Dan Fraser is a presentation expert. In his new book “Kickass Presentations” he gives tips and advice to avoid “death by Powerpoint”. In this episode of The Knowledge Industry Podcast he tells me about his approach to presentations and why most people are doing it wrong.
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Dan Fraser
Really PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, whatever, whatever your software is kind of doesn’t matter. The software itself encourages you to be terrible.
mark egan
So today’s topic, how do we avoid death by PowerPoint? How do we make presentations more engaging than phrases a former police officer, tactics instructor, and now he coaches speakers and trainers to captivate their audiences. Now, he’s just released a book called kickass presentations. So how can his tips help you?
Did you sell online courses or run live workshops? Do you have expertise that can help people in life or business, or you even running an online training empire from your kitchen table? Then you’re part of the knowledge industry, a fast growing industry, that means that you can learn almost anything, and anyone can create a business around what’s between their ears. Welcome to the knowledge industry podcast with your host, Mark Egan.
mark egan
So Dan, great to talk to you to us. First of all, whereabouts in the world are you?
Dan Fraser
I am located in Calgary, Alberta, which is in Canada. And normally we’re the sunniest city in in Canada with about 330 some odd days of Sun per year. Today is not one of
mark egan
them, sadly, all right. So you’ve already you’re already doing the tourist pitch there. Okay, great. Now, just before we started recording, I mentioned that I’ve been traveling, I’ve just been in Finland and Switzerland. And quite Luckily, I got my hands on your new book, which was a great read. And obviously, we’ll talk about some of the details in there. But you know, if somebody were to meet you today, and you’re talking about, you know, presentation skills and how to connect with an audience, that’s not really where you started this journey. So how did you get into this field in the first place?
Dan Fraser
Yeah, I think I came here through a different method than than most I would say. So I am retired as a police officer. And when I joined the Calgary police service, I was, you know, just out of the military and very young and I joined to be a police officer. And then eventually I found myself wanting to be an instructor. And eventually I was a full time became a full time tactics instructor in our academy. So teaching new officers and an experienced officers in all the physical skills of you know, of policing of how to put your hands on people and all of the handcuffing hand covering early certainly for me here. And you know, Taser and, but also how to speak to people. And so there was a lot of a lot of classroom type of stuff. And I really enjoyed that. And it wasn’t till I left that job, six years later, as a full time instructor that some of the other instructors said, Hey, would you put together a course on how to actually teach? And I thought, wow, that’s okay. That’s quite the endorsement. Yeah, let me let me look into that. And so what that launched me on is sort of a journey that I’ve had for the last decade of how can we be effective as speakers and as presenters? And how can we capture people’s attention and hang on to it. And that led me to a workshop and eventually to, to writing a book. And two years ago, when I retired from the service, this is by I took my part time consulting and training company and went full time with that. So I Yeah, didn’t didn’t come to it through the normal way. But what I find is that there’s so many people out there who join a profession, whatever it is, they might be an engineer, and they have no intentions of ever being an instructor or even presenting. But at some point, if you’re a professional, somebody’s going to say to you, Hey, Mark, do you mind speaking to the new people who are coming in? Or do you mind giving this presentation at a conference or something? And for those people, where do you even start? So that’s, that’s really what I’m looking to do here we’re most I think it was Roy Vaden, who said that we are most powerfully positioned to help the person that we once were. So I sort of built the workshop and wrote the book that I wish I had when when I was an instructor.
mark egan
And I know on paper, you know, you went from, you know, actually being in the field to teaching other people but actually, you know, I used to work as a journalist and go out with police patrols and all that kind of thing. And one thing that always struck me is that so much of the job is actually communication is is like calming people down. You know, knowing when to be assertive, you know, it isn’t all cops and robbers and running around with guns. It’s a lot a lot of those communication skills. You were probably sort of fine tuning without even maybe thinking about it whilst you were serving.
Dan Fraser
Yeah, absolutely. It’s, it’s, it’s something kind of like presenting you will get better just by doing it. But you’ll get much better much faster if you’re doing it with some proper coaching and some training and actually really looking at what you’re doing. because not every, you know, not every 20 year or 25 year police officer is amazing and speaking to people most get good. But, you know, it misses some people. So you’re right, there’s, there’s a lot more to policing than just, you know, what you see on TV or all the driving fast and all that kind of stuff. It’s, it’s fun, but really the job is talking to people. And that’s what we really focus on getting our officers to be really good at.
mark egan
Now, when you came into the kind of teaching and presentation space. Now, again, coming back to your book, you know, I’ve been teaching and running workshops for years. But you know, reading some of the things, you know, like, when you talk about some of the do’s and don’ts, even with things like slides, you know, there’s a few moments. Oh, yeah, that’s a good point, actually. So what were the things when you were looking at other people in the way they were teaching and presenting that you looked at? You thought? Oh, yeah, okay. These are the common things that people are getting wrong.
Dan Fraser
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s all the stuff that I did wrong, too. I was, I don’t know, some people think that, you know, when you get to a certain level, and you were just kind of born that way, but I made every presentation and mistake you could we use PowerPoint, and that’s kind of the most prolific software, I’d say in North America, certainly for government, and, but really PowerPoint, keynotes, Google Slides, whatever, whatever your software is, kind of doesn’t matter. The software itself encourages you to be terrible at it. What I mean by that is, when you open a new PowerPoint, it says click to add title, and click to add text. And it’s just begging you to add a title to your slides. And really, your your audience doesn’t want a title, they want your takeaway message. And so that title ends up being kind of something more for the presenter to keep them on track. And then it asks you to fill in bullet points, which this is all synonymous with death by PowerPoint, this is what nobody wants. And yet, the software itself is just begging you to do that. And so it’s no wonder that, that people putting together a presentation, they get their materials together, often their materials are from a policy manual or some other document and it just turns into this, let’s just take it off of the document and put it onto a slide we’ll put it up on the on the wall, and then inevitably, they end up reading off of it. And this is why so many people hate PowerPoint, just because it’s been used in that way. And so I still find that I was working with a client just last week. And he sent me a PowerPoint and I had a look at it. And I was magically transported back to 1998. Like it was it was the same background. It was literally just paragraphs of text. And so that’s one of the danger signs, I’d say if you’re looking at one of your slides, and you’re seeing a sentence, let alone a paragraph, but even a sentence, have a look at that and go what’s my takeaway message here? And how can I communicate that with maybe having just a picture up there and a couple of words, that is going to be glanceable to the audience that, you know, it’s okay for for that PowerPoint deck to keep you on track a little bit as as a presenter, but really, it’s not for you, it’s for the audience. So they should be able to look up to get what you’re what you’re talking about very quickly, almost like when you’re driving down the highway and you’re looking for the the overhead road signs, you’re gonna glance up, you’re gonna get the info that you need. And then you can get your eyes back on the road, which is the actual presenter, the person speaking. And I think that’s another thing that people forget about is the presentation isn’t what’s on your slides, you are the presentation. And we need to bring that level of expertise and knowledge instead of just standing up there and relying on our PowerPoint deck.
mark egan
I think that should be the new slogan for PowerPoint, it encourages you to be terrible. I love that. I mean, you know, you mentioned about, you know, the focus shouldn’t be on the slides. And one thing you wrote about in the book was, you know, maybe not having your slides so bright. You know, if you’re there in person, there’s big massive white square behind you is sort of distracting your attention. Because you’ve kind of looked into the science and the psychology of this definitely when it comes to you know how things look, you know, body language. So tell us a little bit about some of the things that you found out that might help people maybe present more in a more convincing way going forwards.
Dan Fraser
Wow, that’s yeah, that’s, that’s that’s a lot to think about. Okay. Yeah, I do talk about I’m not a fan of having a white background on on most slides if you can avoid it, because it does sort of compete with you. Sometimes if you’re presenting in a darker room and especially if the screen itself is coming off of a TV or a monitor and it’s backlit. It can be very, very bright. And really again that’s competing with you as the presenter and you want the attention on on you. As far as body language goes, it’s one of those things that it’s almost like, like eye contact, where it’s, it’s an afterthought when people are preparing their presentation, often they’re, they’re going through their slide deck, and they’re making sure that they know what’s coming up on the slides. And what they are actually doing at the front of the room is almost an afterthought. And they’re not thinking about what am I doing with my hands? And who am I looking at these kinds of things, because it all becomes overwhelming. So. So once we sort of get people’s presentation dialed in, and they’ve mastered their content, so they know exactly what they’re gonna say, they, they know what slide is coming up, they know what they’re gonna say, for that they can handle any questions that are going to come from their presentation stuff, that’s when we can really move into, okay, what what are we doing with our hands, because hands are, are very, very important. And if anybody’s watching this on YouTube, one of the things I really try to do when I’m speaking in a Zoom meeting, or that kind of training is have my hands visible, just because people love seeing hands. And I always joke, I’ve got a colleague who would just stand with their arms plastered to their side, you know, like, they’re standing at attention, and not moving their hands, they end up looking like like an alien being who’s pretending to be a human. We people love seeing our hands. And if you can use those to highlight what you’re saying, and to reinforce what you’re saying, even if it’s just to pretend that you’ve got a pen in your hand, or one of those little chopstick things like a like a music conductor, and just follow along with the beat of what you’re saying. That’s going to be more engaging than just sort of doing nothing with your hands. The other thing is, because I mentioned it is eye contact, which I think is, again, it’s almost cliche, I know that when I was starting out as a presenter, you know, I was told well, if you’re too nervous to look at people then look between people or pick a spot on the back wall and stare at that. And, and the problem with it is that there really is no audience that you’re speaking to, there’s a whole bunch of individuals, and what people are looking for that individual connection with us. So if we can make eye contact with that person, it’s more like we’re having a conversation with that person. So if we’re looking between people, or if we’re staring awkwardly into the, you know, the back of the room or somewhere else, what happens with those people as they go, Oh, I went to see Mark speak. And you know, what he, he never looked at me, you know, we didn’t have that sort of that sort of connection happening there. So that’s another purposeful skill that we want to be able to lock eyes with. I really love to do that with everybody that I present to, especially if it’s in a classroom type setting, and you’ve only got 20 or 30 people in there a little different if you’re speaking to 1000 people at a convention or something like that. But you can still look at individuals and have a conversation with them and give them that little hit of hit of dopamine from that human connection.
mark egan
I’m glad you flagged up some of the bad advisors because you know, like the hands one. I’ve worked with people and executives and people who need to present on camera. And often they’re told, you know, we had a very expensive agency or trainer or consultant coming. And they said, when you’re on camera, you know, keep your hands together. And it seems to be widespread advice that goes round. But then of course, you look like you say like some kind of Victorian photograph with your shoulder really tight. It’s amazing how much a bad advice goes around. I mean, one of the things you do is consultancy. So like you mentioned, you know, you have clients who work with you to try and improve their presentations. What’s the one thing that people sometimes are resistant to where you give them a bit of advice? You say like, trust me this one, this will make your presentation better? And people like you sure about that? Is there anything that people are more resistant to?
Dan Fraser
You know what, I’m not sure if there’s something that people are resistant to I think sometimes it can kind of feel like drinking from a firehose, like this is like this is all too much. And that’s where i i prefer to sort of break things down into these sort of bite sized chunks. Where Okay, let’s have a look at the presentation and let’s almost do that separate from how you’re going to practice and rehearse it, etc. I don’t know that there’s that there’s a lot of pushback. One of the things that I that I do, however, is some stand up comedy. And so I’ve kind of woven that into my teaching of of presentations and how to be how to be engaging. And that I would say is one of the things that Some people are very hesitant on where they go, You know what, I’m not funny, I don’t think I can pull off this kind of, you know, trying to be a little bit funny. But when they see the benefits of it, and they see that, if they as an audience member want that, then they should be providing that as the as the presenter, then then they kind of latch on to it and go, Okay, I maybe this is worth putting in the effort to, you know, just making my my, my presentation 1% more engaging, because the, the analogy I like to use is that if you showed up to a conference or a training session, you’ve got two identical sessions you’ve got, it’s gonna be the same presenter, the same material, all the information is the same. But in one of those during that hour, you’re gonna laugh one time, and in the other, you’re not? Which one are you going to choose, you’re gonna choose the one where you laugh, or even smile. So if we know that we want that for ourselves as an audience, then that should be something that we’re really looking to sort of bake into our product here so that we’re giving people that same experience that they want.
mark egan
And I know, obviously, you go into a lot of detail on some of the specifics in the book. But just on that comedy points, because it’s a legitimate question where people say, you know, I’m not sure if I’ve kind of got the delivery or, you know, you know, people say, I’m not that funny. I mean, how do you appropriately add humor? Is that something that you script in? Or is it you know, what’s your approach to adding humor to something which may be have a, like, a really serious point at the end of the presentation? But how would you slip humor into the into it?
Dan Fraser
Yeah, I like that, you mentioned that sometimes there’s a very serious point. And that’s one of the things one of the places that I find where people go, there’s no room for humor here, this is a very serious topic. And sometimes those serious topics are the ones that need it the most. Because if we’re just, you know, in law enforcement, there’s all kinds of presentations about, you know, there’s detectives that look into, let’s say, child abuse or something. And that’s a pretty tough subject to talk about for an hour. And so if we want to keep people engaged, we sort of need to let the tension out of that every so often, and so some appropriate humor in there would be good. So a couple of things, that there’s there’s ways that we can prepare this ahead of time. And one of the easiest ways I would say if we’re using something like a PowerPoint deck, is to look through and find some of the key messages that you’re talking about. And then look for funny images that have to do with that with that item. So, you know, if it’s, I don’t know, I’ll take something you know, I’ll take something dark, or, you know, like, let’s say, you’re trying to teach kids how to work, parents how to keep their kids safe? Well, if we’re looking at safety, then you could look for just do a Google search for funny safety signs, you know, spotting the danger signs, and then this starts to take us down this path of, okay, well, what are some words that are adjacent to that? So safety, danger, spotting the danger, and just just kind of having some good looking for some funnier images with that, and what’s gonna happen is, there’s going to be some obvious sort of joke stuff that comes up, like somebody has made a sign that says, you know, beware of this, you know, our dog has a gun, or our guard dog has a gun, something like that, that is better than having nothing. But what I encourage people to do is go a little bit farther than that, and keep looking for something that is a little bit off to the side of what we’re actually talking about. And especially if we can get a funny image that doesn’t have any words, so not like a New Yorker style comic where they need to read a sentence or what somebody is saying, but something that people can get right away, and elicits that emotional response. And have that as sort of the punchline to your jokes. So one of the examples I use in the book is, there’s this this picture of these guys in their, in their backyard in a pool, they’ve got a little table in the middle of the pool with, you know, some type of electric grill and they’ve got a, you know, a stereo there and they’re, they have a extension cord running to it, and the extension cord doesn’t reach so they’ve got a power bar halfway through the water and it’s floating on a on a sandal. You know, like barely. I don’t know if this is the the image is set up to to do that. I don’t know if anybody could be that stupid, but immediately, people laugh because they go oh, these guys are so dumb, and they are not seeing the danger signs. And there’s there’s a number of those kinds of images out there. So if we can use that image For example, as our punch line, so you need to know that it’s coming up next. And you need to be able to set it up by saying, you know, guys, we need to be better at spotting the danger signs. And then we use our presentation remote to advance to that next slide. And you don’t need to say anything that slide, that image now is the punch line, everybody gets it right away, because they don’t have to read anything. And it’s, again, a good little way to add a smile, you’re not, you don’t need to have people rolling on the floor, that’s probably not going to happen. But even if they kind of smile or chuckle, that’s a win. And again, even if we have one of those in a present in an hour long presentation, in my opinion, that’s better than having nothing at all. The other way is the other way to kind of be a little bit more spontaneous. And this takes practice. But if there’s people who are giving a lot of presentations, you’ve got a lot of time to sort of practice this stuff and work it out. And when I’m running smaller workshops, what I like to do is to learn everybody’s name, and have them tell me something interesting about themselves at the start to maybe as an icebreaker, that kind of thing. And then if if you know I’m meeting you mark, and you told me that you just went to Finland? Well, I’m going to do my best to remember that. And then if there’s an opportunity later in the presentation, I’m going to work in that little bit. And so if people are drift, if their minds are drifting in and out of, I don’t know if I want to pay attention to this or not, or this is kind of boring. Maybe I should check Facebook, on my phone under the desk. And then I go, Yeah, this is just like, this is just like when Mark went to Finland. And all of a sudden, there’s no way that you are not paying attention. And probably the your your friends and the people around you are going oh, what’s he going to say about that. And those little callbacks, really I find keep people engaged. I was delivering a series of presentations to accompany. And I had made a callback joke. It was somebody had a had a certain type of car. And it was weird. I was kind of making making fun of this car. And three weeks later, I’m back at the same company. And I made a comment about this car. And we hadn’t talked about it again that day. And there was somebody in the in the audience that went, Whoa, that was three weeks ago, like he couldn’t could they couldn’t believe that I remembered that. And I’m now kind of weaving that into what we’re talking about. So just getting to know your audience is, is super valuable. And again, all this stuff takes, you know, those kinds of things take a little bit of practice. But if you’re, you know, if you give more than a few presentations a year that you have opportunity to practice that stuff.
mark egan
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about connection, isn’t it? And I mean, you talked about delivering in person, but obviously you also deliver virtually, you know, on Zoom or, unfortunately sometimes on teams. Sorry, I’m very entertaining. But the you know, I mean, for instance, some of the you know, tips you’re talking about, you know, getting there early and speaking to get a sense of the audience, that kind of thing. When you’re on something like zoom, you know, sometimes you pop up and there’s a bunch of faces or worse, it’s a zoom webinar, and there are no faces. How do you? How do you adjust your because I mean, a lot of what you talk about is making your message really compelling, engaging, keeping people interested and building that connection. How do you translate that to something like zoom?
Dan Fraser
For me, again, it’s doing a little bit of homework ahead of time. And yes, there’s nobody in front of you when you’re speaking in a physical sense. But if you have the opportunity to talk to people who you’re going to be, who are going to be attending that meeting, we may not be able to refer to them in person, because, you know, one of the last presentations I gave it was for a province wide government agency, and they, they have people all over the place, and all these people don’t know each other. So it’s really hard for me to say, well, as Mark would say, you know, that’s not going to land however, learning a little bit about them, and about what their industry is about and talking to some people ahead of time about, hey, what are your what are your concerns with this? What do you think people would benefit from and talking to a few people like that, that’s stuff that’s really valuable information that I’m able to weave in because I’m speaking to an industry that I don’t know a lot about. And so I got to do my homework ahead of time so that I don’t feel like you know, sort of a canned presenter who it’s like, you know, I’m not sure who my audience is. I just give the same presentation. The other thing I do is I’ll change up my, my slide deck, and so rather than having a so for one I gave to do with paramedics. Well, I changed some of my slides so that the people in it, they’re not in business attire. They are their paramedics and they’re working the, you know, they’re working their job. And so it just kind of it shows that I’m not using just a canned presentation that I am really angling this towards their industry and really working to be specific towards them. I think that really increases engagement for sure.
mark egan
I’m interested in the process also of writing the book, because obviously you do consultancy, you do presentations. What was what what made you want to actually put it down into a book? And also, what was that process? Like? It’s a lot of people think, you know, what, I must get around at some points writing that book, you know, how long did it take you? How did you go about it? Wow,
Dan Fraser
yeah, it’s, it probably took me five years. And when I tell people that they go, Oh, my God, five years, I didn’t sit down to my desk for eight hours a day, for five years, it wasn’t like that at all. And that was kind of more from, from the conception of it, I had a workshop already. So I had a bit of a framework. And friend of mine, who’s an author was sort of encouraging me to, you know, you got to put this in into a book into a book. And I thought, okay, and so eventually, I started writing, and I would write, you know, for, I’d be leaning into it, and then I’d take my foot off the gas for months and months at a time. And it’s always lingering. And you start to tell people that you’re writing a book, and everybody’s asking, Hey, how’s the book coming, and I’m going, Ah, I’m, I’m, I’m nowhere near there. So finally, when COVID hit, and I found myself, without a regular day job, I thought, Okay, this is it, I need to really, you know, put my put my foot down and go for it. And eventually, I had to set myself a deadline. And then I’ve got a Word document, because really, that’s all you’re doing is you’re, you know, it sounds fancy, like you’re off in a cabin in the woods. And it’s very romantic, that you’re writing a book, but really, it’s an hour here and an hour there and making notes on your phone when you think of something good. And you end up with a Word document. And from there, I didn’t know where to go. So I looked into publishing and I ultimately, I decided to go with a company that helps nonfiction authors get their books published. And that’s a company called Book launchers. And they’re based in the United States. And what they do is, and I’m so thankful for them, because they plugged me into their pipeline. And so at this point, I’ve got what they call a, I don’t even know what’s called a manuscript. I’ve got my manuscript, and they send it off to a content editor who is, and there’s, again, all this editing I can, I can talk about it now and probably sound smart. But I had no idea what a Content Editor is. And so, you know, they’re looking at the structure of your book, and, and is it interesting? And do you have enough stories? And do the chapters make sense and stuff? And that was, that was a number of months, because when I sat down with them, I thought, oh, you know, six months, I should have a book and they chuckled. And they said, No, it’ll it’ll be a year and I thought, how many steps could there be? Well, turns out, I had no idea that if you want to do it properly, it really does take time. And so they were able to sort of Shepherd me through all of their various edits and, and then starting to weave in marketing, we start to look at choosing cover art and start to look at, well, we need to, you know, what goes in your subtitle is very important, because people are searching for your book on Amazon, and what goes on the back of your book, and all of these different things that I had no idea about at all. And I’m really glad that I had somebody helping me, I have a friend of mine who, who published a really great book, she did the same thing as me, but she piecemealed everything out herself. So she was kind of her own project manager. And probably it was a little bit cheaper, but I can’t imagine the extra hours that went into it. So the book, really, my hope for the book is that it’s standalone I, I want it to be something that somebody can actually use, and I’m getting, you know, tons of great feedback on that. Because I’m so I’m so fed up with books, and it’s not just in the presenting space, but it’s it’s all over where they tell you what to do, but they don’t tell you how to do it. So you know what you got to do, Mark, you got to be dynamic. You got to engage your audience, you really got to you really got to get to know them and, and inspire them and people go wow, this is great stuff.
mark egan
You read my mind?
Dan Fraser
Well, there’s just there’s so much out there and and I’ll catch myself doing that on occasion. But I really wanted a book where it’s like no, if I’m advocating something, I want to at least have examples of how you can do it if if if I’m not walking people through the process of how to do it. So
mark egan
you Yeah, I mean, just to jump in there the just because what I really liked about the book was I’ve read lots of books on that this topic or similar, and you’re right I’m either they’re kind of just this constant disguise, and there’s no actual real content, it’s just talking about how good how important it is to have a great presentation, or you get ones which almost breezed sort of technical. And then you get some which are kind of big picture, what I liked about what you’ve done is, you know, you need a few components working together for it to work, you know, the way you do your slides have a structured presentation, your body language, you know, the adding humor, all these kinds of things. And if you put all of those together, you get the results. Whereas quite a lot of books I’ve read have just focused on almost that one part of the jigsaw. Whereas you’ve got everything from fonts on slides, to, you know, kind of storytelling, connecting with your audience and everything. So I think, yeah, whatever the extra time is, I think definitely paid off. And what would be your advice to somebody who, and there’s a lot of people right now who have maybe left jobs with what’s happened in the world recently. And they have an area of expertise, you know, obviously, like you did when you were in the police, what was, what would be your advice to somebody who’s saying, right, okay, I’m gonna start presenting now. I’ve got to take all my expertise, and maybe turn it into a keynote, that I can go and deliver at conferences. Obviously, I know, that’s a big question, but in just a general sense, how would you encourage them to approach it?
Dan Fraser
Wow, yeah, there’s, there’s certainly a lot of people in with with that kind of stuff, lots of good expertise. Honestly, I would get some, I would use some outside resources. Because if you’re not a very experienced presenter, and probably even if you are there stuff that you can still pick up and learn from, you know, books like mine, or even going through, you know, there’s a ton of really great tutorials on on YouTube, and there’s just, there’s so many resources. Now, to do that. One of the pieces of advice I’d have is to, is that your stuff, your presentation is always sort of in a beta form, where it should be, you’re never going to have a clean finished product that this is it, I’ll never touch the slide deck. Again, it’s perfect. It you’re always going to be working on it. And always seeking feedback. Find, find people who are good presenters, find people who maybe are outside your industry who don’t know anything about this and present to them and have them give you feedback. And it’s it’s got to be people who are actually going to give you feedback, because if you use your, you know, your your friends and family, everybody’s going to go you know, Mark, it was great. You did a wonderful job. Well, okay, I’m glad you thought it was great. But that doesn’t, that’s not gonna help you to get better. So you really need to sort of expose your, your, your material and your soul to people to go, is this is Do I have something here? Is this really worthwhile? Because sometimes we don’t know what we have until we show other people and really, it’s, it’s not about us. It’s about it’s about our audience, you know, so people put together a presentation, so they put it together for themselves. And it’s not about you. And so when we look at jargon, and there, there’s certain things in industries that we’re just blind to we we’ve done it so often that we don’t even realize that we’re using an acronym. And it sometimes it takes somebody who’s outside your industry or not as familiar to really, critically look at your stuff and go you know what, when you said that you were going to submit your document to KDP what is that and you go, Oh, my God, I had, I didn’t even realize that I said it. And so just really feedback, I think it’s one of the biggest things that people need to seek. And it’s tough. Like it’s really tough to hear that your stuffs not good. But that’s how you get better.
mark egan
And just find a question then you just reading the book, it senses that there’s there’s almost like a hard way I can’t really describe it, but almost like a kind of more of a mission to what you’re doing more of a an underlying ethos rather than, hey, here’s a few presentation tips. Is that true? And if so, what would be your underlying kind of ethos submission when it comes to presentation?
Dan Fraser
Yeah, I really want to end death by PowerPoint and these terrible presentations and every time I think, you know what, I know this stuff. And so if I know it, everybody else must know it. And then I you go to the world and you just see terrible presentation after terrible presentation and the people delivering them aren’t terrible. They just don’t know what they don’t know. And so that’s really my mission is to help presenters feel their best when they’re presenting said they can do They can be super happy and confident in what they’re doing, they can get that same feeling that I get when I am, you know, in the middle of a presentation that I really enjoy giving or afterwards, and, and to give the audience a better experience and therefore more tools so that they can then go out and change their own behavior and be more effective in their own lives. And it’s just something that’s that sort of continues that way. So that would be that’d be my mission is just to help everybody to just level up wherever you’re at with presentations. Let’s look to get you to the next level. And then once you’re there, well, let’s look to get you to the next level.
mark egan
Great, well, I can say congratulations on the book. kickass presentations, I can’t really say that in an English accent. If somebody wants to find out more work with you learn more about you and what you’ve been writing about. Where should they go?
Dan Fraser
Yeah, absolutely. They can go to my website, which is Fraser training solutions.com. You can also follow me on Instagram at kick ass underscore presentations. And of course my books available everywhere. Well, everywhere in North America, I would say if you’re in the UK, on Amazon, for sure. Yeah, anywhere books are sold. Definitely worth
mark egan
the read. And like so I’ve been doing this for a long time. And there were plenty of things in there that made me think or made me question what I was doing. So, again, best of luck with the book, and I really appreciate you sharing your ideas with us.
Dan Fraser
Awesome, Mark. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
mark egan
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