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Welcome to this week’s episode of the HRDQ-U In Review podcast, where we bring you the latest insights and practical tools for enhancing soft skills training within your organization. This podcast is brought to you by HRDQU.com, and I’m your host, Sarah, Learning Events Manager at HRDQ-U. And today, I have Debbie Lindsey-Opel joining me to discuss the webinar, “Presentation Intelligence: The Key to Speaking Confidently.” Debbie is a seasoned visionary with over three decades of experience in strategic communication leadership.

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public affairs and professional development. Thanks so much for joining me today, Debbie. Sarah, it’s so exciting to be here talking about one of my favorite subjects. So for any of the folks that are tuning in today that haven’t had the chance to watch the recording of our webinar yet, can you share a little bit about your background, what you do, how you got to where you’re at today? know, one of the things that’s exciting when I look back is I have worked in a range of industries. I started out really the first career was working in the banking industry and

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doing human resources work, and that evolved uh into a nice career working in municipal government, of all things, which the gateway was through the human resources, but quickly moved into working out of the executive suite, the city manager’s office in municipal terms, and took on the public information role. So I started talking for a living, and I haven’t stopped since. So it was great to be able to uh share with the community and what was going on, whether it was a disaster, whether it was something fun.

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So that really grew into another opportunity to work with a major grocery retailer. And I was the director of public affairs. And so I live in Texas and I had 72 stores in 40 counties in South Texas. So I really was able to hone my skills working in a variety of communities, the size of the community, the types of organizations and nonprofits and communities that they were. So it was great fun to do that. And then I started my own business. And as my own business, I’ve been able to uh really continue to see the growth.

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of my skills, but also I’ve gotten to work with some amazing people. So I’ve worked with major industries, I’ve worked with nonprofits, I’ve worked with science foundations, really helping them hone their messages and be really effective in what they do. You know, I started my own business in 2004. And so I’m coming up, it’s just kind of amazing to think that, you know, in February, it will have been 20 years. So I’ve been doing this sort of as an independent for 20 years now. And it’s, uh you know,

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The three dimensional development is the official name of my company and it reflects the windshield of time I had working for the grocery retailer because I could only drive from one place to the other. And um it’s the three dimensions. We know what we know, we know what we don’t know, but we don’t know what we don’t know. And that couldn’t be more true when you’re thinking about presentations. I just have enjoyed, although it’s been very long, it definitely describes kind of how I look at things.

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You know, really what I want to do is I want to, I just have this passion. want to equip people with the tools so that they can reach their full potential. And that includes, you know, as it relates to their confidence, it relates to their skills to interact with other people and tell their stories. So in the end, that’s really my big goal is to coach people who they can be more confident in how they present it. They can use their knowledge to influence and do things that will improve their lives. That’s really impressive. Your diverse experience of, of, um,

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you everything that you’ve done throughout your career, I’m sure that’s really helped you, you know, just form your, where you’re at today in many ways I could only imagine. You know, one of the things I did as a Director of Public Affairs is I spoke to a lot of government agencies and elected officials, and you really get very precise about how you want to communicate when you’re dealing in that realm. then through time, I actually served on a city council here in the community that I…

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live in. And so I had to see it from the other side and how you craft that message going back the other way, because people will interpret it maybe a little differently than what you expected. absolutely. And so what changes do you see happening in the L &D space right now? You know, it’s interesting, Sarah, because you can learn anything you want to learn. mean, let’s just go to HRDQ, right? I mean, there’s so much information out there today. And the question is, will we do it?

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And there are the hardcore fanatics, there’s some folks, there’s these digital natives who’ve just grown up on digital platforms, but there’s still a wide range of individuals who know that it’s there, but just don’t have the discipline or the just really available commitment to spend that kind of time. So it comes down to employers in a certain sense. And that same demographic and others are looking to their employers for professional development.

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And so as we look at what’s ahead for the space, it’s that employers have to commit and continue to invest in professional development for their teams. Because we’ve heard about what’s happened post-COVID, the quiet quitting, all the people don’t want to work in the same hours that they did before. So employers will be looking for something to set themselves apart. And I see that this type of professional development, giving access to new skills and keeping their workforce engaged is really powerful.

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You know, one of the things that I like to talk about are the power skills. That’s really where I excel. And folks kind of want to call those the soft skills, but not anymore. I mean, we live in a world now that those are the skills, the conflict management, the communication, the decision-making, the analytical tools, the creativity. You’re not going to get those on artificial intelligence, you know? You’re going to have to still be able to deliver those person to person.

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Your perspective on this is so interesting. And how do you see the emphasis on power skills or soft skills evolving with AI and all of the technology enhancements that we see happening? I don’t know if you’ve heard this as well, but just over the course of the last probably two to three weeks, I’ve heard four or five different people in a variety of spaces saying, you know, when you just put it into the artificial intelligence and pick your one,

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it comes out sounding different. It doesn’t sound like a person. And there’s still going to need to be a person. It’s fantastic. I’m not going to say I don’t use it. It’s really interesting to prepare something, drop it in and see how it changes what I say. But more importantly, if I drop something in, I can’t just take what it says. And so for us to be able to bridge that human component back into what artificial intelligence can do for us,

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and let it do what it does well. But people to people, mean, as a species, how humans developed, we relied on each other and the interactions that we have with each other. And if we take that away and we eliminate it, there’s going to be this disconnect, I think, between how people are going to be able to interact and really achieve their best. Absolutely. And especially in this day and age where everything really can be done behind a computer screen or you talk about social media or whatever that may be, where there’s just the

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You know, you can, people are so much more confident to say certain things if, if with their thumbs than they are. is it? Is that, I mean, and we’ve become, in some ways we’ve become emboldened, but in some ways we’ve just become less kind. Yeah. And we’re able to say, you know, in a face-to-face conversation, when you’re in front of someone, even as, as a video screen, you know, as a webinar, you’re going to be a little bit more cautious. But when you’re,

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back behind a social media platform and you’re just wanting to put it out there, there is no governor that kind of keeps you in check. And so the way that we’re communicating now is a much less two-way dynamic and more of a diatribe and more of a more rigid form, I think, of how we’re trying to get our message out. Absolutely. And what exciting things are you up to next? Well,

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I just finished another opportunity today talking about presentation and how it impacts our business and our world and what we’re going to be able to do. And so as I look out to what’s going to be happening in 2024, I’m going to be looking at taking my top speaker skills and packaging them up so that we can get them back out into uh the world of training and professional development. You know, one of my favorites is the communicators Academy, which is

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a program that I developed, actually attended several years ago what was billed as the world’s greatest speaker training. And after we were there, I kind sat through it and actually got on stage and I I spoke to 800 people and they got on their feet. But on the flight home, I thought it really wasn’t the world’s greatest. It was good, but it didn’t really connect. So it didn’t teach that connection piece of it. And I began to think about what is the structure to that. So that’s been kind of in my toolkit for a while. And I see now,

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Based on some of the things we’ve already talked about, they’re really dusting that up and putting it back together and understanding some of the same things that are crucial for us just to interact as human beings are very, very learnable skills that you can put together for communication. I’m trying to look at micro learning as well. I think you guys have looked at that too at HRDQ, saying, hey, trying to do a four hour presentation with someone that’s maybe a little bit more difficult.

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If you can get it down to an hour, even half an hour, uh maybe even 10 minute segments where you’re dropping in exactly what they need to know. I think because of our busy lives and because we were competing so much now for airtime and space and there’s so much content, if I want someone to tap in, it’s going to have to be in a way that they can really better access it quickly and put it right to work. So I’m looking at how we can take these tools that we’ve worked on over time and really redeploy them back.

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out into the space because we these great tools now, right? That’s the other thing. Well, on the one hand, we talk about, oh, all these things are changing. Now look on the other hand, oh, wow, all these things are changing. So it opens up avenues and opportunity. Wow, that sounds like you have some really impressive updates and the communicators Academy revamp with this micro learning program sounds really exciting. I’m hoping, I’m hoping it’s going to land, you know.

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One of the things I talk about at communicators Academy is you have to land your message, right? It’s great to put your message out there, but if it doesn’t hit your audience, it’s going to be not exactly as effective as you might have hoped. And so we recently did this webinar together on presentation intelligence, the key to speaking confidently. Can you share what the key takeaways were for registrants at this event? Well, I think one of the things is one of the most fun things I like to talk about when we talk about presentation and it’s that we’re not 10.

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When we think about what’s happening uh in our brains as we grow, we hit a certain area about 10 years of age where we sort of learn some things that have become these scripts that we replay. As I describe it, we go back to a kindergarten classroom and you see these kindergartners and the teacher asks the question and it’s not just that they raise their hand, their whole physicality goes into it. Both hands go up, they’re shaking, they’re on their feet. Hey, ask me, ask me, ask me. By the time you get to the first grade, you get a little bit more.

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refined, I would say. Maybe the hand goes up. Maybe you still have some of that enthusiasm. But as you progress through second, third, fourth, up to fifth grade, the likelihood that you are going to uh energetically raise your hand to be noticed goes down. And I believe that occurs because we are in a situation that we got scared, we got laughed at. Somehow we were diminished in some way for putting ourselves out.

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And our brain is very adapted trying to protect us. And so it started a message, mapped a message in our brain that said, hey, it’s not safe out there. Don’t do that. Here’s your comfort zone. Stay here. And as we grow and become adults, that same message continues to resonate. And so rather than being able to live the life as an adult, we are actually living life as our 10 year old. So I think that helps people to understand that they’re not alone, that they’re natural extroverts. There’s natural folks who

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maybe grew through that and high school wasn’t quite as dramatic for them. But for a lot of us, it just wasn’t the place where we felt like we wanted to be our true selves or to put ourselves out there in a way that people would notice. you know, the framework for presentation intelligence provided sort of a way to look at this. What it provides for

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us is to say, what’s internal to me? What do I know? And then there’s some external things that when you are making a presentation, what people can see out of what you are, what you’re giving them. And, you know, there are six factors that come together in the model that I use or have developed that talks about our perception, our personality, and our persistence, which are the things that we know about and that we drive. And then the other three are presence, physicality,

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and preparedness. And when we’re out with others, they can clearly see, they can know by the way that they see us physically behave, whether or not we’ve been prepared or ready to do that. So those six factors come together and they’re learnable. They’re traits that we can learn. We can know about ourselves. We can learn how to

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manage and self-manage what we do in a way that lets us be more effective as we’re communicating, and then we can be ready. When our stage comes, it becomes about being prepared and where we stand and how we behave. uh That’s really where we can stand and have a good time and enjoy being out in front of people instead of being the cowering little 10-year-old back in the corner.

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What are the two biggest challenges to overcome in building speaking confidence? I think it’s about mindset, number one. ah Our mindset is that we are not allowed to grow. We have a fixed mindset. This is me. I can’t do it. It’s never going to happen. It’s going to always be this way. And when we are stuck in that mindset, it’s virtually impossible to grind forward to be able to grow.

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But when you have a growth mindset, when you believe that we’re not done, that there’s always an opportunity, and then you have sort of your own persistence to be able to reach out and actually do the practice, because you have to do the work. At the end of the day, there’s no way to get better at public speaking without taking the risk and actually speaking publicly. oh

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It’s a, know, that being able to speak publicly and confidently means that you’re going to get up a time or two and not be confident and maybe not walk away. I tell a story. One of my careers was working as chief of staff to the mayor in the town where I live. And she was fierce and I learned quite a bit from working with her. And every time she would leave and come back from giving a speech, I would say, Hey mayor, how’d it go? And she go, Oh,

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It was about a four. And then the next time she would come back and she would say, Hey, Mayor, how’s it go? She said, well, it’s a 10. And I really learned something about that every time she wasn’t concerned and she wasn’t angry. She just knew she wasn’t nailing it every single time, but she was conscious enough to be aware of how effective she was presenting in her mind. And she wasn’t afraid to confront it. And that taught me a lot about how we need to speak.

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And just be honest about it. Was it my best? Maybe not. Maybe it was an eight and a half. Maybe it was a four. I’m not sure. But just be honest about it because that’s how we get better. We don’t get better from always, oh, you’re a 10, you’re a 10, you’re a 10. Because then we just think we’re a 10. But if we get a five every once in a while or less, we then go back. We want to go investigate and be like that forensic scientist that says, why didn’t I nail that? Did I not have enough sleep? Was I not prepared?

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I did that 10 year old show up again and say, I’m back. So those are the kinds of things we can learn to really reinforce our skills at presenting. And then you layer on all of the ways that you develop your presentation, right? The storytelling, what tools do you use in that genre? How do you connect with people in that way? Having like self awareness, it seems. Oh, my goodness. If we could just check in with ourselves and give ourselves a little grace. One of the things that I have found is that we have this inner critic in our head and what that inner critic

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tends to say to most of us are things we would never even say to even our worst enemy, much less our best friends or ourselves. And so I always invite when you hear that inner critic coming out to ask, what evidence do you have of that? You know, when it starts in your head and it starts telling you those things, what evidence do you have, self, that those things are true? Because your brain will just lie to you. It will just tell you things that it may have the best intent. It may have this intent to protect you.

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But you need to thank your brain kindly and go do the things that are really going to help you make more money and be more successful in your career. And public speaking is a big key to that. so presence is part of this framework. Can you explain what presence is and why it is so important? Well, I love to talk about presence. In fact, I was having a conversation just last week with someone who was talking about an executive that did not have executive presence.

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And so when you think about what that is, underpinning that presence is confidence. You are confident that you have put your skills together, that you have put on your uniform. I had an opportunity to train with a former football player and he transitioned out of that to become a real powerful coach around storytelling. But he would talk about when it was time to get ready for the game. He would…

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that he shared, you because I’ve never been in a football locker room, clearly. But he talked about, how do you prepare? How do you wrap your hands? How do you wrap your feet? How do you put on your tights? How do you put on your pads, your jersey, you know, your cleats? All the things are part of what get you ready to go into battle. And we do that when I am presenting, whether it’s virtual or in person. What I learned from that is I am very, very deliberate about how I get ready to go. When I stand up and start speaking,

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I don’t wanna have to spend those first seven seconds, which is about all you get to make an impression, trying to convince people that I have the standing to be there making that presentation. So presence begins before you ever get to where you are presenting. And it means that you’ve thought about your audience, you’ve thought about yourself, you recognize that how you show up is going to send a message. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, talks about a study that they did.

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trying to determine how long it takes us to decide and make decision about someone. And his book was two seconds. You could watch a two second clip of an instructor and make a decision about how effective that instructor was gonna be over the course of the semester. So when you’re thinking about presence, you want to have all things ready. You want your appearance to be ready. You want your mindset to be ready. You want your material to be ready. You want to arrive early.

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You want to make sure that how you show up is that you’re not coming in all disheveled and worried about the timing. You want to be the first one there. And when you can do that, I also share before you go on stage, it’s one of my superhero moves. ah It’s called a superhero pose. You may have heard of it. If you’ve ever seen Superwoman or Superman, the hands go on the hip, the shoulders go back, the heads go up, the feet get planted and

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When you do that and hold it for two minutes, Amy Cuddy has said, that’s gonna remap your brain. One of the things that when you do that stand, it actually makes you bigger. You know, put your hands on your hip and shoulders. So it tells the world I’m a force to be reckoned with. And that’s presence. When I walk out and not in a confrontational way, but in the way that says, I’m here, I know what I have to share with you is gonna be important. And we’re both gonna have an enjoyable experience while we’re here.

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That’s really how you get to presence. It doesn’t look like one thing. It doesn’t look like one person. Some might say it looks like the infamous Ted Talks, which they’re a great learning tool, but I don’t know that people really understand how much time you have to commit to effectively deliver a Ted Talk within the framework that they expect. Most mere mortals really don’t have that kind of time. So presence is a factor that you bring to the table by what you start with.

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and how you communicate to yourself and how you prepare yourself to be on that stage, however you define it. The preparedness to show up with confidence. That’s a very good way to say it. Because you can’t just… I I can certainly show up confident and then they’re going to ask me something that I don’t know anything about that I should have known. And guess what? That confidence is gone. Yeah. And so being prepared and ready, that’s really the underpinning of all of it. And then having the mindset that says, what I have,

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is such value. I’m gonna give value to the people that are there. It’s not, this isn’t my show, this is their show because they’re taking the time to come and take part of what I have to share. And so I think that’s the mindset for presence as well. And so is there a right way to present? Well, let’s see, if we could all answer that question, No, there’s not a right way to present because then we become homogenized, right?

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I’ll tell you, when I present on a virtual platform, I always try to stand up in my presentations. If you look at how we’ve taken the virtual meetings, there is a standard, I’m sitting in a chair, I’m, you know, anchored, and all my energy is draining to the floor, right? It’s just too close. So when I present…

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And even when I’m sometimes just a participant, I want to stand and I want to be in a position to generate energy because the energy is what we generate in our presentations from ourselves. Now, I’ll go steal energy from an audience. I’ll go, you know, stare into someone’s eyes or even on the platform, imagine who’s on the other side. But we have to be able to generate that right energy. And the energy that I have is different. Someone who may be much more calm or much more

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forthright and straightforward, they can still give an outstanding presentation because it has to be authentic to who you are. We have a real skill now of being able to see when people are not being authentic. It comes out pretty clear. And so you don’t want to try to be someone not yourself, but you want to find someone like yourself. I watch people give presentations all the time. I want to learn how to do that.

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There’s a uh book by Daniel Coyle that’s, you know, uh has to do with excellence and finding all the talent hog beds. And his one of his great tips for achieving that is to steal without apology. So you want to watch people and what are they doing? What can I adapt my speaking style naturally to bring some of that in? And that’s really what helps us enhance that and improves how we can be better at it. And what role does perception have in presenting?

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Perception is such a real key because we think about perception. I come from a time when it used to sound like this, hey man, perception’s reality. And might have been a little chemical involved in it. But it turns out that perception is reality. And the reality that it is, is my reality. So, you know, we think there will be hundreds and hundreds of people that

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we’ll be listening in on this podcast and not everyone’s going to take the same thing away from what we talk about, right? So it’s based on what we believe and what we’ve experienced and how we framed ourselves with our values and what we let in. And that’s a good thing because if we had to stop every single minute of every single day and analyze every single thing that we were coming across, it’d be very difficult, right, wrong, good, bad.

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if we had to make those value judgments every day. So we’ve created these frameworks that help us process the world. The bad news is once those frameworks have been formed, sometimes we do not go back and check in on them. And so they just continue to perpetuate themselves. So the good news is from a perception standpoint, you can adjust your perception. You can take in new information. You can then understand that what

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might have been your perception as a 10-year-old, does not have to continue to be your perception now. Once you’ve challenged it a little bit, brought in some new information and analyzed that the world today can be addressed and managed in a much more productive way. And so you talk a lot about preparedness and readiness for a presentation. How much time should one practice? Well, how much time do you need to practice to be really, really good?

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you have to practice your material because number one, if it’s not your material, sometimes when you’re making a presentation, maybe you’re presenting something from your corporate world or that’s to teach someone. And so that may not be something that would be necessarily your material. And so the key becomes in any presentation, you have to make it your material. You have to make it what you want it to be from your heart and your words. When you’re trying to use someone else’s words,

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it’s very difficult to be ah provocative or interesting or the things that you want to be because they’re not coming from you. So when you think about being able to prepare, it means that if you have material that is yours, you find the best. The other challenge with your material is it’s all wonderful, right? So sometimes you want to tell everybody everything and you’re always time bound. And so when you’re prepared, you know how much time you’ll have for the discussion.

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you’ll understand what your outcomes are and what your purpose is for making this presentation, and you will be ready to do that. But if you don’t prepare for that, you will be running up against a hard deadline, and you’ll only be halfway through. And so that means you actually have to say the words. It’s very interesting when we read, we activate a different part of our brain. When we begin to speak out loud, the pathways that go to make those words aren’t the same. And so if you haven’t really

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practice if you haven’t used uh the tools that we have uh doing practicing on a virtual reality platform and recording yourself and then going back and watching that to see what you look like or just recording on your phone. We have such amazing tools now to be able to do that. So that’s the kind of uh practice that you need to do. And you actually need to do that by recording it and by watching it and maybe having somebody else watch it because we are also not the best judges.

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of our performance because, my goodness, do you hear how I sound? Oh, look, my face isn’t equal. know, all the things that we try to convince ourselves, our reasons not to go out and share our greatness. Yeah, I don’t think that there’s one person that likes to hear the sound of their own voice. Like, is that what I really sound like? Isn’t that interesting? Yeah, we do that, don’t we? And then we get very judgmental about it. Yeah.

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What I say to people would be, well, that’s very interesting because how old are you and how many people have you sent running away in the opposite direction? You know, this just, again, that’s perception that we tell ourselves that that’s not, I’m not up to the challenge. So that 10 year old, you just gave that 10 year old a big old chunk of peppermint candy right there. like, oh yeah, there I go again. And Debbie, before we sign off today, where can listeners go to learn more about your work and connect with you?

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Well, I invite them to join me at 3ddresults.com. That’s the number 3, ddresults.com. So they can learn a little bit more at my website. And you can visit me on LinkedIn and you can look for Debbie, Lindsey-Opel. And I’m excited to connect with you. I love to talk with folks about their ideas and their thoughts and their fears. I really like to hear what is the number one challenge that you have when you get out in front of someone.

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And that’s how we all begin to learn and grow and continue to build our skills. Well, thank you, Debbie, for your time today. Well, thank you. I want to leave with this one comment. John F. Kennedy said, there’s only one reason to give a speech, and that’s to change the world. And if you are willing to step up and stand out and speak up, you will change the world because your knowledge and your gifts and your leadership are what we need for the future. Well, that’s just a great way to close out our conversation today.

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