Presenting Failures - Chapter 1 - Front Of The Room Behaviors

Welcome to Manager Tools. This is Sarah. And I'm Mark. Today's podcast, presenting failures chapter one, front of room behaviors part one of one. As always, our content is handcrafted by humans. And we're now certified by proudly human. The questions this cast answers are, what are some common presentation mistakes? How effective are most managers when they're presenting? Not. And how can I improve my presenting skills? If you want answers to these questions and more, keep listening. Your peers at this level aren't in your building, and most of them are figuring it out alone just like you are. The M Conference connects senior professionals and executives from across industries for two days of focused development, honest discussion, and the kind of relationships that change careers. M Conference 2026 will be in Los Angeles on October 6th and 7th. Get registered now at manager-tools. com/mconference. So, Mark, too many managers, and frankly, you'd think it'd get better, but it doesn't, the majority of executives as well, — exactly. are terrible at presenting. But, folks, getting good at presenting is like getting good at managing. And what that means over here at Manager Tools is, since everyone else is so terrible, all you have to do to be seen as excellent is not be terrible. And part of the problem really in this respect is most of us tell ourselves that we're good at it, and the reason we can get away with continuing to do that is because no one ever tells us that we're horrible. Yeah, the average manager is, I mean, I see manager presentations all the time, they're terrible. They make every mistake that a person can make. The people in the audience, uh they just want information and they may not be that person's boss or they're not going to school them on it. And they tell themselves they're good at it because no one ever tells them they're horrible and nobody else thinks they're horrible. They think this is just the state of presenting. But think about that for a second. When you have to sit through presentations, do you find the presenters sharp, smooth, eloquent, knowledgeable? No, you don't. And you don't tell anyone they were boring and selfish and had too many slides. I hate to say it, but most of us are contributing part of the system that makes everyone terrible and we don't recognize it and we should do something about it and that means getting better ourselves and encouraging other people to get better as well. Absolutely. All right, our outline for today. First, you are the presentation. Face the audience. Do not read your slides and learn how to use a remote or a laser. Yeah. So, I'll start with you are the presentation. We're going to start this entire series of presenting failures cast with this basic reminder. We're going to say it over and over again. You are the presentation. Not the ideas, not your slides, not your charts and everybody spends all their time on their slides and not on their own behaviors. Not your charts, not your graphs, not your fonts, not your animations, not your colors, not your speaker notes, you, physically you and your behaviors. Mhm. And what you means, folks, is three things. Your knowledge, your behaviors, and your relationships. Put more scientifically, I guess you could say, what you know, what you do, and who trusts you. And we're going to share more details on how to win around those three components of successful presenting in our future guidance. Again, this is chapter one of a multi-chapter series. But today's guidance isn't directly about seeking success as a presenter. It's more about avoiding failure. We'd love to not have to do it, but everyone is failing so often and so badly around us all the time that we've decided to ring failure's neck before we put a metal around the neck of success. So, today is all about let's just not do these things ever again. Yeah, so we start with this reminder because we don't want you to think that the elimination of failure modes is the same thing as success. We've said that two decades long, avoiding failure is not the same thing as seeking success. And in fact, that's how most managers conduct their managerial behaviors, too. They're just trying to avoid failure. They're spinning plates. They're trying to do everything as opposed to focusing on the things that are really important. But Dark Mark, who we recently announced is going to make a comeback, would say that since virtually every manager is so terrible at presenting, and I we mean it, terrible. We mean it with a good heart, folks, but terrible. All you have to do is not be terrible to look pretty darn good.

Mhm. — [clears throat] — And now, we've got a bonus for you, which we will be repeating in each and every cast of this series. If you really want to be a good presenter, all you have to do is rehearse. Stand up, know your material, and say it out loud a few times before you actually deliver it. That's I mean, the silver bullet, the slowest moving bullet on the planet, potentially, but that is the way is you actually practice it a few times before you get in front of your audience and say it for what is for many people the first time ever. We'll have an entire chapter on rehearsing, but I can tell you right now one of the part one of the first parts of that that podcast about rehearsing will be this. I know you think you don't have enough time, but you do. You're spending all that time on creating your slides and making them pretty and you don't have to. Uh you don't have to have animation. uh all the stuff that people do. You don't have to have as many slides as you do. And now with Claude, you can just outsource that. Yeah, you can shorten the amount of time you spend on that and spend the time where it really matters on rehearsing. Yes. Now, before we go on, Mark, I feel like for some of the newer community members, we should give them a quick review on what Dark Mark is. Oh, sure. So, uh we've been doing this now for 21 years. Crazy. And uh still incredibly popular and still hundreds of thousands of listeners all over the world. And Dark Mark occurred because periodically when we're doing a podcast, I would go on a tangent, some would say a rant, about things that bugged me in the world of management or professionalism or leadership or corporations or, you know, organizational structure systems or whatever. And I would be very blunt. And the vast majority of people who are going to coach or train you or provide you guidance are not as knowledgeable as they should be uh because they haven't been doing it very long, but they're also uh loath to correct anything or be totally honest about something. And so, periodically I would go on these three or four minute I call them a tangent, some people call them rants. And I actually apologized many times I did it. So, I'm sorry, but I have to address this cuz it's the elephant in the room. We're talking about one thing, but a tangential area was important and I say, "Gosh, you guys, you have to learn this. You have to do know it. You can't not. " So on and so forth. And somebody I maybe it was Mark or maybe it was Mike, I don't know, said, "Ooh, you sound like Dark Mark. " Which of course has vague connections to Harry Potter and Voldemort and so on. But at one point I said I apologize for it, I think, in Things I Think I Think, 10, 15 years ago, and said, "Yeah, I really need to stop doing that. " And people roared and said, "No, no, we love that. — He's our favorite guy. Who's being candid, and so on. So, that's what Dark Mark is, and he he's been dormant for a long time now, but I mentioned it to a few people in the field over the last 6 months, and they all said, "Yes, please bring that back. Please be candid with us. Please tell us stuff that may not be in the show notes, but would be helpful to us in applying the knowledge that you're sharing that particular week. " And so, we just announced last week in Things We Think that um We're bringing it back. — Dark Mark will be returning with his own series. Interestingly, somebody asked me, "Is there enough? " And I said, "Oh, yeah. " And I read like 10 podcast titles of Dark Mark. But, I also want to share one other thing. Somebody wrote to me recently and said, "Hey, I'm excited about Dark Mark coming back. I really like it when you give us more information about something that we don't understand or wouldn't be exposed to that we should know about that affects our business. And I'm wondering how much Dark Mark guidance will actually help, and whether or not I need to be careful how to use it with. " Well, what I would say is that Dark Mark generally is not guidance. It's commentary about the systems and processes and people and events that occur in our careers and in our professional lives that are difficult or challenging or just plain wrong or idiotic or unethical or frankly evil or selfish. Usually, it's selfish. Galactically stupid. Galactically stupid would be a good way to put it. That's a quote from A Few Good Men. I think it was Tom Cruise that actually said [snorts] it. Yeah, so Dark Mark won't necessarily be uh we wouldn't be putting out guidance. That said, there will always be guidance in but the Dark Mark topics may not be specific guidance inherently. — Yeah, exactly. All right, so. Jumping into our first piece then of guidance beyond the you're the presentation, which is going to be a standing item in these casts, face the audience. All three of the failure modes in this chapter revolve around your physical presence while you're presenting. And in that way, they're all related. And you'll hear the connection in the guidance. We're not starting with these three recommendations because they're more

important than the other things relatively, rather because they seem to be most popular, most prominent. All the bad way. In a bad way. Exactly. And everyone stinks at these behaviors everywhere all of the time. So, I mean, just low-hanging fruit, if you want to call it. These are some of the the biggies. — Yeah, if you change these three things though, because they're so popular, you will immediately make a difference. The audience who have has seen you before, if you've been doing these things, and I would be willing to bet on a bucks that you do, that in fact, the audience will immediately recognize that you have improved your game. And once you do that, and you get some positive feedback, somebody says something like, "Hey, you were really good this week. You're really good. That was really good. " They won't really know why, but it's because of these three things. So, remember now, we're talking about facing the audience. You are the presentation, okay? The presentation is being given to the audience. The audience, your audience, is your evaluator. There can be no other reasonable direction of focus for a presenter than the audience. Unfortunately, what we see is, by our physical movement, by our body language, by our physical presence, we send a different message to the audience. — Yeah. That's exactly it. So, folks, all that said, you must face the audience 99% of the time you're presenting, your shoulders must be squared to your audience. So, how can you measure your shoulders being squared? How do you know what that even means? It's easy, folks. When you're standing up straight, there's a straight line between your shoulders connecting your shoulders. Make an invisible line perpendicular to your shoulder line coming straight out of your chest starting at your breastbone toward the front. Yeah. Notice, folks, we're talking about your shoulders, not your face or your head. Your head can turn on top of your shoulders. I think you've probably learned that by now. You can look in a different direction than your body faces. But it's your body that faces, not your face. Okay? The audience, without even looking for this, knows when you are not facing them, when you have turned away from them. This is counterintuitive, but it's true. The audience recognizes that you're focused on them. And frankly, the way most audiences are set up, if the perpendicular line from your emanating from your breastbone out from your shoulders is pointed at the audience, even if you turn your head, unless you turn it in a way that wrenches your neck, you will still be looking at the audience. But the audience is tuned at a more subtle level to feel your shoulders facing them. Okay. So, now we've got our facing line emanating again from our breastbone at a right angle to our shoulder line. When we face with our body one way, the facing line moves with us. And now it's simple. Your facing line virtually never points away from your audience. You never turn so far right that your facing line is to the right of your audience. You never turn so far left that your facing line is to the left of the audience. And we say virtually, folks, because there are going to be moments where you're walking from one side of the presentation area to the other. And we're really not recommending you do some sort of weird shuffle so that you can get from one side to the other. — Right. With the eyes still pointing at the audience. — Exactly. You could be writing, for example, on like a whiteboard or on an easel stand. We're not recommending you try and do that with like one of your hands over your shoulder so that you can stay facing forward because that's weird. And we said 99% of the time facing your audience. So there are going to be those moments where you aren't within this facing front space, but that's kind of what we mean. Yeah. A classic example of how poorly presentation skills are understood by the average professional is the number of TED Talk presenters. And believe me, folks, I know you're going to tell me TED Talk presenters are the cream of the cream. They're not, okay? Mostly they're egotistical. They want to get in front of an audience. They want to help their personal brand. There are exceptions, of course, but the vast majority of them are terrible speakers. And they have a habit of pacing back and forth across the stage as they speak. They seem to be saying, "Hey, you little folks down there. Let me let you inside my exalted elevated world that I live in as I

mentally pace through my random thoughts in front of you because I didn't respect you enough to think about you and rehearse as part of that respect that I would be showing you here today. " Imagine somebody talking to you in a conversation and pacing back in front of you like you're Sherlock Holmes or somebody discovering E = mc squared or the gravity or calculus or something, you know, holding a pair of glasses and twirling them and just sort of musing for the audience. It's not your job as a professional and they shouldn't be doing that either. It's arrogant. It's selfish. When TED Talk people don't face their audience, that's all the tell you need to know that they don't get it. Folks, I'm going to say it again. It's never about you. Okay, as far as you are concerned, you are the presentation, but the ultimately the presentation's value is determined by the audience. It's never about you, it's always about the audience, so you must face them. Absolutely. So, folks, can you face the left side of the audience with your facing line and turn your head to the right side of the audience? I mean, it's Sure. — Yeah, of course you can. Yes, your neck turns. You're absolutely right. You can turn your head as much as you want. But, it's not your sight line that matters to the audience. Again, it's your facing That should be changeable right now. Now, the first time you do it, you're going to feel awkward, okay? Because of these next two things we're going to talk about. And you'll realize the tyranny of 99% when you start hearing about these next two, which causes everyone to break the first rule. So, our second bit of guidance is whatever you do, please, — [snorts] — dear Lord in heaven, do not read your slides, okay? Now, we're hopeful that you remember we said a minute ago that all three of these failure modes are related to your physical presence. We also hope it's obvious that you can't be facing your audience if you're reading your slides. Now, by that I mean, the slides that are being projected to the audience, okay? We I think we'll talk about confidence monitors here in a minute. — Mhm. We will. It marks you as a rank amateur. Unprepared, that's the [clears throat] big problem. Unprepared, that you don't know your content well enough to not read the slides. It makes you look nervous, and there are too many other pejoratives I won't include. I just won't include them. Mhm. [clears throat] Absolutely. Folks, again, your facing line is the unconscious message that your audience is receiving about what you think is important, about what you prioritize. — Yes. So, face your slides, and you're basically just saying to your audience that I care more about myself and my content than I really care about you. Your audience is the most important part of this presentation. Communication is what the listener does. Face your audience. You care about them. They're the most important. Turning around and reading Very bad. — Yeah, very bad. And I got to tell you, folks, holy moly, is reading slides popular. It's the go-to, quote-unquote, not facing your audience move of 90% of the presenters that I see these days. If an alien came down to the average corporate meeting and saw slides being presented, they would assume that meeting's nicknames were story hour because of all the reading going on. Mhm. But, folks, since we already said you shouldn't be facing your slides, since you're supposed to face your audience, why do we even need to say don't read your slides? I mean, because it does seem obvious, but, folks, the reason we have to say it is because everyone does it. Everyone. And it's wrong. And this series of guidance is all about failures. And even if you don't think you do it, you do it. I assure you do it a lot more than you realize you do it. And look, there's actually another reason to mention reading your slides. Uh and there are actually three of them. Three destructive outcomes between you and your audience when you read your slides. The first one is your audience, when you read, knows you don't know your content well enough to earn their attention. If you had considered the cost of their hourly rates times the number of people you're presenting to, plenty of our meetings would get very expensive very quickly. If [snorts] you did respect the investment happening, and it is an investment in every meeting. In fact, I've mentioned a few times over the last two decades that there used to be, and I think there still are, but they're not as popular as when they first came out, meeting timers. And what you would do is the meeting timer was hooked into the salary situation of the

company, you could load salaries in there, and then it would tick off with money every minute that went by in the meeting. And people are gassed. They're like, "Oh, we've got to shorten these meetings. Oh, we got to do this. " Yeah, it's horrible. It's expensive. And people hate meetings partially because they don't have agendas, they start late, they finish late, and people don't appreciate the waste that's going on. So, if you did respect the investment, you would know your material so well through rehearsals, that's the only way you're going to get there, you would never dream of reading it to the audience. — Mhm. And folks, another one of the destructive outcomes is that when you turn around and you read your slides, your audience thinks you care more about the material than them. And folks, there are a lot of speakers that I've seen that are so enamored by the words that they want to say, and how they want to say them, that they don't want to get it wrong, so they're looking directly at the slides to get it, but that's giving your audience the exact wrong impression. And why wouldn't they have that impression? I mean, you've turned your back on them and now you're talking to your slides as if the only two people in the room are you and your slides. — How romantic. That sounds dark. That's a dark mark moment right there. And look guys, the other thing is if you're looking at your slides, so is the audience cuz they're not looking at you cuz now you've turned your back on them. Shame, shame. Your audience can read and you don't need to insult them by reading to them. If you're going to read your slides, just don't read and tell them, "Go ahead and read my slide. " Yeah. Now folks, I talked a little bit about rehearsing earlier, mentioning that it is the world's slowest silver bullet. And again, that's why people end up having to read their slides, right? They've decided that they needed to save time and they've not rehearsed, but reading your slides is an embarrassing rookie error. And folks, just because everybody else does it, it doesn't mean that you're doing it just makes you an average presenter. It makes you equally terrible. So, I mean, I guess if you want to consider yourself equally terrible, that's fine. I wouldn't if I were you, but yeah, don't think you're average. Exactly. How do we avoid reading, folks? We write things on our slides that we don't intend to say verbatim. What you're doing when you prepare your slides because you know you're going to read them is you're writing things that you're going to say verbatim and you don't need to do that. What we do is we rehearse the words we're going to use to characterize or highlight or illuminate or elaborate on the points our slide is making. Okay? We don't write on the slides the things we intend to say. Okay? We have bullets there, but then we talk about we characterize it, we highlight it, we illuminate it, and so on. Through rehearsal, we make our slides a memory device for our audience. We're not actually going to say many of the words on our slides, but our slides will be something that they'll help them remember. Mhm. And we did refer to the use of confidence monitors, which we think are a great tool, folks. If your organization, your presentation location, wherever that may be, doesn't come with a confidence monitor, we would recommend you create your own, essentially, by setting up your laptop to mirror the presentation screen, and thus have what amounts to a small confidence monitor for yourself that you can glance down at occasionally. That way, you'll have your slides in front of you, and you're never going to have to turn around to read them, and therefore avoid admitting that you don't know what's in your presentation. We admit that logistics and physical space do make confidence monitors a bit of a challenge at times. Never mind, I mean, if it's a an event location cost, I would say also comes into play when it comes to confidence monitors, but again, we hardly recommend the use of confidence monitors when and if you can use them, because they can absolutely help make you a better presenter. Yeah. I'll go a step further here and say if we've got senior managers listening, and I'm sure we do, I just finished an effective senior manager conference, it was great. We had a great time. Uh but even if you're a manager, if you have your people presenting using slides, share this information with them. Share it with them, okay? And help them learn to speak to the audience by facing the audience, and make a confidence monitor available to them, so they can look down and quickly remember where they are in the rehearsed narrative that

they have that is supported by their slide. Okay? Make it easy for them. If you can't, okay, fine, but allow them to have a printed version of their slides on the desk in front of them so they can look down at that. You might even help them prop it up a little bit so they can see it if they're standing next to the end of the conference room table or whatever. And you know, when it comes to confidence monitors, we've been in many organizations where confidence monitors were used for bigger meetings and the history of all the presenters reading their slides with the backs to the audience is still true for 80% of them. Yeah. You're absolutely right. — Because and that's not because the confidence monitor doesn't work, it's we have this ingrained behavior that I'm supposed to turn around and read my slides to the audience as if I'm a part of the audience and I'm the teacher reading along. Again, story hour to the alien. Mhm. And folks, just a little footnote here before we move to our next point and something that we're going to get around to explaining at a much deeper level in the future, but a start for today. When you write your slides, you're using your writing brain. But when you talk, you're using your speaking brain. Great presenters speak to the audience about the slides because they know their slides were written and not said and were therefore never meant to be said to [snorts] begin with. I mean, even if you read word for word every single word on the slide, it doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound good as a presentation because it's a different kind of forum for your words that doesn't sound like I was meant to say these things. Now, you might notice folks that we're presenting to you now and if we're not using slides, obviously. But one of the things you'll notice if you're a licensee and if you're not a licensee, we encourage you to do so. Help us spread the word about good management. The prices are very reasonable and comes with a whole passel of digital tools and so on. But if you're a licensee, I don't know if you've noticed, but when you read the show notes, 99% of which I've written, they're written so they can be spoken. They're written in common everyday language. In fact, every time I get word to correct my slides, I use the editor feature, and I really like the editor feature. It trips up on every single contradiction. It says I should say they are and you are rather than they're and your, or it is rather than is. And I think it's because the editor believes this is a word document and it's long and it has multiple parts and it has an outline and so on, that it's formal writing. Uh and I haven't figured out how to turn off the formal writing yet. If By the way, if you figured it out, email me uh marketmanager@manager-tools. com help me with that. Because I'm writing so that it's easy to talk about it. And every great writer will tell you, write the way you talk. Okay? Now, not if you're a PhD person writing a dissertation. And speaking of which, didn't we just have somebody in our community get a PhD? Yeah, Todd Schofield. — It was Todd Schofield. — Congratulations, Todd. — Todd, congratulations. Todd just successfully defended his PhD at Upper Iowa University. I think it's on business. It's on uh a very particular part of business. Well, if the folks here are interested in what it's about, Todd is giving a presentation at the M conference on his dissertation topic. Oh my, I feel very dumb right now. We're going to have a PhD talking about uh that's great. And Todd is such a nice person. He's I'm not [clears throat] surprised he's willing to share it. Hey there, got a graduate in your life? The first job is exciting and harder than anyone warns you it'll be. First Job Fundamentals teaches new professionals how to build relationships, deliver results, and get noticed early. And it's included in any of our licenses. So, you can give it as a gift that actually matters. Find out more at manager-tools. com/licenses to buy a gift for the grad in your life. Okay, last item. Folks, you have got to learn how to use a remote. A presenting remote that allows you to forward advance and retrieve your slides and also how to use a laser pointer if in fact you have one. The average level of quality in usage of slide {slash} projector remotes is a three on a 10 scale. This is a dead easy thing to master, guys. And yet 90% of presenters fail in the first minute. The average level of quality in usage of a laser pointer is on a scale of one to 10, a one or a two. And a one would mean pointing it out the window and trying to distract a commercial pilot trying to land. That's how bad it is. — So, it's pretty bad. And folks, we can just start with the actual remote itself.

You've got to put your remote in your non-dominant hand. That way, your dominant hand is 100% free to make the normal gestures you would normally make when you're talking, which always favor your dominant hand. So, you don't want to tie your dominant hand up with something in it. It'll make your uh your presentation style look more rigid, look more uh formulaic than you want it to. — That's a good — more natural, like a person again talking to them. So, keep your remote in your non-dominant hand. — Yeah. Now, this gets a little dicey. You'll have to think this through, so bear with us because often the presentation remote, the remote for your slides, is the same as your laser. So, you'll have to keep that in mind, but look, folks, rehearse with your remote. — Uh-huh. In a future chapter, we'll talk about memorizing the first line you utter with each slide and the last line for each slide, so that when you say it, you know you're starting that slide and you know when you're done with the slide, so you can advance your slides. That means coordinating with your slide remote, as opposed to coordinating at turning the page on a written deck sitting at your desk. The If you're sitting at your desk and you're turning pages and slides at your desk, that's not rehearsing. You have to stand up. You have to use your presenting voice. You may have to do it at home. on the weekend. If you've got three presentations in a week, you may have to come in early one day and spend an hour in your office presenting. By the way, I heard a neat trick from somebody recently. I've never tried it before, so I can't hardly recommend it, but he swears by it. He comes into his office, he has a big monitor. He turns the monitor around so he can stand on the other side of his desk. He has his remote. He's got his PowerPoint or his uh Keynote presentation up there, and he presents to his monitor. Now, you might say, "Wait, Mark, but he's looking at his slides. " Yes, but he's using his monitor in his office as a confidence monitor, okay? He's getting used to the slides and what he's going to say in it. And as long as you can have a confidence monitor, or maybe even take the slides away and just put them uh take the confidence monitor away and put your slides on the table in front of you. And when you change the slides, turn the pages on your deck, that's fine. It would be so much better if you just kept your facing line pointed toward the audience, and you learned how to use a remote. So, when you're rehearsing, rehearse with your remote. — Yes. Yes, and folks, another good reason to rehearse with your remote is you're going to learn where the buttons are on your remote. And for the record, less buttons are better if you're out there today choosing or buying a remote. You don't need a remote that does the highlight feature, that moves the slides around, that does a spotlight something. I do there's so many fancy things that your remotes can do. And again, you are the presentation. Not your slides, let alone your fancy dorky remote that you've got. That is not the presentation. No one cares about your remote. It's a 1-second impression that you're leaving that is not nearly as important as your presentation. Right, which is you, of course. Uh years ago we had a fairly small one, a really neat little small one that would fit in your hand completely. I have a longer one now. They don't make it anymore. — talking about that Logitech one and it was kind of it was it was indented in the middle and it had like it was bulbous, it was like round at the top and around I know they stopped making that. I used it till it died several times. They won't repair it either. Yeah, they're trying to add more features and the first one didn't have any features cuz software wouldn't talk to something. It probably didn't have a big enough CPU in the slide. — Yeah, I would guess. But it was my favorite and still is. I like my Logitech one now, but it's not nearly as good as that one. — But what I will say of my current one, Mark, which is the same one you have, is it's slick. Uh slick is probably the wrong word. It's slippery. Like sometimes if my hands are dry and I turn, it could slide out of my hand. — right out of your hand. Whereas that other Logitech one was not grippy, that's the wrong word, but it was matte on the outside. Plastic matte. — Yeah. And also that bulbous part sat right in the cup of the palm of your hand. — It did. It would never fall out of your hand. It was always there. It was like it would just was glued to your hand in some magical way. So, folks at Logitech That will serve as our high-tech nostalgia moment for the moment. — I loved it. Okay, now when it comes to lasers, good lord help us, okay? If you were to have a laser that would leave a trail of where each manager points it, we would all be living in a Jackson Pollock painting or one of those disco laser light shows with mirror balls or a laser system that protects the crown jewels with like 500 lasers. It's visual Tourette's. It

is incredible. Folks, you cannot move your laser up and down over and over again on a column of figures, okay? You can't do that. Don't wave it in a flat wide lazy Z when you highlight some prose text. We could give you 20 more don'ts, okay? But here's the do. With the laser off point it at what you want to highlight. Turn the laser on. Then turn the laser off without moving it. If you want to hold it on for a second so they can pick up the laser, that's fine, okay? Then you turn the laser off without moving it. And then you can bring the laser back to the laser the remote back to the side. Your laser pointer is not a light saber, although we are recording this I think on May the 6th, almost May the 4th. May the 4th be with you, everyone. It's not a light saber. It's not a paintball gun, okay? It's supposed to identify a single spot on a slide. And you're going to want to highlight a bullet run back and forth left and right across the bullet. Don't do it. It's horrible. Drives the audience crazy. They already know what you intend. — Uh-huh. Yeah. And finally, folks, your laser pointer has got to be held in the hand that is closest to your slides. If we are sitting in the audience looking at you and you are to our left of the screen You would hold then your pointer in your left hand. If you're to our right of the screen, you would hold your laser pointer in your right hand. Now, we can admit this gets a little bit complex. You're going to have to make a judgement call here about your dominant hand choice. Maybe your dominant hand choice plays a part in which side of the slide you choose to stand on. Exactly. And I mean, depending on how long your presentation is and how the you're probably not on a stage, but you could be on a stage that the setup is of the presentation area. It may not be overly easy to accomplish it, but when and if you can, pointer in the hand closest to the slide. Yeah. Now, why? Why is that? Everybody's wondering why. We already told you in the first bullet about facing the audience. Because if your later laser pointer is not in the hand close to the slides, you will have to turn to face your slides to use the laser pointer. You have to turn your back to use a thing you probably don't really need anyway. — thing. I would say don't use it. Yeah. This happens all the time. It's a total rookie move, and you think you're doing a good job, and then suddenly you get wacky with your laser pointer. If you're in the audience, and I'm standing to your left side, so the screen is to my left side, and I have the laser pointer in my dominant hand because and that happens to be my right hand, and I want to put my laser on the screen. I have to turn, and now my shoulder and my back are turned toward you. And frankly, like we said, we don't really need the laser pointer. Sometimes it can be helpful. It can be helpful, and it's okay to use it, but if you're going to use it, it's got to be in the hand closest to the slides, and you can still gesture toward the slides with the laser pointer using the guidance I just stated, and still keep your facing line toward the audience. Once you turn toward the slides, you're trying to get them to look somewhere, but you then turn away from them and you lose the audience. Yeah, absolutely. I want to say one more thing. I want to shout out historical shout out. By the way, folks, if you lose the audience, if you have the best laser pointer in the world and you turn and face the audience, even if it is the green laser pointer of death, which many in our community will remember was a gift to us many years ago, even a green laser pointer of death will not save you. And one other thing that sometimes rookies learn when it comes to laser pointers, if you're using a video screen as opposed to a projection screen. — Yes. — In other words, you're slave to a TV, a digital screen, laser pointers don't work. The screen swallows them. It only works on a white background cuz the white radiates the colors back. So, just be careful. If you're having a monitor rather than a screen, your laser pointer is not going to work. Yep. That's exactly it. All right. So, to wrap it up, folks, presenting isn't hard in the sense of it being complex or hard to understand. But, because the average presenter is horrible, many of us have learned really bad habits and have no sense that there's an even better way to get this done. Like so many other aspects of managing and professional life, it responds well to behavioral discipline. So, learn the basics, rehearse the basics, and you're going to be impressing everyone everywhere all of the time. There you go. Thanks, sir. Thank you, Mark. — Thanks so much for joining us, folks. We

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