Did you ever hear the one about the guy walking in Manhattan and he comes across an old man on a street corner playing the violin? The tourist asks the musician if he knows how to get to Carnegie Hall. Without missing a beat, the musician responds, "Practice, practice, practice."

Welcome to the Executive Master's for Sustainability Leadership program at Arizona State University. This is Communications 513, Week 5 in course 3 of Sustainable Storytelling.

In the first four weeks you have outlined your SPARKTalk, created your visual storyboard, pulled it all together, and now you're ready to screen it with your trusted advisors.

There is some urgency in all of this, because you have one week to polish your presentation and turn it in for your final grade in communications. AND, you have just under two months before you take the stage in Tempe for your 18-minute SPARKTalk.

But, you're uncertain about your capabilities to pull it off and maybe lack the confidence right now to "own" that stage.

Therefore, "Practice, practice, practice..."

Last week I introduced you to this cool online tool called Haiku Deck. Haiku Deck is a free platform that helps you make compelling Powerpoint presentations.

I like it because it makes you think "small". By "small" I mean It allows you just one image per slide, and a very limited amount of copy. (You know how I feel about clutter on your slides).

Plus, it has themes that help you maintain consistency throughout. So I thought I would present this week's instructor session using nothing more than Haiku deck.

What a novel idea. And I hope this different format from what you're used to in my storytelling session is a little surprising. Remember how your brain loves a break from the norm?

But the truth is, Haiku Deck helps you focus your message, provides great royalty-free images to use, or you can upload your own visuals – which I have done with some of my slides – and it provides enough flexibility with its layout tool that you can flex your creative muscles without sacrificing consistency in your presentation.

This week, as you're preparing, practicing and screening your SPARKTalk, I'm going to show you how I prepare for each of my presentations. And I start with...

Surveilance.

I can't stress enough how important it is for you to do some reconnaissance on the room and atmosphere that will be the stage for your presentation.

Actually, you have already started this process by studying your audience. We have discussed many times about knowing them in a Godlike way so that you can frame your story accordingly. This happens well before your presentation.

Now, a day before I take the stage, I try to surveil my surroundings. What does the room look like? How big is it? Where are the screens? Will I be stuck at a podium, or will I have a wireless mic that allows me to work the stage? How many people will be in the audience, and how much of the room will be filled up? Will it be packed, or is it going to feel cavernous with not enough bodies to fill the place? This is important because it allows you to anticipate how you might work the room.

I want to know exactly what I'm in for, because I guarantee you that Murphy is the show producer. If something can go wrong, it typically does.

In fact, I recently keynoted the 27th Annual Clean Air Campaign Awards luncheon at the swanky J.W. Marriott at Desert Ridge here in Phoenix. It is your typical ballroom, and one I had been in many times, so I had a good idea of my setting. I still arrived two hours early for the luncheon so that I could meet the producer, technical people, see how the room was arranged, what my AV set-up was going to look like, and talk with some of the guests to learn their stories that might help influence some of my presentation. I'm constantly searching for ways to connect with my audience, and using some of their stories to make my points is one of the best ways to harmonize with them.

Which leads me to my next step of surveillance and preparation...

Meeting the most important person in the room: your A.V. Guy.

Befriend the AV guy!

They're often surly, unappreciated folk who have been doing this since grade school. Remember, they're the ones who always rolled in the projector cart and hooked up all of the cables during science class? Yep, same guy. This is their domain, their place of authority in the world, and they are highly protective of it.

And because nobody usually pays much attention to the AV guy, the more you appreciate him and his capabilities, the better. Start by asking his name, and use it often. Everyone loves that. And be genuinely appreciative of his efforts, because they can sabotage you in a heartbeat and blame it on technical difficulties. I've seen it happen. They're second only to the guy operating the tape machine. If you're playing back a video, they almost never hit the cue in your script. It either starts early or late. That's their deal. It's best to run everything from your laptop so that you remain in control of your presentation at all times.

If you get off on the wrong foot with your AV Guy by coming off as pretentious or dismissive, they'll simply make your life a living AV hell prior to your presentation when you're already feeling the heat of the event.

So when you get to the site of your presentation early to do your surveillance, plug-in to your AV Guy, and make him an ally. Believe me, you won't regret it.

Now it's time to get things rolling. Your heart rate has increased dramatically and your saliva glands have just declared a drought in your mouth. Vertigo takes over and you feel like you're about to fall.

When this happens, all I can do is invoke Joseph Campbell's famous line, "If you're falling...dive!"

By now, you've practiced, practiced, practiced. You're well rehearsed. So just dive into your presentation. Let your hot cognition – your subconscious – do what it does best. That is to serve up the information you have embedded within it so that you don't have to think about every word and search for every sentence. Trust your mental muscle memory and let it flow.

Dive in, the stage is yours.

And remember...

Most audiences will like you from the start. They truly want you to succeed, even if you're in a stiff boardroom. People generally want the person who is on the stage – who has the courage to put themselves out there – to be successful.

So relax, take a deep breath, greet them with a big smile, and know that the audience is on your side. Make them feel at home with you. Find ways to connect during your opening, and most of all, have fun. Smiling, and appearing as relaxed as you can possibly be in one of the most stressful experiences known to mankind – public speaking – is remarkably disarming to an audience.

And please don't apologize for being there; for being nervous; for anything.

Your audience is investing their valuable time in you and your story. So take this opportunity to thank them, and then make the next 18 minutes more meaningful and valuable than anything else they could be doing.

They have come to hear you and experience your leadership.

So lead.

Always strive for clarity in your thoughts and your presentation. Follow your theme like it is the North Star of your story, because it is! And if you get sidetracked on a thought, that's okay. Just recognize that you've been detoured, relax, and gently bring yourself back to your main point. It's a little bit like mediation that way. In mediation, you try to focus on your breathing, but thoughts of that damn cat video always interrupts your chi.

The same is true in presenting. You might be coming up to a big point, and that guy who is typing on his iphone reminds you of your daughter who is transfixed on a cartoon while your asking her to get ready for school. Collect yourself. Take a deep breath. And carry on.

It's okay to glance at your slide as a gentle reminder as to where you are in your presentation journey. But please don't stand there and read them. Clarity comes from knowing your presentation inside and out, being practiced and rehearsed, and being able to collect your thoughts on the fly.

And as you are sharing your concise and clear thoughts, I hope you have considered ways to punctuate your main points by using metaphor. There is nothing more enticing to the mind than to be served up a juicy metaphor to make a point.

It's like peanut butter and jelly: neither is as good without the other. But when you combine them in a sandwich, the whole is much greater than its parts.

Did you know that we utter one metaphor for every 10 to 25 words,or about six metaphors a minute? We are "metaphor making machines to create great meaning our of the chaos around us" a statement which is a metaphor in and of itself. See what I mean?

Our brain simply loves to connect two different ideas to make a third and more powerful idea.

This photo requires no narrative, because our brain connects the dots. To me this pic poses the question: are not our thoughts and the literature that captures them the building blocks of society?

What thoughts and insights are you sharing with your audience that are the building blocks for your sustainability initiative, and how can you share them with intentionally powerful metaphors to make your points clutch to their minds like a cat to catnip?

There's that cat again, caught in a metaphor.

Now, as I move into my presentation, I always want to remember...

URGENCY...

(Note for presentation technique: I pickup the pace of the next three slides showing them for only seconds to underscore my next points theatrically...)

NOVELTY...

and SURPRISE...

To take my audience to a new place.

which can be dictated, as you have just experienced, by the pace of your presentation.

OMG, the mad magician has cut that poor woman in two! How long can she stay like that? Suspense! I wasn't expecting a magic trick in the middle of this presentation. How novel. What's next?

Do you recall at the beginning of this session how I quickly covered urgency, novelty and surprise? I reminded you of your pending SPARKTalk at the end of this course, which is just one week away. I'm sure for some of you that raised your heart rate a bit. Plus I completely departed from my typical presentation style, which your subconscious at least registered as novel, even if your conscious mind did not. And I used this surprising new tool of HaikuDeck with interesting imagery to heighten the surprise factor.

I think it would be even more impactful if I was standing before you and these images were running in the background over my shoulder amplifying my points.

Why? Because people have come to see and hear you. Your visuals are the frosting on your story cake.

Now that you are fully into your presentation, I want you to start...

Harmonizing with your audience. Each gathering is unique. And no matter how well you have surveilled them and prepared, crowd personalities and dynamics will have begun to reveal themselves.

For instance, you may have overheard a story prior to your presentation that is relevant to one of the points you are making. That is a great time to ad lib and use that story to amplify your point.

I was giving a storytelling workshop to 500 attorneys in Chicago last year, and this big guy was sitting in the front row with his arms crossed mean muggin' me with a look like this is all B.S. I picked up on this, and at the right time in the early part of my presentation, I stopped in the middle of the stage, placed myself as close to the audience as I could, folded my arms and said, "I bet I know what you are all thinking. All this emotional storytelling stuff has no place in the legal profession. Right?" I got several affirming nods from the audience, and then I continued, "And that is precisely why I am here: to state my case about the power of storytelling and how it can revolutionize your practice. You will be the ultimate judge and jury as to how persuasive I am in this quest. And, over the course of the next 60 minutes, I am going to use story on you to prove my point."

At that moment, the big, ornery looking attorney released his arms, and I witnessed the audience settle into their chairs for the ride.

That's when I knew I had them; that I had harmonized with them and that they were open to what I had to say.

Something else that often happens is when a question materializes that reminds you of a salient point that is not in your script.

Leap on it! (Which, by the way, is a metaphor)

This opportunity allows you to answer their question by highlighting your point, and immediately connects you with the person asking, and therefore your audience.

If you are following another speaker, it's helpful if you can weave in a point or two that they made to help support your position.

These are all great ways to harmonize with your audience and not come off as a canned pitchman or woman.

Jazz musicians know this better than anyone. It's about...

Improvising. To truly feel comfortable vamping during your presentation means to follow the advice of that N.Y. street musician: "Practice, practice, practice."

When you know your material, you can become a brilliant improvisationalist, which helps you harmonize with your audience.

For instance, earlier I mentioned that I gave the keynote speech for the Clean Air Awards Luncheon at the posh J.W. Marriott at Desert Ridge in Phoenix. It was on October 30, the day before Halloween. Prior to me going on stage, we had excellent live music by a famous saxophonist accompanied by a wonderful guitarist. The lights in the ballroom started flickering and then dimming, and then back on full blast again. This went on throughout their performance. It was like a haunted rheostat switch had taken over the place. It was both annoying and comical. Finally, the general manager himself arrived with four engineers in tow, and it took them about 10 minutes to replace the faulty electrical panel that was causing the spastic lighting.

As an aside, are you noticing a technique that I am using here that Hollywood has perfected? It's called foreshadowing. Earlier in this presentation I had mentioned my keynote at the Marriott, and now I am telling you the bigger story here. You may have not consciously picked up on it, but your subconscious sure did. Foreshadowing is a great tool to serve up novelty and surprise that the brain simply can't resist. It creates suspense, resolution and familiarity: all strong attention getters.

Now, back to my story already in progress: When I got on stage, I took advantage of this wonderfully weird happening with the lights and wove it quickly into my storytelling presentation. When I introduced the crowd to Joseph Campbell, America's foremost mythologist, and the inspiration he has been to me in my work, I also mentioned an interesting and opportunistic factoid. I informed the crowd that Joseph Campbell had died 27 years ago to this very day, on October 30 in 1987. And knowing that I would be invoking his name and work during my keynote, and not one to miss a good party, I am sure that it was Campbell himself messing with the lights as a wink and a nudge to the audience to pay attention to the power of story in their lives.

Granted, I got lucky as hell that that happened. I call this "designed serendipity." And what I mean by designed serendipity is to be so prepared with your presentation, that you can easily improvise when the universe provides the opportunity.

So please keep an eye out of serendipitous events like this that you can use to really harmonize with your audience. Because when you do, you...

connect on a level you never thought was possible. And as you are a creationist introducing new concepts, new ways of thinking, and new ways to act, you absolutely, positively have to find ways to connect with your audience.

When you are practiced and confident with your presentation, the universe, the environment you're in, and the people around you somehow conspire to deliver you with wonderful moments of connecting. But you have to be paying attention, let your creative juices fly, harmonize, improvise and connect.

Because beyond the creationist, you are really a...

futurist, painting the path you want your audience to follow to a compelling and better tomorrow. Make that road ahead beautifully clear, attractive, and sought after by your crowd. This is the point of your entire presentation, as you take the audience on a journey of what is, and what can be. You take them to the peaks of excitement, and drop them into the depths of despair (okay, so maybe I'm getting a little melodramatic here).

But my point is no one has ever been bored into change.

I can't overstate this next point. If you are going to paint a clear and compelling path for them to follow, then your presentation must have a central theme, the North Star, that you follow on the "And, But and Therefore" route of your story. If you find yourself and, and, and anding your presentation, then you are in a "telling" mode of exposition, and not a "showing" mode of story. Revisit episodes within your presentation to create more contrasts, highs and lows, "where we are's" and "where we could be's." Take your audience on a journey from beginning to end.

You want them to hear, see, and experience the...

the TRUTH in what you have to say. Nobody was ever bored into the truth, either.

And now that you've arrived at the truth – the moral of your story – for heaven's sake,...

ASK them to do something. All of your presentations will inherently ask them to ponder or consider a new concept or idea. But that is NOT an "Ask."

What are you going to physically ask them to do that sets them in motion to help you achieve your initiative, and how are you going to build in rituals to sustain change? It all begins with your first ask. And if you haven't cajoled them with story, and taken them on a journey by virtue of your performance, then your ask becomes considerably less compelling.

It's worth repeating: Nobody was ever bored into doing something.

Now, picture yourself taking a bow to the uproarious applause. Consider how you will gracefully handle all of the accolades of, "Wow, what a great presentation." And how you are going to show restraint after getting all of the financial and human resources you hoped for to launch your initiative – until you get back to your office, of course – and answer the one ask I've been asking you all along: What's your...

STORY?