2-Minute Tip: Textiful

One way to avoid overwhelming and stressing your audience is to make resources available after the fact and to let your audience know those resources will, in fact, be available.

Ari Meisel recommends Textiful for this. With this tool, you can tell your audience to text a key phrase to a specific number. Now you have an automated dialog with the audience member. You can automatically email them your slides, add them to a newsletter mailing list, or set up other follow-up activities.

When you tell your audience about this at the beginning of your talk, that helps them focus more on understanding and thinking about you content instead of just trying to retain all the details.

Post Tip Discussion: Meet Ari Meisel

Ari Meisel speaks around the country about being an Overwhelmologist and helping founders replace themselves in organizations. Regardless of your role in an organization, though, there is a lot of wisdom in Ari’s approach.

Bio

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Ari is the best-selling author of “The Art of Less Doing,” and “The Replaceable Founder.”He is a self-described Overwhelmologist whose insights into personal and professional productivity have earned him the title, “The Guru’s Guru.” He can be heard on the award-winning Less Doing Podcast, on international stages speaking to thought leaders and influencers, and for those who prefer the written word, Ari’s blog posts on Medium offer immediate and actionable advice for entrepreneurs seeking replaceability.

Teach Your Audience to Listen

Ari starts off his talk by explaining three things.

1. He speaks really fast to pack in a lot of information, and he encourages his audience to slow him down if he goes too fast.
2. He likes to be interrupted so he doesn’t want folks to wait until the end of the talk to ask questions.
3. At the end of the talk they’ll be able to get the slides and notes via textiful, as described in his tip.

By explaining these items, he teaches the audience how to listen to his talk. Giving folks the ground rules means folks don’t have to wonder if it’s appropriate to ask questions, if they have to take detailed notes, or if the talk is going too fast for others.

When we know the ground rules and set the appropriate expectations, we can focus more on the content.

OAO Methodology

Ari mentioned the core methodology of OAO.

1. Optimize
2. Automate
3. Outsource

Those 3 elements are key to making yourself replaceable.

You first need to know which processes you can make more efficient. That’s not just about being faster. It’s about making sure they are built in the right way to deliver the results you want fastest and at the lowest cost.

Once you optimize your processes, how can you automate them? Are there tech tools that will deliver the same result with less involvement from you? A text message autoresponder like the one Ari talked about in his tip might be one example.

But it’s not just as about tech tools. Are there ways you can set up an automated process that triggers actions from you or members of your team in such a way that you don’t need to spend much time thinking about it? Preserve that brain energy for things that matter and make a bigger difference in your business.

Finally — outsource. Once your processes are optimized and automated for your business or role, is there someone else who can take that over? Maybe it makes sense to hire another company or contractor to execute that task for you.

TedX Talk

Ari mentioned doing a TedX Talk as one of his earlier speaking endeavors. Here it is.

Managerial Economics 101

I mentioned the Manager Tools description of Managerial Economics 101. Here is their explanation of the concept.

Other Lessons for Speakers

There’s an important lesson for speakers here. At one level, it’s about how a speaker or trainer runs their independent business, or how we do the rest of our job if we have a role in a corporation.

At another level, it’s about the content of our talks. It’s easy to fill our talks with too much stuff — with too many details. We might do that because we want to share all the details. Or prove how knowledgeable we are. Or because we’re afraid to leave something out.

We sometimes do the same thing when crafting slides. We put too much on there because we love our content. Or we want to make sure it’s complete. Or because we think we should.

In reality, putting too much in a talk or too much on a slide is just as counterproductive as doing too much non-core work in our business.

If we overwhelm our audience we are less likely to land our actual message or point. If we don’t do that, what’s the point?

Links

Call To Action

• To learn more about Overwhemologist Arie Meisel click here or the other links above.
• Share this episode with a busy colleague or entrepreneur you know by giving them the link http://2MinuteTalkTips.com/Ari
• Don’t get best…get better.

2-Minute Talk Tips is the public speaking podcast that help you become a more effective speaker in as little as 2 minutes a week.