief]

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0:42Use Indeed's sponsored jobs to hire top talent fast. And even better, you only pay for results. There's no need to wait. Speed up your hiring with a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. You built a beautiful deck. You follow the template. And yet two days later, nobody remembers a thing. If you're reading your slides, your audience has already checked out. And here's the brutal truth. People forget 90 % of what they hear. And today we're giving you the four science-backed strategies to deliver presentations people actually remember. So let's get into it.

1:29now here's the problem we see this even in our x-factor accelerator members where you treat presentations as data dumps info overload death by bullet points but high performers they design presentations that grab attention hold emotion and leave a lasting impression. Today, we're giving you four science-backed strategies that top speakers and leaders use to deliver unforgettable presentations. So as Johnny said, we have to control the 10%. That's right. 90 % goes in one ear and out the other. In fact, people forget almost everything. According to Eveninghouse Forgetting Curve, memory retention drops to about 10 % after 48 hours, unless messages are reinforced or emotionally sticky.

2:17So if they only remember one thing from your presentation, we have to make sure it's the right thing. Now here's the science. Herman Ebinghaus first mapped his memory decay back in the 1880s. The cool thing is follow-up research by Murr and Drost in 2015 confirmed that without reinforcement, memory just fades fast. And that's why instructional designers and TED speakers alike obsess over the key takeaways. So we want to make sure that you can define that 10 % of your presentation in one sentence. And we want to make sure we repeat that sentence over and over again throughout the presentation. Now, this works even for your weekly meetings with your team.

2:59We want to make sure that their one actionable takeaway, they actually leave that meeting remembering. Of course, there's going to be a bunch of other data and information that you got to get across, but we want to make sure that everything else aside the one key takeaway sticks. We like to think of everything else as the scaffolding, and it's your job to repeat the 10 % over and over again that you want attendees to leave with. Think of your message like a commercial. You got one headline, make it land. I mean, this is, you know, either highlight it in the presentation, repeat it over and over again.

3:36For AJ and I, in our presentations, when we do corporate and military, it is in our workbooks. It is in bold. We discuss the wins. We go over these multiple times because when those people leave, we want them remembering what they had learned walking out of there. Not what color shirt you had, not what your hair looked like, not what your accent sounded like, but what they learned. Now, here's the thing. The timing matters. We want to leverage the memory curve. The beginning and end of your presentation matter most thanks to the serial position effect. Now, psychologists Glanzer and Kunitz show that people recall the first and the last, so the primacy and the recency of things they hear.

4:26The middle material, that's fluff, often forgotten unless emotionally charged or uniquely delivered. So we don't want to bury our best ideas in the messy middle. We want to open with fire and close with clarity. As AJ said, open with fire and close with clarity. A great way to do that is to start with a vivid story, a provocative stat, a bold claim, something to grab people's attention. In most marketing, they're going to show you an image that compels you to take interest and to get you to think. A lot of times that image might even be disturbing, but it's going to get you to stop. It's going to get the chemicals flying.

5:14And then whatever that message is, whatever you're hitting out of the gate, make sure that you clarify it at the end. Summaries, paraphrasing, and by reframing your 10 % as the call to action or takeaway story. If your last slide says questions and you're just leaving it up, you're leaving money on the table. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to saying no. That's Mint Mobile's whole thing. Their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, No hidden fees. No BS. And that's why I love Mint Mobile premium wireless service for just 15 bucks a month.

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7:43That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash charm. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash charm. Exactly. I can't tell you how many clients I've worked with who will share their presentation in their deck before their big event. And they end with the questions, question, question mark slide, thinking that, okay, great, I'm gonna get through the content and then I'm just gonna field questions and it's over. That is actually the worst way to end anything. You want time for questions, yes, but after finishing the questions that show your expertise and help the audience become more engaged, we still want to end with clarity.

8:22What is the takeaway? What is the call to action that your presentation has? It doesn't matter if it's a weekly meeting with just your group, or it's the most impactful keynote that you're gonna give of your life. When we understand the science behind how people remember things and what makes us stand out, we can leverage it to our advantage. And that's the third strategy that we wanna talk about. which is kill the split attention effect. When your audience is reading a bunch of text on a slide at the same time as looking as diagrams, they're actually not listening to you very well at all. So we wanna limit the number of words and images on the slide.

9:00We wanna make it clear and reinforce what you're actually saying. Because why give a presentation at all if all you're gonna ask your audience to do is read the slide? And in fact, Meyer and Moreno demonstrated that split attention between spoken words and on-screen text overwhelms working memory. The result, poor comprehension of what you're sharing and lower retention. And this is called cognitive interference. So if you think you're just gonna throw all the text on the slide and you're just gonna read through it in a monotone voice as you go slide by slide in your deck, you're actually gonna lose your audience faster than you realize.

9:37Text-heavy slides aren't just ugly, they're neurologically disruptive. it. Use minimal text, one image per idea. Your voice is the content. The slide is just a visual cue. I loved putting together all of our presentations for the Art of Charm, for all of our programs. For me, it's always interesting. What visuals can I use to grab that attention, to draw people in, to get them thinking. Phil Jackson, who used to coach the Chicago Bulls, and of course is one of the dynasties with Scottie Pippen and Jordan and Dennis Rodman. Imagine having to coach caliber players such as that. You're not going to coach the elite players of the league.

10:28You're going to ego-manage elite players of the league. And Phil knew that he could talk until he was blue in the face in that locker room. He knew his greatest aid was visuals. And he would usually either play short stories or a movie that would induce the emotions that he wanted those players to showcase when they hit the stadium floor. and that's how powerful that is. The text, people lose it in their mind. The visual imprints in your mind. I get it, you have a case to make, but we need to pay close attention to strategy number four, which is preventing cognitive overload. Yes, you are great at your job.

11:19You've analyzed and crunched all the numbers and the data and you wanna showcase everything that you've learned. But here's the problem. Brains aren't hard drives. We can't transfer that information from slide speaker to audience as quickly as you think. In fact, if you overload your message, the audience completely checks out. And we've all been there in a boring presentation where the slide in front of us has 17 bullet points and it's continued on to the next one and continued when you really wish they would just get to the point. Now, here's the thing. High performers don't just present. They curate information.

11:55You should only be sharing what's important to moving the narrative forward. Clarity isn't a luxury. It is your gateway to influence. And the science here is clear. Cognitive load theory introduced by John Sweller explains how working memory has a limited bandwidth. When too much information is in front of us, well, guess what? Our brain defaults to shutdown mode and we tune everything out. So if you're trying to get key points across or if you're like us running in-person training and you want the audience to retain information and learn from you, well, we want to use the rule of three. Very simply, make three points to prove your main hypothesis or the main point of that slide.

12:39We want to keep it to three. We want to speak in short, punchy sentences. And we want to layer complexity. We want to walk them through it. We don't just want to lead with complexity. Yeah, your job isn't to prove how smart you are. It's to make your audience feel smart. And, you know, AJ and I have been doing this for close to 20 years now. Do we really need to put 20 years worth of information into everything that we do? You guys would leave this show. I can say stop. Don't leave. Exactly. We try to get the ideas out and make sure that they stick for you guys. If you want your message to land and stick, here's the playbook.

13:27Control the 10%. Your key message is everything. What's the takeaway? We want to begin bold and we want to end unforgettable. Those two moments are key in any presentation. And we want to speak. We don't want to read from our slides. We want the slides to enhance what we're saying. And lastly, say less mean more. Recognizing that cognitive overload is present in presentations, you are going to become a top 1 % presenter in no time. This is how high performers influence rooms, win buy-in, and walk off stage remembered, not just tolerated. Top performers don't just wing it. They wire it. These strategies are part of a system we drill each and every week inside our X Factor Accelerator.

14:15We call them Persuasion Triggers Live, high rep sessions where you can practice storytelling, communication under pressure and message design until it's automatic. It's no fluff, no theory. These are real world exercises with real time feedback from us. It's how our military officers, execs and founders in our program level up fast. If you're ready to own the room, not just survive it, join us. Apply now at unlockyourxfactor.com. We'll see you inside.

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