Presentation Hacks: How to Say Less and Win More | Bill McGowan

29:33Everything you say in and around those three things can have a little conversational wiggle room. But one of the things that we cover in the book are seven devices. That's the mag seven, the magnificent seven that help you be a little bit more memorable in how you position information. So give us some of those seven tips to become more sticky, because I think that's usually what's missing for a lot of us on the presentation. It's Like, I know what I want to say. I know the key points that need to be made, but I'm not really thinking about how's the audience going to retain this as they leave the room or they go to the next conversation or they come back and say, hey, I got to bring you back in the office on this project now.

30:12Right. Well, first, people love analogies because an analogy has tremendous power to help us understand or help the audience understand a concept that may be foreign and unfamiliar to them by comparing it to something common to everyone's experience. And usually it's done in a very concise way. So, for instance, I was training a bunch of hedge fund people years ago, and they were doing a panel conversation on Brexit, which could be a really difficult topic. Pythion, right? So this one guy was talking about the political landscape, and he said, I mean, listen, let's face it. Before the last prime minister left office, she was the chess player only at the king left.

31:03and she was just moving it around one space at a time until she got checkmated. You know, I don't remember anybody else who was on that panel that day. I don't remember what anybody else in that panel said that day, but I still remember that guy. And what was interesting about it was he made the analogy completely out of the realm of British politics. And for 10 seconds, he gave me an opportunity to visualize a chessboard. He almost gave me a little mental vacation where now I could completely immerse myself in some other imagery and some other reality. And after those 10 seconds, what I found happened was I got a little mental refresh and I was now okay about reabsorbing myself in the topic of Brexit.

31:49You just need that little bit of a break. So analogies, metaphors, really, really valuable. And they're usually very visual too. Yeah. And I think that that part of recognizing, hey, I don't know much about British politics, but I know chess. That's right. A lot of people fail on analogies because they also choose something that a lot of people can't relate to in their analogy. Yes. I mean, I was working with a client in the logistics field and we were talking about supply chain, another subject that makes people's eyes roll in the back of their head. And so maybe people don't understand all the factors that go into ships anchored outside of the harbor.

32:29They're waiting to unload refrigerators and dishwashers. But what we said was, at the height of the supply chain was what we basically had was a six lane freeway trying to merge into a one lane country road. And so everybody has sat in that traffic, right? Squeezing into the merge. So it makes it pretty much universally relatable. What you said is so true. The relatability has to be universal. Has to be something everybody experiences. And that point of, you know, every slide has to have a purpose. Yes. We're not just throwing, you know, 30 slides because we have a 30-minute presentation and now I can have a one-minute per slide cadence.

33:08But every slide has a purpose and a takeaway and something about it that the audience can chew on that can lead to it becoming memorable is so important. Yes. And that's why, you know, of those three things that you should know by heart in each slide, opening line, closing line, and the sticky idea. You know, what is it, not that we're ever going to say this in a presentation, but the classic, if you remember nothing else from this slide, I want you to remember this. You should be delivering that in a way that you don't need to tee it up with that overt warning. It should be something pithy, punchy.

33:48Now, in a world where we're asked to talk for half an hour, obviously you have to have the goods around all of that. It can't just be cleverness on top of cleverness. But there's no question that something created with a little imagination and a little visual stimulation has so much more value than just going through things in a very corporate way with all the same jargon and all the same cliche expressions, which we've all heard.

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38:12And it's something that I know a lot of our clients struggle around overthinking and getting in their head around what to do with my hands, how to actually position myself, what's the right body language I should be using. So coach me through how you with your clients work through a presentation and the nonverbal communication that should go along with it. I usually find clients are telling me, oh, you're going to have a hard time with me because I talk with my hands. I say, I don't know who told you that, but that's fine as long as you avoid two or three basic rules. And that is just don't do the same gesture over and over again.

38:53And that's sort of what we see in the political world. And don't have your hand be a metronome for how you punctuate your words, right? That starts to become distracting. So, but other than that, I find as long as you're not being too literal to show in telly, like I've got three, oops, sorry. I've got three points to make today. You know, point number one, I don't think people want to be condescended to like that. But other than that, just let your hands do whatever they want to do. as long as they're not in constant manic motion they should come and rest pretty much around where your belt buckle would be okay not clenched with the show tension not shaped that was what reporters in the 80s did yeah you know on camera um just like imagine you're taking your thumb and your forefinger of one hand and just kind of clenching it on the nail of your other forefinger palms facing in backs of your hands facing out and from here i have a very short distance to have them get into the action and a very short distance to rest if they're down by your sides which doesn't really look make anybody look comfortable they've got a long way to come up to get into the action and then when you're done with them they have a long way to drop and it just becomes more of a choreographed gesture instead of an organic gesture standing in front of a room the majority of people will feel this shot of adrenaline just from the nerves yeah and it our bodies like to get rid of all that excess nervous energy and typically our feet wind up be the portal through which we try to expunge it and so that results in what i call the stationary march where you're not actually walking from one side of the room or one side of the stage to the other, but your feet never actually stop moving, right?

40:44You're rocking, you're swaying, you're stamping around in place, and it can look very fidgety in front of the room. If you stand with your weight forward on the balls of your feet, you feel a little pressure in your toes, not that your heels are off the ground, but just weight forward, you're going to find it very hard to start rocking and swaying, and you strike a more commanding pose in front of the room. Yeah. I think, and I've heard this advice around owning the stage and movement across the stage. And I think sometimes it could be exaggerated where we're like running across to try to get our point across, but it's like, we got to get our steps in.

41:22It is good to engage different parts of the audience if the stage allows it without running back and forth. And that's a way to allow your feet to expunge some of that energy. Right. As long as it's not going going to look like pacing. You know, a lot of people will do, they'll be stage right or right side of the room. They'll walk to the left side of the room, but not stay there. And next thing you know, they're moving back and it starts to look like, you know, the tiger in the cage. Yeah. And then it's hard for the audience to keep their eyes on you. Or sometimes something I see a lot is people will pick the time to move in the middle of making an important point.

42:01And what we prefer people do is move in thematic transition and then come to a stop before you deliver the important idea. So you talked a little bit about tonality and its importance. And I know many of the clients we work with and probably many in our audience, when it comes to that tension and pressure they feel professionally around presenting, they actually lose a lot of the tonality variation and the emotion in their words. and they try to keep it even keel, keep a poker face, but actually works against you in terms of being sticky and memorable. The absence of mistakes, identifying perfection as what you're going for is usually really detrimental to your presenting skills because then what you're doing is you're playing not to lose.

42:53Your whole goal is to just not have any little hiccup. and that makes people flatten out where you stop taking chances and you stop varying the sound of your voice and stop adding emotion into how you're expressing yourself. I would much rather have people make a little stumble here or a little hiccup there, but really put their emotional back into what they're saying. And we have a definition of energy at our company, Clarity Media Group, where we say energy is your palpable enthusiasm for the value of the information you're sharing to your audience. If you don't look jazzed about how important this is, they will not be.

43:37You have to lead by example. And a lot of people just present in this very narrow range of energy, enthusiasm, their voice flattens out. We will actually work with people and say, what is it you're saying here? What is the underlying emotion of this paragraph? Are you optimistic? Are you incredulous? Are you whatever? And what is the tonal sound of those emotions? And let's work on delivering it so that we are bolding and underlying that emotion instead of just saying it in words. One of the things that I found helps me in this realm, and certainly working with our clients is actually looking to express the emotion physically changes my tonality.

44:26So we have to do advertisement reads for the show. And oftentimes if I'm just reading straight from the script, it's a little harder for me to get that varied tonality. But if I'm actually expressing in my face, the tonality then follows. So for a lot of our clients, We film them so they can see, oh, if I'm not expressive in my face, then I default to that monotone, very narrow band of interesting words and variation in my tonality to draw people in. But if we can get them to be more expressive with their face and wear the emotion, the tonality follows. Sure, absolutely. And you often hear people say, you can hear the smile in that person's voice, right?

45:11And it's very true. I think another great thing is if there's not video involved and you're just doing an audio conversation that's not as common today with virtual being so prevalent, but do an interview walking around a room, you know, moving. If you have notes that you want to just keep at hand, put a headset on, walk around your house. Think about how you have a really animated conversation with a friend or a family member, usually pacing between the kitchen and your living room, and you just can't stand still. And that's the energy that you want to go for. Being in a big, comfy chair is going to change the perceived energy of your voice.

45:54Now, with that tension and pressure in a lot of presentations, we also find there's filler words, and we try to add more than necessary. And you have a whole chapter on the book about a verbal diet, working with clients around trimming down the words and actually being more concise to be more memorable. Why is that so important? Because most of us take too long to make a point. And everybody's attention spans are shrinking. everybody's calendars are being overloaded and most people are sitting in a meeting thinking oh my god there's five minutes left to this meeting and my next meeting starts in six minutes and just imagine how much of a personal hero you'd be to people if you were able to chop a 40 minute meeting to a 30 minute meeting because you were efficient in communicating what had to be said And I think that effective, concise communications, as I know you know, it's a productivity matter.

46:55Yeah. Because a lot of time is wasted in professional settings because people can't make the point. Or they can't discern the point. And then they're running around trying to figure out what leadership actually wanted. Right. There's some interesting stats that we uncovered and speak memorably. One of them is that$1.2 trillion of money is lost in the business world because of poor communication. That's a staggering number. And the effectiveness or the perceived effectiveness in a Harris poll of how leaders communicate has fallen about 12 % in recent years. And so it is a business imperative that people understand, how do I make this point concisely, memorably, and make sure everybody's clear about it on their way out the door?

47:51Well, sometimes we try to make things concise by adding acronyms and shortening things in ways that can also be detrimental to those in the audience who can't follow along and don't know what those acronyms are. So what's the balance there and how should I approach going on this verbal diet to be more memorable?

48:11We hypothesized what it would be like if you were told, okay, on average, you speak 16 ,000 words a day. Now imagine that you're only getting 12. You're only getting 12 ,000 words. And it's our belief that you would be so much more selective in how you communicate, realizing that that tabulator is running all day long and that there's a real risk that come four o 'clock, you run out of words. Then you have to pantomime everything between four and five 30 whenever you leave the office. and there's no question you would be more strategic, have fewer filler words. You'd be more thoughtful about how you communicate.

48:56You probably prepare more. And also with filler words, you would probably take your time a little bit more. Filler words typically are a product of speed because your brain is always out ahead of your mouth navigating. What's the thought I want to communicate. What are the words I'm going to use to communicate this thought? And then in 600 or so milliseconds, it's fed to your mouth. And filler is typically what your mouth has to do while your brain is trying to make the next decision, but it hasn't come up with it yet. And our advice is slow down your speaking pace so your mind can navigate farther out ahead to understand where it's all going and what words are going to be used to communicate the thought.

49:49I was working with a woman not too long ago, and I was not surprised when I put her, the video of her interview through our AI tool, to see that instead of speaking at 170 words per minute, which is almost the top of the normal range, she was at 230 words per minute, which is a significant, you know, uh, amount higher. Not only that though, AJ, she in about a 90 minute conversation and role play said, you know, 320 times and said like 310 times. And there is no question in my mind that all of that filler was directly correlated to her words per minute yeah i think unfortunately so much of that filler is now being um the the filler i feel is i'm trying to i'm losing my train of thought trying to get at the idea of like we pick it up like like in our conversations with co-workers and team members and especially especially younger generations, these filler words become just habit and routine because we're all using them, passing them around.

51:14And then you get in a presentation and the filler words, plus increasing the rate of speech, now you're at 230 words, who in the audience can follow along? They can't. And if you think about it, there aren't two modes we communicate in. There's internal, how we speak among our colleagues at work. And then there's external, where maybe we're in front of an audience or people, clients or people outside of our company or the media, whatever it may be. And the internal occupies probably about 90 % of our time, maybe even more. And the mode that we're in externally is 10 % or less. And it is really difficult to adopt and execute this external style of communicating when the internal is so ingrained.

52:10Very few people are able to flip a switch. So our recommendation is try to speak in that external mode internally, not try to change suddenly when you're now in this other realm.

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53:23Muteen, the new fragrance by Miu Miu, defined by you. Yeah, and it can certainly be difficult, which is one of the reasons that we do the video work with our clients. And it certainly seemed to help your client. And now with the rise of AI and we could talk about technology, I think a big challenge for a lot of us is this mode to video where much of our confidence and comfort around communication was in a room together with other humans. And I know for myself, going from being on stage and preparing to do a keynote to a live audience to then switching to Zoom, it's a totally different environment.

54:01And I had to go through some woes and some panics around, okay, how am I managing this virtual room? But now it's ubiquitous. We are forced to be on Zoom virtually 24-7. So how do you approach that in preparing from a media training standpoint to now video, not just a live audience? And there's a belief that we have that as important as it is to read a room, you cannot read a Zoom. And that's simply because that thumbnail chain of people who are on the call that vertically goes down the right side of your screen, they are not going to give you the same signs of attentiveness that you're going to get from somebody in front of you at a conference table.

54:49If they're looking off screen and they're writing, you may, in your worst assumption in your mind, think they're texting a friend. Whereas they could be taking copious notes of everything you say, but you're left to imagine maybe the worst or their camera goes off. I'm sure we've all had that happen. To me, that's the equivalent of somebody getting up and walking out of a conference room. Same thing. and uh so there are lots of things that can happen that can really shake our confidence on a virtual call and i tried something i tried an experiment a while back where i realized i was distracting myself from the task at hand and that was doing the best job i could presenting to the audience because i kept looking over at that thumbnail chain to see if what i was saying was landing and resonating and I wasn't getting what I wanted because that just doesn't happen on zoom to the same extent.

55:50And so one day I just closed all the windows, all of them, and treated it like an old style conference call. And I found I was a lot more focused. I was a lot more confident because I, I stopped trying to get something I was never going to get. And that's the affirmation and confirmation that this is landing. It's interesting. It's helpful because while it may be all those things, those people, they're not going to give you the outward signs that that's happening. Right. For me, another one was turning off self-view because so rarely are you on stage staring at yourself. You're more looking to engage the audience.

56:30And even when I'm on stage, I'm looking to engage an individual in the audience instead of staring at a screen full of faces staring back at me. And that self-view, I think with it being on by default, so many of us get in our head even more looking back at ourself. Am I saying it right? Oh, I was looking in the wrong direction. Or wow, I kind of need a haircut. Maybe I should make an appointment. Yeah. It can be very, very distracting. The couple of other things that I found in really analyzing life on Zoom was this phenomenon that we call in the book Zoomnesia, which was this awareness that all of these training sessions that were now exclusively on Zoom were all starting to bleed together.

57:13And I was having a really hard time differentiating the session I did Monday afternoon from the one Wednesday morning. And that never happened to me before. And I realized that the trappings of all these sessions were now absolutely identical. I was always in the same seat. They were always in the same window. And while the content was different, all of the things that helped trigger our memory were the same. Were the same. Yeah. And the only antidote to that was just taking really detailed notes on every session. But Zoom fatigue is a factor. Zoom niche is a factor. It's hard and it's exhausting, as you know.

57:53Well, I think that's another important point around brevity and being concise, because if you can stick the landing in 20 minutes instead of 30, people are going to be happy to show up to your next Zoom session knowing that they're going to get the 10 minutes back and not be stuck there with you droning on. Yeah, exactly. And also the amount of time, our typical one-on-one session at Clarity is like four hours. You cannot do four hours virtually. Two hours is the max. Yeah, I find 90 minutes for me and I'm tapping out. Yeah, exactly. But, you know, a lot of other things that happen in terms of our physical presence in front of a room, adrenaline can betray us and it can have some negative effects on our presence in front of a room.

58:44The other thing, in addition to making it hard to stand still, is our eyes are probably going to dart around the room more because we're nervous and not really land and connect with anybody. And we're often advising people to find four people, either around a conference table or out in an audience, maybe one in each quadrant of the room, who represent those good, encouraging listeners. The people who smile, the people who nod, they look connected with your content and just play to those four people. I know that when I look out into an audience and I see somebody taking their phone out and doing this, confidence killer.

59:26Even worse on Zoom when they're checking their email and they're darting to the top of the screen because a notification popped up. Yeah. And so I want to make sure that the people who I make eye contact with in the audience are going to bolster my confidence through the rest of it instead of shake my confidence. So there's two avenues I'd love to explore with you around AI. I think the first, I have this hypothesis that human communication is actually going to become even more important in the age of AI. So these skills that we're talking about here that you probably haven't been trained on, there's no work conference where they're saying, okay, here's how you give a keynote and here's how you present.

1:00:07You're just expected to do it. But learning and strengthening these skills is going to put you at an advantage with the rise of AI. And the second is how you're leveraging these tools with your clients and the insights that AI can provide us is far greater than ever before. So what do you think about my hypothesis around human communication and its relevance in the age of AI? I agree 100%. The whole point of the book really was how do you stand out in your communication skills in a world where there's so much noise and so many people trying to articulate ideas the exact same way? And if you think about it, AI is this amalgamation of everybody else's information, the way to communicate it.

1:00:57I know if I put something into chat GPT, it comes back as a very generic feeling and sounding type of regurgitation of information. And I think that what that's going to do is put an even greater premium on personality, viewpoint, insight, all the very human things that we can bring to the equation that right Right now, generative AI can't do. Now, it's very likely that it'll continue to get better and better at all those things. But, you know, if I put into chat GPT, hey, give me a really good analogy for supply chain problems. What I'll typically get is about four paragraphs of something that would take me two minutes to explain.

1:01:44It's not really good at the pithy and punchy yet. No. So it's a little clunky in those areas where human personality and point of view can still reign. Yeah, I shared this on the show previously. I was playing around with the chatbot and asked her how her day was, and she reminded me that she's AI. As humans, we have experiences that we bring to all of these presentations and talks, and those anecdotes and the vulnerability behind it and the story is what connects us more than the data and the facts. When you're querying chat GPT, it's going to pull all that information for you. The data is going to help strengthen the slide and put together the chart, but it's not going to add the anecdote.

1:02:26It's not going to add the experience that your audience is going to walk away with. And I worry that people are going to delegate all that mental activity that goes into devising a way to communicate. The brain's a muscle, right? You use it or lose it. Yeah. And if you start abdicating even the writing of emails, the chat GPT, pretty soon you're going to lose the ability to just deliver something engaging that somebody's going to want to read. Well, I know growing up, if we were going on a trip, you know, my dad was pulling out the map and we were figuring out the stops and where the gas stations would be.

1:03:08And now I don't even think about how to read a map. I couldn't tell you how to like plot out a, you know, multi-state road trip like my dad used to do. And exactly your point, use it or lose it. You know, the more we actually go to technology, the less likely we are to be able to use it in those key moments where you're not going to have GPT in your ear and you're going to be put on the spot. And you're going to have to be memorable. Or if the contact file on your phone got wiped out, how many phone numbers would you actually know to dial? Maybe the top five. Right, but that's about it. Yeah, so I think that I agree with you 100 % that engaging communication skills are going to be more important than ever moving forward.

1:03:53And to your earlier point with our attention span shrinking so much, your ability to get to the point sooner and sooner and hook someone in the first five seconds when they're scrolling, when they're thinking about what they're going to eat for lunch and they're staring at the clock is going to be even more important. Yeah, there are a lot of studies that show in the first seven seconds, people are making half a dozen value judgments about you. Seven seconds. Are you friend or foe? Are you somebody I'm going to want to hang with the next 20 minutes and listen to? Do you seem like you have command of the information?

1:04:31All those things kick in very, very quickly. And it's ironic to me that most people in presentations leave the greatest degree of winging it for the first 90 seconds when that is the most important part of the presentation. And you should really know your first dance moves cold. And most people don't. Well, you talk about in the book the importance of likability. You have a great example of a woman who says, you know, I got the job because I was the person you could sit on the bus with. That part often isn't thought about in the preparation for a talk. Like how likable am I going to be on stage?

1:05:13It's probably not rattling around in most of our minds as we're putting together the deck and we're thinking about all the charts and data that we have to present. But that likability is so key in that first 90 seconds. I heard this really interesting definition slash equation for authenticity the other day. Somebody said authenticity is equals passion plus warmth. And I do feel as though when people put a deck together, they're not thinking, where are the moments where I can display warmth to the audience and really connect with them? And, you know, one of the things that happens when people are nervous presenting and they just want to get through it technically clean without any incidents at all, the first thing to disappear is a smile.

1:06:04People don't smile when they're nervous. And I'm often telling clients, greatest cloaking device on the planet to your nerves. If you can muster appropriately placed smiles, that will cloud people's impression that you may be nervous. Yeah. And we see this time and time again in our training where we film interactions. And one of the first points we make before filming is nonverbal communication. Smile is going to put everyone at ease in these scenarios. and we'll pause the video before we start replaying it and go, okay, how'd you feel about your smile? And everyone self-rates their smile higher than it actually is in those tense moments.

1:06:50So internally, we often feel like we're projecting that passion and we feel like we're projecting that warmth, but in actuality, experiencing it and seeing yourself back in video, nine times out of 10, you're not. You are so right, AJ, because when we video people in sessions and we show it back to them, inevitably, the number one thing they say is, wow, I look kind of bored. And it's exactly what you just said. They had this mental image that they were bringing it. And now when they see it on a screen, they realize that they were flatlining a bit. Yeah. So with obviously the rise of video, we can start to see the nonverbal signals.

1:07:30And with AI, we can actually start to analyze our presentations like we have never been able to before. It'll actually get the tonality and start to measure, okay, these are the moments where you were actually passionate based on what we picked up on. So how are you using AI tools to analyze and improve your presentations and your clients? We use a tool called Udly, and we use it as a compliment. And what I mean by that is I will videotape people, I'll record people either giving a presentation or in a Q &A situation, and I will provide the feedback. But we also feed the video through this tool, and it will measure their speaking pace, their filler words, their redundancy words, their non-inclusive words.

1:08:23But there are certain things that are just very interesting that it can reveal. I could tell this woman that I mentioned earlier, you're speaking a little too fast. and maybe she'll accept my feedback. Maybe she won't. But if she sees that it's 60 words per minute over the speed limit, then I think it sinks in a little bit more, that cold, hard data. Yeah, the quantification. Yeah. And there was another person that I was training recently who kept, in my mind, it seemed like he kept saying, you know, we're just really focused on blank. You know, we're just really focused on this. I thought, wow, it seems like he said that a lot.

1:09:05So I fired up the AI tool and I'm able now to pinpoint exactly where in the interview he said it. It was very interesting because every time he said it, he was dodging a question. I could tell from the transcript where it identified all the times he said it. So the AI tool was able to really confirm it for me that he was using it. It became a tell that I could now extrapolate that he was being evasive in his answers. Or it will have like literally a graph that shows speed. And so if it's undulating and it's moderate but then fast, I'm able to pinpoint the fast part and say, See, every time you sped up to the top of the zone, it was on a question you didn't feel confident with.

1:10:00So there are certain tools that allow us to take the analysis maybe one layer deeper. Yeah, where to focus, maybe to spend some more time actually preparing and recognizing, okay, maybe this is where I'm getting out over my skis based on what AI is telling me. Right, exactly. So I think it's a great complement in the training world. but it's interesting there are often times where the ai tool will provide certain broader feedback that i don't agree with at all yeah you know it's been a very similar experience for us where clients will be like okay i'm now messing with this ai tool and it's telling me all these things and it's like well that's not what i'm experiencing as a human so yes it has you know ones and zeros that it's crunching based on how it's looking at your presentation but me experiencing it as an audience member, I'm not getting that.

1:10:52Right. For instance, let's say you're a client of ours wanted to use an analogy and there's a good place to put an analogy and there's a bad place to put an analogy. I find that when people blurt it out at the beginning of an answer or in the beginning of a section, it feels very contrived. It feels very canned, like they've been practicing in front of the mirror all day. And the better way to do it is to build towards it so that you can create the illusion that this clever idea has just come to you in the moment. The AI tool will simply reference the fact, good strategy there to use an analogy.

1:11:34It will not be taking into account the placement. Yeah. Some of the subtler ideas. Right. So it's just, it's a tool that's supportive, but I wouldn't rely on it just for analysis. Exactly. But it's interesting because I think back, maybe it was 12 years ago, somewhere in that neighborhood where a couple of students from MIT called me and said, hey, we're building this app and it's going to teach people how to be better public speakers. And I had the same exact response that everybody who's ever been disrupted by AI has said. It's like, yeah, I don't think that's going to be able to do what I do.

1:12:11yeah and i mean i help them with a certain insight as to what um but you know it's it's establish itself as as as you said a good compliment yeah and i think listen if you can get the data and you can use it in meaningful way to improve why not yeah but don't rely on it as a crutch recognize that you're not talking to an audience of ai right hopefully right you're actually talking to humans and that's what really matters yeah well thank you so much for joining us today work our audience find out more about the book and the work that you do uh the book um synopsis is at claritymediagroup.com slash speak memorably which is the name of the book and uh it comes out first week of june very excited about it and really it's designed to make sure that this golden opportunity that people in business have all over the world every day to make what they say count that opportunity is kind of being squandered.

1:13:13Yeah. And it's a shame, and I want to make sure that those opportunities are seized instead of squandered, and that's what the book is really designed to do. Well, thank you for a memorable conversation. I really enjoyed it, AJ. Thank you.

1:13:36And now comes a part of the show where we showcase one of our X Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Preston. Hey everyone, this is Preston from Mesa, Arizona. I joined the Art of Charm because after transitioning out of the military, I noticed I was struggling with building connections and relationships with people on a personal scale and it didn't help on the business side of things either. I tried a lot of different coaching programs, YouTube, personal growth videos, the works. And the great thing about Art of Charm is it's not a pill that you can just take to quickly fix everything. They have a system and a structure so that you can build what you need to to see the matrix in yourself and actually get the results that you're looking for in the end.

1:14:13The awesome thing, AJ, Johnny, Michael, they work with you one-on-one as well as they put a lot of time and effort to set up continual meetings there during the week and groups. Again, I would highly recommend this. You're going to see the matrix. You're going to see things that'll help you connect and build great relationships. Thank you, Preston. And good luck to you and all of your future endeavors. It was an honor and pleasure working with you. If you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts, head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show. It means the world to us and helps others find the show.

1:14:46Before we head out, a huge thank you to our producers, Michael Harold and Eric Montgomery. Until next week, go out there and be charming.

1:15:04You're just a toy. And you sold the world. You're a song of a tragedy. Cause you had your taste. All black on the easy day. Yeah, but I remember you. Oh, yeah. I remember you. It was a bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.