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The A-HA Method - GABE ZICHERMANN - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Have a deadline in mind make it 2 months out so have the details and time
        
        Type of talk (keynote, breakout, pitch)
        
        Length of talk (the normal length of talks at this event in minutes)
        
        Themes or topics (especially useful if you’re pitching a future event)
        
        Live or virtual
        
        Dates
    - - mastery of presentation skills is best achieved by mastery of content/material. The more you know the content you plan to deliver, the easier it will be to deliver it well—largely because you won’t be trying to remember what you mean to say, and will instead focus on the flow state of saying it.
    - - Simply put: practice, practice, practice.
      - A brand-new deck might take 20 to 25 sprints to get right
    - - When to get feedback
        
        The best times to incorporate external feedback are when you’ve reached a milestone in the creation of your talk and are ready to do an edit/revision pass.
      - Who to get feedback from
        
        people of the same demographic as your audience
      - Instructions
        
        First and foremost, you need your reviewers to act impartially. They may really love you and think you are the best at everything you do (Hi, mom!), but in the case of a talk feedback loop, the last thing you need is empty encouragement. You need specific, actionable feedback—and you need it to be as honest, harsh, and brutal as possible.
        
        Before beginning any feedback ask or session, make sure to lay out the ground rules
        
        Effectively, what you want is them to:
        
        Suspend disbelief—pretend they are the audience.
        
        Listen closely and take notes on anything that comes to mind.
        
        Pay attention to their own attention level, ensuring they note if their focus fades in or out and when.
        
        Ask questions and provide honest feedback to clarify what they did or didn’t understand, and what they’d prefer you to change.
        
        Be direct but not mean. In the early stages, you’re mostly looking for substantive feedback about the story, the structure, and what you have to say. As the talk development progresses, you should include more asks about presentation skills, especially with regards to tone and speed. Remembering a core tenet of A-Ha! is that the audience pays attention when needed, you can also inquire about their attention level as you progress into a more repeatable phase. And slides should be evaluated at least once for clarity and impact, though if you’ve done visuals a few times, and follow the advice in this book, you probably won’t need much input there.
        
        Listening
        
        listen and ask follow up questions
        
        Recording
        
        record the sudience not yourseld
        
        The content is king—and your ability to deliver it in your own unique, authentic way, is queen. Together, these are the priorities that must be met first. Get yourself additional help as needed to accomplish this goal, a priori.
- - - - An overuse of the arousal technique will likely cause one of two reactions in the listener:
        A sense of discomfort
        A desensitization to A-Ha’s!
      - So you must carefully manage the number, amplitude, and interval of peak arousal A-Ha! Moments to ensure that you’re generating maximum impact without triggering an aversive response.
    - - Sympathetic is fight or flight
      - Parasympathetic is feed and breed
      - They act in concert and in opposition to each other, helping regulate how we feel.
    - - Studies show that emotional arousal has a powerful, selective effect5 on memory and retention.
      - This means that when you’re highly aroused, your brain increases the memory encoding for high-priority information and decreases it for lower-priority information
      - As a speaker, you want to ensure that your most important points are those encoded into long-term memory.
      - By crafting your talks, pitches, and meetings with clearly defined emotional high (and low) points, you can influence when the audience will be most receptive to what you have to say, and control what data-point or idea is presented to them at that moment of greatest receptivity.
    - - Another thing that arousal may affect is multitasking. When someone is both focused and alert, they are less likely to multitask.
      - By channeling this focus and alertness in our listeners, we can ensure minimal multitasking.
      - This connection is positive if your goal is to get that A-Ha! Moment followed by the audience writing down (or tweeting) what you said. In general, the perfect rhythm allows people to come to a point of focus, with maximal arousal and minimal distraction, and then feel free to encode or share those moments.
    - - The time immediately after an A-Ha! Moment (or any meaningful stimulus) is called “emotional refraction.” Its length corresponds to the amount of time it takes your brain to reset after you’ve encountered something new and meaningful.
      - By carefully separating your A-Ha! Moments, and explicitly giving people downtime to consider, process, and communicate what you had to say, you create more space for positive outcomes.
      - This can be done by the raising of your voice or tone, a change in the cadence of your speech, or by using smart pauses.
    - - One of the outcomes that most speakers find complex to create is the fostering of connectedness
      - A-Ha! Moments can create powerful connections with your audience. This is accomplished through two different but important factors
        
        1: The first is the “shared experience” that everyone in the room is going through. This can be particularly powerful when you are empathetic and vulnerable with your audience, but is useful in most contexts.
        
        2: The second element of arousal and connectedness is what’s called the “Separation Call Hypothesis.” This is a theory that explains why humans have such a powerful physiological response to emotional stimuli. It posits that the reason we respond so strongly is because it is rooted in our protective reaction to becoming separated from our offspring. When we hear their call of distress, we are moved to take action to rescue them. So in a sense, your efforts at creating emotional arousal in your talk may be prompting the audience to want to save or protect you and the ideas you’re putting forth.
  - - - Maximize social media promotion (e.g., tweeting about what you said).
      - Improve memory and recall.
      - Increase connectedness to you.
      - Generate more requests for your participation/leads/follow-ups.
- - - - Compelling charm that inspires followers
      - can be taught and the smallest moments of magnetism can be powerful tools
    - - being quantitatively or qualitatively different generally serves us well in our professional endeavors.
      - The goal and idea is to stand out without being a completely unknown quantity
      - Blue Ocean Strategy, authors Kim and Mauborgne
    - - taking risks. That’s the way you fearlessly approach challenges, stick your neck out, and try your best
      - The critical thing is that you take the maximal risks that your situation allows, and that you use your nerve to make the world stand up and acknowledge you.
    - - You have to be good at the core talent elements of your career
      - Too often, people new to public speaking and pitching believe that this too is either genetically expressed or not. But the reality is that anyone can develop the talent and skill necessary to be a great speaker.
      - even if you don't have the natural propensity for public speaking you can come up with a plan and practice
  - - - you must speak the truth in your public communication and—at minimum—avoid ever telling a lie.
      - it’s trivially easy for people to check up on what you’ve said. As soon as people find a single untruth in your dialogue, they will discount everything else you have to say
    - - everything that comes out of your mouth will be subject to the audience making a snap judgement: yes or no. I agree or I disagree. And this will happen throughout your talk, not just at the end, once you’ve had a chance to make all your points.
      - unless you have real knowledge of what you speak, and are willing to share it, it will be difficult to persuade people that you are worth listening to over their objections
    - - creating even the slightest frisson of boredom will cause your intended audience to go do something else—whether on their devices or simply in their mind
      - One of the main ways you accomplish effective persuasion in these times is to be economical. By saying less, and more efficiently, you ultimately say more.
      - People appreciate the economy of language, which results in saved time and less chance of distraction
      - discover and promote your personal style, and carefully structure how you get to your point for maximum effect
    - - First and foremost, you must be authentic. That is, audiences must believe that the persona you’re conveying is the real you
      - it’s preferable that you be your own person. Sounding like everyone else just won’t cut it, especially in this era of social media.
    - - it is extremely important for every speaker to understand their own personality, skills, and orientation and bring that to the party.
      - Voice Quadrant - where do it i sit in Funny / Serious / Vulnerable / Academic
      - if you are not funny dont tell a joke, if not academic dont lecute
      - asses yourself and lean into your strengths
- - - - The first act of any story sets up the challenge inherent in the piece. You will meet the protagonist and antagonist(s) and understand how they are going to be challenged to accomplish their goals. Though you may not understand all the issues and conflicts, before the conclusion of the first act, you undoubtedly know a great deal more about all the players and what you can expect.
      - Best Practices
        
        The 1st 10 seconds
        
        First Impressions Matter
        
        Be the best version of whatever person will have the greatest credibility delivering the message
        
        Control the narrative before the talk
        
        Have a 50 - 100 word bio (update your linkdin), have a great business card, and a good photo
        
        Do not waste time
        
        dont make a joke etc, people have limited attention spans, open directly to the establishing statement of your talk
        
        Opening can take 1 of 3 methods depending on the circumstances
        
        Planes
        
        The plane type of opener usually takes around 10 to 15 seconds, and sets up a contextual case for the talk to come in the form of “let me tell you about
        
        Generally speaking, there are three scenarios under which you want to use this form of opening:
        
        1: Establishing authority. Sometimes you want to have your bona fides established up front. used to great effect when doing company pitches, in the form of “I’d been a chemical engineer for twenty plus years and suddenly I realized that …” It’s a subtle/not-so-subtle way of reinforcing for the audience that you know what you’re talking about, and may help pave the way for greater confidence in your material.
        
        2: Shifting context to from someone who has spoken before you about a different topic or idea. A plane-type opener works here to shift everyone’s sense of what’s coming next.
        
        3: Literary work. Generally speaking, if your presentation is about something you’ve written, created, or performed elsewhere, you may want to take some extra time to build up to the points you’re endeavoring to make. Do this by contextualizing your content for the audience to view as a whole, rather than just the specific topic you’re covering right then.
        
        it still takes the first chunk of the audience’s attention away from the material of your talk to an establishing premise.
        
        Rocketships
        
        Rocketship talk openers are exactly what they sound like: opening gambits that move very quickly to gain altitude and present their most dramatic side first. A rocketship opener can be said to establish the conflict immediately, and to engage users with a provocative statement or idea right off the bat.
        
        Often, the speakers will open with a single, provocative question designed to jolt the audience out of its complacency or stupor, and to immediately pull focus to what they have to say.
        
        the first words out of the speaker’s mouth immediately establish a mildly shocking provocation that the audience probably doesn’t see coming. So when should we use the rocketship opener?
        
        1: Any talk that is under 30 minutes. Don’t waste any time setting up the scene, just get right into it.
        
        2: Big picture talks - If your talk is designed to present a big picture thought—something perhaps inspiring and oriented toward generating action, motivation, and excitement in the audience, the rocketship opener will add emotional heft to your point and clearly signal the kind of ride that attendees are in for.
        
        3: Always, if you can. The rocketship however is the most consistent with the frameworks of the A-Ha! Method, and—I believe—the realities of the audience’s attention span. There is rarely a downside to grabbing the audience’s attention right off the bat, and mostly upside to doing so.
        
        Trains
        
        A train—or “soft”—opener is designed to ease the audience into the conversation. Typically, this is a maximum of a 60-second “preamble” to your talk that is designed to accomplish one of three possible goals:
        
        2: Win over a hostile audience - A slower start may help the audience ease into your style before being confronted by what you have to say (and jumping to “no”).
        
        3: if you have time to kill
        
        1: Charm the audience
        
        Usually use an anecdote or story that connect the audience to the material
        
        Provocations
        
        The core tension of your presentation, as expressed in your provocative opening statement, isn’t a throwaway. In fact, the intensity and clarity of this provocation and framing is among the biggest determinants in how successful your presentation will seem to have been with the audience.
        
        So what is a talk’s provocation? Generally speaking, this is the point that the whole talk hinges on, and is usually in the form of something that is, has, or should have happened. The corollary to this is that there is something wrong with the way in which these things happen today that requires fixing.
        
        Every pitch should have this essential tension, there is a behavior / process that could be better. Also frame professional communications this way to improve understanding
        
        Use to influence and persuade
        
        So if you think about it in this way, as a general rule, we want most of our provocations to paint a picture of a better future that can be ours if we … do what you’re suggesting.
        
        First and foremost, anything you suggest in the opener must be resolved by the end
        
        Lastly, when considering your opening provocation, it’s generally good practice to not directly insult your audience.
        
        The 4th Wall
        
        The corollary—and goal of most performance—is to create a world that you briefly forget isn’t real—or what’s called suspension of disbelief. The same is true of public speaking and professional communication, though usually on a less prosaic level than the theatre
        
        Once we establish the provocation (or problem we’re trying to solve) in the opener, it’s essential that everything from that point onward live inside the world we’re claiming exists.
        
        Even without a technical disruption, speakers tend to break the fourth wall during Act I by making reference to the other speakers, the hosts, or a circumstance related to the conference. That is, they are bringing the audience’s attention to something that is explicitly not the talk they are giving.
        
        The Rah- Rah Exception
        
        Can break the 4th wall if you need or want to get the audience ramped up
        
        Referencing other speakers
        
        Don't as it is a waste of your time and distracting