Andrew Thorp, a speaker, trainer, and consultant in the field of business storytelling, shares tips and techniques for building confidence in public speaking; creating more engaging, data-driven presentations; and one simple trick for regaining an audience’s attention when engagement starts to fade.
Thorp explains the importance of “storifying” speeches and presentations to resonate with listeners, why perfection alienates audiences, and how vulnerability can help people connect with your message.
“[If] you’re a successful person, people actually want to know what mistakes you’ve made so that they don’t need to make them themselves,” said Thorp, who spoke at ENGAGE UK & Europe in October.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Common reasons audiences disengage and practical ways to keep them engaged.
- Storytelling structures that make presentations more engaging.
- “Habituation” and other methods for building confidence as a public speaker.
- Why authenticity beats perfection in presentations.
- How professionals can bounce back when public speaking goes wrong.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: On this episode of the FM podcast, recorded at ENGAGE UK & Europe, I’m joined by Andrew Thorp, an award-winning speaker, trainer, and consultant in the field of business storytelling. We’ll be discussing tips and tools for creating more engaging finance presentations, small habits that can help professionals build those skills off stage, and how to bounce back when public speaking goes wrong.
Welcome, Andrew. Thanks for coming on the podcast.
Andrew Thorp: It’s my pleasure.
Brown: Why do professionals and leaders, especially those with impressive communication skills, struggle to command an audience?
Thorp: I think there’s often an overreliance on logic and a rational argument being put across. So the default, I guess, is to give more information. And the trouble with that is that people can become overloaded, and it doesn’t really connect with them on a more emotional level.
And human beings are driven by emotion. They might think that they make decisions on logic, but we don’t. So there has to be more of an element of what I would call “storifying” what you’re trying to say, so it’s more engaging, gets under people’s skin, and just connects with them more strongly.
Brown: What is the process of storifying a speech or a presentation, and what would that involve?
Thorp: I think you’ve got to start by deciding what you want to say and then maybe packaging that into some kind of structure. And obviously the simplest structure, that sort of old chestnut — a beginning, a middle, and an end — is part of that sort of template approach, where it follows some kind of natural arc. Because when people speak, when they try and verbalise a thought, I think one of their greatest challenges is how do I structure what I want to say?
And it can be a little bit garbled or goes off in tangents and doesn’t really have a clear way of helping people follow what you’re saying. So I think having a structure is a really good starting point. And beginning, middle and end, it doesn’t have to be just that. There can be more sophisticated versions like the hero’s journey, which is a well-known sort of story template that most of the movies you ever watched probably follow the hero’s journey template.
And we talked today as well about PRO, which is pain, remedy, and outcome. Here’s a problem we see in the world, this is what we think we can do about it, and this is the outcome you can expect afterwards. Many people, I think, who are promoting an idea of some kind or maybe a product or a service tend to go into the weeds and talk about the remedy and not establish that people need it yet. Or indeed paint a picture of somewhere better, you know, painting a picture of the future that following your advice is likely to achieve.
Brown: I guess It can be quite easy for, as you said, people to go off-track when they’re trying to speak to people. If you’re trying to connect, especially to a large group of people, it can be quite easy to go on tangents to try and reel more people in, but then at the same time, you’re also alienating or losing more people. What commonly causes accomplished business leaders to lose their audience, and what steps can help them deliver speeches that are more likely to resonate with the people that they’re speaking with?
Thorp: I think maybe a lack of energy that’s being created in the room. If you’re physically presenting to a room, you’ve got to create some energy through the way you deliver and your [feeling] — clearly you feel something about the content that you’re talking about. If you’re just delivering words and they come out a bit flat, you’re not transferring the enthusiasm you have for your idea to someone else because it doesn’t come across that way.
And it’s also very difficult to do that online as well, because there’s no energy on a screen. That’s one of the challenges, I think, for people who present online as opposed to in person. But I think also you’ve got to make sure that you’re tapping into something that’s important to the audience. Again, an old chestnut is that it’s not about you, it’s about them. In other words, you have to talk about something that the audience can relate to, where they see themselves and maybe in a sense of, if I don’t do, if I don’t act, I’m going to be in trouble. Or FOMO, fear of missing out. If we don’t act now, others will maybe come in and steal a march on us and be competitively advantaged. So, I think you’ve got to get into the audience’s shoes. You’ve got to make sure that your message lands. And the best way of doing that is to make it about them.
Brown: I guess it’s difficult for leaders as well, because even though they maybe want to share things that are personal or things are more emotive, they’re also representing the values of the company. How do you bridge the gap between being vulnerable but in a professional kind of way?
Thorp: Vulnerability is such a huge topic within the field of leadership and persuasion, and Brené Brown has probably cornered the market in this. She’s a wonderful, wonderful speaker and a writer about vulnerability. And I think it’s much easier to show vulnerability from a position of strength. So if you’re a successful person, people actually want to know what mistakes you’ve made so that they don’t need to make them themselves.
And I think somebody once described this as cheap wisdom. In other words, you don’t have to go through the pain that they went through, and it’s generous. But you admire people for being open about the mistakes they’ve made, but also they’re doing it from the point at which they’ve got through that stage and they’re now successful. So managing that vulnerability, I think, is important.
Brown: Public speaking is something that obviously causes a lot of anxiety for professionals. Are there any small habits that they can practice off-stage, off-camera to become more confident in public speaking in front of a larger audience or does it have to just sort of be exposure therapy and you’ve got to jump in the deep end?
Thorp: I think practice is key because the more you practise something that makes you uncomfortable, the less uncomfortable you’ll be doing it. I think the psychologists call it habituation. So, you become habituated to feeling your heart racing a little bit and a slightly dry mouth. But when that happens and you’ve experienced it before, you realise it doesn’t really matter because you’re enthusiastic about wanting to share an idea with somebody. So that helps.
But also, I think trying to be more conversational rather than it being a one-way presentation. If people feel they’re having a conversation with you as a presenter, the vibe in the room generally is more open and a bit more relaxed. So I think your style of speaking can help as well if you sound like it’s a chat, but there’s some really good stuff that you’re saying as part of that conversation.
Brown: Finance professionals’ work is obviously very data-driven, it’s very data-centric, which carries risks of disengagement and alienating leaders that don’t speak the same language. What two or three tips or digital tools can make finance presentations more digestible and engaging?
Thorp: I mean, in many respects, a number in isolation doesn’t really mean anything. It only really means something in comparison with something else. So if it’s higher than it should be, lower than it should be, why? So there’s always a story behind the numbers that you have to tap into the meaning behind what’s on the screen.
And in the talk I gave this morning, I mentioned that it’s quite similar when you’re presenting data. It’s a bit like being a tour guide in a famous city because you’re directing people’s attention to that building or that spire or that window and the story behind it. You don’t just say, well, look at all that lovely stuff. Isn’t that great? So I think as a presenter of data, of information, you’ve got to help people focus on what matters. And then your status, I think, increases because you’re helping people interpret what they can’t interpret themselves.
Brown: We’re all humans, so obviously mistakes can happen quite frequently during talks and presentations. But I guess that vulnerability of being exposed in front of your peers or other professionals can be quite challenging to overcome. How can professionals recover from those setbacks without allowing those setbacks to hold them back from presenting in the future?
Thorp: I think it depends on what you’ve got wrong. If you’ve got the numbers wrong, then that might be serious. But let’s assume that you’ve done your research, you’ve got the numbers right, but maybe something about the way you put them across doesn’t really land properly or maybe there’s a technical glitch here or there. And I think one thing that seasoned pros do very well is they use the mistake because it’s a gift in a way.
And a quick example from my own experience: I gave a talk once in Romania, in Bucharest, to I think it was an accounting group. And I couldn’t get my slide to move from slide one to slide two. And they’d given me a clicker with two arrows on it, but nothing else on it. And I looked at the techie guy to the side as if to say, “Can you come and help me? Maybe the batteries have gone.” And he came on stage, took the clicker from my hand and turned it the other way around and said, “Now you’ll be OK.” So I was trying to go backwards from slide one.
And I think the audience liked that. So although it was a mistake, I made light of it and made a bit of fun with it. And I think that got them going a bit. And they felt, well, this could be fun.
Brown: That’s a nice story because I think we maybe overestimate other people’s reactions to things that we do.
Thorp: Yeah, and there’s a principle that I came across a while ago called the illusion of transparency. And that is that when you’re presenting in front of a group of people, you assume they can see inside you about how nervous you’re feeling, how your stomach’s turning, how your heart’s racing to the point where you think you’re having a heart attack. And they don’t know. They can’t see it. But because you feel it, you have a heightened sense of that being visible to people. So you’ve got to understand that they don’t see necessarily the things that you’re feeling inside.
Brown: I think that’s a really positive note to encourage people to not retreat so inwards and think about the purpose of the presentation. People are there to focus on the topic. They’re not laser focused on you or your behaviour or micro behaviours as well.
Thorp: Yeah, and I think perfection is a very bad thing to aim for when you’re presenting. Audiences don’t really like perfection. They don’t trust it. It doesn’t seem real. And I guess it’s the equivalent of an AI-generated piece of text as opposed to something that you’ve written yourself. You can see it’s too slick, it’s too perfect.
If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your stuff, your material, then clearly you’ll come unstuck. But let’s assume that you’re there for a reason, that you do know this stuff. Don’t worry if it doesn’t go absolutely smoothly from start to finish. It’s more about how you handle that. And I think it might have been Jimmy Carr or someone like that who was asked, what do audiences really want from a performer, from a speaker? And he said “All they really want is to feel they’re in safe hands.”
Brown: It actually makes something that people see so uncomfortable almost more comforting as well.
Thorp: And someone shared a story with me the other day that they saw Lenny Henry perform at the Lowry in Manchester. And I think he’s 68 now, Lenny Henry, but he’s amazing, amazing. And in the intervals, one of his team took him to one side and said, “You realise you messed that story up, don’t you, that you told in the first half.” So even he doesn’t necessarily nail it 100%. I mean, they still enjoyed it, apparently. I wasn’t there. But he didn’t quite nail a bit of the story, which was actually quite important. And he was told about it afterwards by his team. So even he doesn’t get it right.
Brown: There are tips, I suppose, we mentioned earlier about certain things that can cause you to lose your audience. If you’re noticing that people are sort of disengaging with the topic or the way that you’re presenting, is there any way that you can kind of bring it back?
Thorp: Yes, change something. Audiences, human beings generally pay attention to something that’s different. So if you drone on in a flat, monotone voice and all your slides look the same and they’re all busy, people will zone out. If you then turn it off and say, “I don’t know whether this is working, so let me just tell you something that I heard the other day”, they’ll suddenly pay attention.
So you have to have a few things in your toolkit which allows you to improvise and change tack slightly when you know it’s not landing or people are zoning out. And one technique we talked about in there is simply pressing B on your keyboard when you’re in PowerPoint, because it makes the screen go black. And they’ve only got one thing to look at then. And that’s you. So if you can see the eyes moving back and forth and they’re distracted and reading, they can’t listen to you at the same time. So if you notice that, you’ve got that tool that’s like an attention management device then.
Brown: I think that’s really helpful, practical advice. It’s something that probably people wouldn’t even consider doing.
Thorp: And W for white, it goes white if it’s W. And it does come back again. If you press it again, don’t worry that it’s not going to come back.
Brown: So great to have you on the podcast to share all these tips and recommendations for listeners. In closing, what are the benefits of becoming a confident public speaker, and how can professionals transfer those skills into other areas of work?
Thorp: Well, for one thing, it’s a very efficient way of getting your message out there, because there might be 40 or 50, or in this case, there were maybe 150 people in the room who heard what I had to say simultaneously. So that’s quick, isn’t it? It’s efficient, rather than trying to talk to people individually all the time. A lot of people will say, “Well, I’m OK, face to face or in a small group, but I’m not comfortable speaking …” So, it’s very efficient if you get comfortable doing it or you get skilled enough to feel comfortable up there.
But I also think people admire you if you’re able to explain something to them in a way that maybe they can’t explain. You’re almost helping them find the words that they were reaching for and didn’t quite find. And they might then be able to transfer that to somebody else and reference you as having taught them that. So it does elevate your status and reputation if you’re good at this.
Brown: Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you for being on the podcast today.
Thorp: That’s my pleasure. Been fun.
