ep37 | the artisan podcast | will greenblatt | transform your public speaking and master that interview

Will Greenblatt shares key public speaking techniques to transform your interview, pitch, or presentation.   
Find out more by following Will on LinkedIn

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I'm so excited to welcome Will Greenblatt to this call today. He is the co-founder of the Outloud Speaker School, an agency of actors who teach public speaking and communication skills to entrepreneurs, executives, and to candidates. He has repeatedly spoken at Google, Wayfair, and Boston Dynamics, to just name a few, and has provided coaching to over 4, 500 individuals virtually worldwide.

 His clients have won numerous pitch competitions and raised capital by honing in and raising their skills in publc speaking and pitching. He's here to talk to us about how we can do that in an interview process, how we can do that when we're pitching new clients or pitching new projects.  And brings all of that with the experience that he has gained as an actor.

He started acting when was seven years old. He speaks five languages including Mandarin Chinese and learning Urdu in the process. So with that, so excited to introduce Will and take our conversation to the next level.

Katty: I met Will a number of years ago. I'm part of an organization called EO, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and Will came in to teach us all facilitators how to be better public speakers, how to facilitate meetings better, and how to really hone our presentation skills.

Will: Yeah, it's really nice and I love what you've been doing all the stuff I get on Linkedin you know following you because we haven't actually spoken in so long, but the power of the personal branding, the telling your story, getting your message out there makes me feel like I've kept up with you in a way.

Katty:. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yes. The power of social media and how we show up and how we represent ourselves on it is powerful.  Let's just jump in and talk about it. I know you speak with executives, with corporate teams and talk about how to represent themselves, how to present themselves, how to, be a strong public speaker as well as for pitch competitions and how to promote themselves that way.

So obviously the audience that we're speaking to here today are the creatives and the talent that we work with who on a regular basis have to pitch. They have to pitch their portfolio, they have to really pitch their creative thinking when they're presenting clients with ideas and where they're presenting options.

So I really wanted to jump into that. I know your acting background has been a huge force in kind of what you've developed, but why don't we start from the beginning and bring us to where we are currently today from your career trajectory? 

Will: Yeah, the good thing is I just told this story on a stage as part of a public speaking competition two nights ago or three nights ago.

So I have a handy, short, and condensed version. One of the biggest tips I always have with people is to tell your story with less, fewer words, right? So many people want to throw everything about what they're thinking, whether for it's a pitch or a presentation or just telling a story, they give too much detail.

So I'm going to try to do, take my own advice and give the shortened version.  When I was seven years old, I started acting in film and TV.  My family were actors, so I fell into the business kind of through them. And I acted all the way through my childhood, through teenage years, through high school, and I thought, okay, I'm going to go to theatre school.

I went to National Theatre School of Canada. I thought I'm going to get my conservatory training, and I'm just going to go to Hollywood, and that's going to be my life.  And my brother passed away when I was 17, and it threw my life off course, I was like really grief-stricken and I didn't know what to do with myself.

And so when I went to theater school after that happened, I just wasn't in a good place mentally and I realized I didn't want to be an actor. So I ran away from home searching for something like what I was going to do with my life. And I discovered teaching in Spain. I taught English for a year and a half.

And then my first startup was in China. I knew some other English teachers, we started an English education company in Hangzhou, China. So then I discovered entrepreneurship and the long story short is that I came back to Canada and was like, okay, I've got acting, teaching, entrepreneurship. And then I realized, okay, if I use the acting & teaching background, I can teach entrepreneurs and other creatives and business people to tell their story with the kind of skills that I've been honing my whole life, really, since I was seven.

So that's the abridged version of the whole story. So it's an acting and teaching background, and then a focus on entrepreneurship, which is about how do you talk about problems, solutions and prizes. And all public speakers can benefit from that entrepreneurial mindset of somebody has a problem, you've got the solution, and then you have to sell the story of the vision, the prize.

We'll get into that later in the storytelling frameworks. I think for your audience, the creatives, it's really important that they don't just think of themselves as a certain type of person. Still, they embrace the role of a storyteller, a salesperson, an entrepreneur, or an intrapreneur, if they're working at a company. This idea that they've got to get people to buy in with the way they talk with their words, with the power of their speaking voice and their story and their personal story.

Katty: Yeah. So let's talk about that. Because as you're telling your abridged version of your story, just from a visual perspective, as I'm looking at you, you're taking over the whole screen, like you are animated, your energy is coming through, your enthusiasm about what's coming through, what you talk about is coming through. So let's just talk about that. Because so much of our communication in our world now is through digital media and Zoom and Teams and so forth. How can we use this space as our stage to really present ourselves best? 

Will: The easy answer is you can actually look at the little box where you're showing up and see what that looks like. And so I have an extra light here. I don't know if it'll show on camera, but you can probably see it moving around on my face. So I made sure to set that up beforehand just to give me a bit more light. I've sat in front of windows.

I'm making sure that I'm in the center and that my head is barely touching the top so you can see my shoulders You know too many people look like this on the screen. And if you can't see me if you're listening to this I've slouched down. You know that some basic framing things some lighting things, some audio things.  I'm speaking into a decent mic for this as well, which is really important.

Those technical things are important. And then, it's the same concept as speaking in any situation, really, but it's how committed you are to your topic, and can we see, hear, and feel that with the way you're talking?

So one thing I know is that I care about my message enough to not worry if people think I'm cool and laid back. I don't do that because I'm so much more interested in my message getting out there than I am in what people think of me as a person.  I know that if I put effort into being clear, and excited, and enthusiastic and showcase my passion, I have a better chance of people receiving my message and receiving it positively and remembering it.

So you know, in this space, you can work on the technical side of things, but just remember why you're passionate about what you're doing and then let people see that.  It's not as easy as that, but that's the idea. That's what you want to commit to and not try to hide and be humble, be too quiet, be too laid back.

But you have to find a way to show that you are passionate. And if people don't feel your passion, they don't feel your commitment, they don't feel your energy, they will write you off very quickly. And it's such a shame because these are brilliant, talented people who have a lot to offer. And then they open their mouths and people go, eh,  it's a shame. 

Katty: Yeah. You have to be able to sell yourself and sell your creativity, sell your ideas, sell your strategic thinking, whatever the job is that it that's being required.

But it's interesting what you're saying. One of our core values at Artisan is enthusiasm in life and work. So your whole body language exemplifies that body language speaks volumes. So if you are not enthusiastic, not just with the words that you're using, but how your body presents then that's going to come through, passion. You use the word passion. I'm using enthusiasm, but they're really like the love of what you do and how you're going to get it out there.

Will: So what I try to teach is just being aware of that and starting to like intentionally choose how you want to be. And it's not about being fake, but it's about reminding yourself, giving yourself permission, allowing yourself to show your passion rather than squishing it down, which we too often do.

Katty: Yeah. Actually, what comes to mind as we're talking is when we're receiving feedback about our work. The pitch is happening, your presentations is happening and maybe the client says, "oh, I don't like that color or oh, that's not what I was thinking" …how to keep ourselves from retracting and still be able to present a counter in a positive way to be able to win them over versus just totally losing it.

Will: Yeah, or being defensive which I saw on stage at a tech festival in Toronto a couple of days ago. A founder was asked a question and he just got really defensive. It was a very reasonable question and his answer was reasonable, but he thought he was being attacked even though I didn't feel that way from the question. The investor said something like, how are you going to make money? And he went, "It's very common to take a 20 percent fee. And we're going to take that 20 percent fee!"  But he didn't need to be that defensive. He could have just said, 

"That's a great question. We take a 20 percent fee."  Done.

Katty: How do we control our emotions when we're triggered like that? What are some techniques? 

Will: The best one is breathing into your belly. I get a really bad stage fright. So when I've been an actor, this was the way I allowed myself to go on stage without having panic attacks before opening night. And when you're nervous, you stop breathing deeply into your belly and you start breathing, hyperventilating shallowly into your chest, and then of course that makes it work worse because you're getting less oxygen your brain thinks you're fighting and it's a whole vicious downward spiral.

 So if you just stop that at the source, and intentionally breathe deeply into your belly  (Breathe In) and then out (Breathe Out), even just doing that once my voice is slowing down now and getting deeper because it just has an instant calming effect. And if you keep remembering to do that throughout and just training yourself to start to look for those and be aware of those moments when you feel Triggered or as my therapist would say Activated which I think is a great.

It's not always bad being activated. It can be useful, but in general, we don't speak our best when we're activated, and definitely not when we're triggered. When our emotions get the better of us, we're reacting instinctively, we’re not thinking through how we want to speak. And then yeah, we're probably more likely to show anger, defensiveness, fear.  So yeah, breathing into the belly is really important, and you can do it without showing people you're taking deep breaths.

People are always like, oh, how do I?  But then won't it look like I'm nervous if I'm breathing deeply? It's you just listen. And somebody asks you a question, you just go "Yeah, that's a really good question", and you breathe as you're thinking and answering it, and you have a lot of time to do that, you don't have to jump right in with an answer, but just, “Yeah, that's a great question”, and you can stall with a phrase like that to give yourself time and then go into it.

Katty: I can see that being so powerful in an interview. We have a candidate who is getting ready to meet with a hiring manager. And sometimes I think there's a pressure, especially if you have a half hour for that interview, there's a pressure to get in as much as you can during that time. So patience with, and just slowing down our conversation is sometimes not top of mind, but what you're saying is actually forcing the conversation to just, sit.

Will:  Yeah, a question I like to ask a lot for this specific example is, how would I talk to this person if I didn't want anything from them? Because so often when we're in these high-pressure situations, we're trying to get a sale, we're trying to have somebody approve of something, of a request or a work. We want something from our audience members. There's a power imbalance, but it also tends to make us a bit needy, and a bit on edge, and we want something so badly from the person.

But it makes us change the way we really talk, and it makes us change our energy.  And, the power of this question is you go, what would I say? So Katty, we're talking right now. Neither of us is trying to sell anything to each other. We're just having a conversation because we're both interested in the same topic.

And so you and I, there's no power imbalance. There's no problem. There's no fighting or jostling for position. We're just enjoying the conversation but we know we have an audience. So we're still trying to be clear and interesting to listen to and interesting to watch, which is, I call this thing Authentic Stage Presence.

It's this term I like to use a lot. It's like, how can you be interesting to watch and listen to, but also as real and natural as possible, like you're hanging out with your friends at a bar or in a cafe or in a living room.  And so you want to think about that when you're in an interview or in a pitch or presentation.

It's like you want something from this person. But if you didn't, what would your voice sound like?  How fast would you talk? How loud would you talk? Would you smile? Would you make a joke in this moment? Do that.  If you do that, it puts you at ease. It puts them at ease. And it feels much less like a transactional conversation.

And those transactional conversations, when they're, when they don't feel that way normally go so much better because the person just feels like it's a real human conversation.  And yeah, any pitch, anything where you're trying to convince another person and you inherently want something from them, try to just pretend you don't and think about how you would communicate in that situation.

Katty: Pretend that you don't, but still infuse the passion and the energy in that conversation. So they know that you want it, but you're not nervous about it.

Will: Exactly. It's about showcasing your passion because that's what you do all the time. So I'm a big proponent also of you want to try to be consistent with the way you talk. So many of us have a different voice with our friends, with our family members, with our work colleagues, with our we have all these different personalities.

It's like a collage of different magazines that I'm just pasting together and I don't feel like a real person.  So I was just like, okay, what is my voice and I started really trying to work on that and make it as, as consistent as possible, obviously, it's going to be a bit different.

I'm not going to talk to my best friend the way I'm talking on a podcast. But the difference for me now is a lot less because I've really worked hard on finding my voice. That's my advice too, is find something you're passionate about it and whenever you talk about it, whether it's to your best friend, your mom, your partner, or the CEO of the biggest company on the biggest moment of your life.  Speak the same way. 

All this stuff is normal. We're human beings who have evolved to communicate with each other in different ways. And so everything we're doing is just human.

But it's just becoming aware of those things that we're doing and saying what of those are going to be, are going to serve me really well in my career, and my ways of communication? What is not making me feel so good about myself or getting me what I want? So it's choosing a bit more intentional ways to be both real but also showcasing your intelligence and your passion.

Katty: Love it. Thank you I remember when we had met some years back you, you had a framework or a methodology, but maybe that's the, maybe that is the right word for it, that you really talked to the audience about  your tone, your pitch, your volume, like all of those things going to make, can make or break whatever it is that you're trying to communicate. Do you mind to talk to us a little bit to take us through that? 

Will: 100%. I call that the Speech Settings.

There's five vocal speech settings that I like to look at, and two physical body language ones. The five vocal ones are volume, pitch, pace, clarity, and inflection.  And just to make sure everybody knows these terms, volume is how loud or how soft you are.  Pitch is the high or the low of your voice. The pace is how quickly you're talking or how slow. The clarity is the how clearly you're enunciating or how much you're mumbling. And the inflection is like the pitch, but it's how much it moves. So how much does your voice go up and down or how much does it just stay the same?

And so all of these have a zero, which is like the lowest they can be and a 10, which is the highest they can be. So, what I always show to people is I show this image and it looks like a DJ's mixing board, with those little sliders that go up and down. And I just say just like a DJ or an audio engineer, you can adjust any single component of the sound or the image, in the case of the physical ones at any time. 

And it makes a big difference. So often when I'm working with people, especially in a group setting, I'll say, give me your pitch and they'll give me their pitch or their presentation. I said, that was great. Now, everybody, where do you think their volume was at?

And the person maybe is a really quiet talker.  And they'll be, people will be like, three, four, and I'll be like, yeah it's a little low. So I'll say, okay, what I want you to do is try it at an eight or a nine. And the person always goes, no, I couldn't do that possibly, because they've lived a whole life,  being quiet.  Just try. And then eventually they get there and they declare their pitch in this loud volume and they are a completely different person.  And the whole crowd goes, Whoa, because it's crazy to watch this one little thing.

And just to add the two body language ones, those are physical expression, which is your arms and your body, and then facial expression. And then the last one sometimes I don't always talk about, especially when we're on Zoom, is groundedness, and that's how well you stay, that's how well your feet are connected to the floor versus like shuffling around and pacing nervously and stuff. And the point is to become aware of these things and not get stuck in any of them and think, Oh, I should speak at a seven for volume.

People say, what's a good volume that I should speak at? There's no such thing.   What do you want to do with your words? Do you want to scare someone?  Yell at them. Scream at the top of your lungs.

Or do you want to stop your dog before they run onto the road and chase the ball? Use a high volume.  Do you want to comfort your child because they're really scared and they've had a nightmare? Don't shout at them.  Use a low volume. You know what I mean? We know this stuff instinctively in other areas of our lives. When we're talking about family or friends, we do this stuff naturally.

What I'm advocating for is that, you take that wisdom that we all have as human beings. Some of us are better at it than others.  But we just be more intentional about it, especially when we're on stage, and say, Okay, I want to get this audience excited, I can be a bit louder.

Okay, I want to warn this audience about something, I can slow down and get a bit serious on my face. Whatever that intention is of what we want to do with our words, we just we are able to adjust the speech settings to achieve those objectives. And that takes a while, but it's amazing how much can be done just by starting to play with those.

Katty: How would you make that adjustment in an interview setting? I guess where you're sitting your room, the space that you're at. Like you have to really be paying attention to the physical environment, and your proximity to the interviewer, if it's an in-person one.  That physicality probably has to play into that.

Will: When I was in China doing my first startup, one of my co-founders and I did a double pitch like we were pitching our thing to a potential customer. It was like the biggest pitch we'd had so far. And we were in this boardroom. The thing is when we had practiced it, we had practiced it in our apartment, which was actually bigger than the boardroom we were in randomly.

And my co-founder had practiced it as a sort of theatrical kind of presentation, but then at the last second, they put us into the small boardroom and we were just sitting across the table from these potential customers.  And I think because of my acting background, I was able to adjust without even thinking about it.

And so we had our laptop, we didn't even have the projector, we were just showing them our presentation on a laptop instead of on the projector. So it was much more intimate. And I was like, yeah, so this is what we're doing. And then it was my co-founder's turn, and I think because he was nervous, he was like yelling.  And I didn't know how to stop him and I didn't know what to do. It was fine. It was, a bit awkward, but he was really speaking way too loudly. And I think because he had practiced it in a certain way, he wasn't ready for the curve ball and it just, it wasn't the right volume.

He didn't adjust his volume for the, as exactly as you said, the physicality, the proximity, the environment. And so paying attention to that is, is really important. And then also switching up in the middle of your presentation or your talk let's say, you want to tell a quick story in an interview, you mentioned an interview, right?

You want to tell a quick story, they always ask you this question, what's the time you overcame a difficulty?  So a good way to do that is to say here was the problem, here was the difficulty, and then I found the solution. So the first half of that story is bad.  It was a problem. It was scary.  It was hard. You want to show that kind of the difficulty of it.

 You don't want to be like, yeah, it was really tough. You want to show how tough that situation was. So you might have a different inflection to your voice when you're talking about a problem where you're saying it was really bad.

We had lost $10, 000 worth of inventory. I was on the hook for all of it. My coworker was freaking out. I didn't know what to do. And then you've discovered the solution. And your voice can change.  And we figured out what we wanted to do. And then you can smile, and your voice can drop down or can go up and get excited.

However you want to do it, there's no right way.  But you shouldn't tell the whole story in the same tone of voice, volume, pace, pitch, facial expression. Because it's not appropriate for the message being conveyed.   So  you want to not only pay attention to the environment, but also what am I actually saying?

Exactly. We need variety. We know we need to listen to variety if we're listening to a speaker or if we're talking to somebody, if it's the same tone, we just get bored and nod off. No matter how interesting the tone is, if you hear the same thing over and over again you're done.

Katty: I'm flipping the script here, not as the interviewee, but as the interviewer. The recognition that the interviewee may be nervous or scared or overwhelmed or in awe of you and the company and like all of that. I could see that even from an interviewer's perspective, how changing your tone can help somebody just be put somebody at ease or calm them down versus these are the facts of the job. This is what you need to do. And that could totally freak somebody out. So the kind of the back and forth between two people, like that's, I'm seeing, I'm hearing the power of the voice in this thing, right?

Let's talk about body language real quick. I think the piece that people miss a lot in body language, they, we've listened to words, but maybe not necessarily to what somebody is saying non-verbally.

And we're communicating oftentimes on a WhatsApp, on the Slack channel, on email, we're not even seeing each other or on social media, How do we take what you've talked about so beautifully and translate that into when we're not having the body language component?

Will: If I understand your question, are you saying how do we communicate better in our writing with each other when we don't have access to body language?

Katty: Yeah. When we're not seeing each other, for example, we're on the Zoom, but the camera's off. 

Will: So I would make a distinction between those two forms of communication, audio and writing.  With audio, yes, it's very important that your tone of voice does some heavy lifting that where your face and your body language can't. If you're on the phone, if you're cold calling people if you are catching up with somebody over the phone, or if you're on Zoom and your camera's off you want to be a bit, you want to be even more expressive.

But again, I want to bring it back to this idea that the way you talk about yourself and your work, it's by default, you are slow, clear, excited, not slow, but, slow enough to be understood and you pause after important information.

You develop this way of talking about yourself and your business, where no matter who it is, no matter what it is, you can access that kind of passion and clarity at a moment's notice, because it's just you've trained it into yourself and it's real, it's, you care about what you do.

But also I would say for audio, we'll stick with the audio first. Okay, imagine that people can see you.  So if I turn my video off right now, you can't see me anymore, right?  But I'm still using my hands to gesture while I'm talking to you, in the way that I would. Like I'm still gesticulating the same way that I would when I'm on video.  Because I know that's going to help my voice.

And I know if I'm sitting up nicely and in the way I would want to be seen, that's also going to help my voice. And then of course, if I turn my video off, but I'm slouching down like this, it's way harder to access that excited voice, it doesn't match our body.

Okay. I'm going to go off on a bit of a tangent here, but please indulge me. You mentioned the 55 percent of our rule that comes from something called the Mehrabian model, which Albert Mehrabian, who is from Iran, he came to Canada, I believe, or the U. S. I can't remember, he was a psychologist who specialized in communication, and he's the one who people take that number from, that 55 percent of communication is body language, 37 is tone of voice, or 35 is tone of voice, 38 something, and then 7 is words.

But I think he himself has spent his entire career trying to say that's not right, don't believe that because it was a really specific experiment that doesn't translate to real life and he said that very clearly.

But a concept that he should be famous for.  And I wrote about this in my book because I think it's such a shame.  He came up with this term called Congruence. The key to trusting a speaker is when they speak in congruence. Congruence means your words, your tone of voice, and your body language and facial expressions all match.  When your voice is telling that you're excited, and your words are saying you're excited, and your facial expression and your body language are all telling the same story, people go, oh, I believe you. And then when you say something like, I'm really excited to be here,  people go, I don't believe you. I don't trust you.

And whether or not they think that consciously, it just, it erodes trust. But then it builds it, if we're matching. One of the most important things you can do is just if you're saying something, look and sound like you mean it.

And if you're talking about something horrible, like your company solves a problem that is killing millions of people each year, don't say that with a big smile on your face, because it looks weird. You have to think about the reality and the emotions of what you're saying, so it's got to match.

So that's why I wanted to bring that up, is this concept of congruence, your voice, your body, your facial expression, and your words all telling the same story, is super important for people trusting you. And as we know in business, trust is everything. 

Katty: I love that concept of congruence. I will have to check it out and check out your book as well.

Will: Yeah I've dedicated I think chapter four, the first part of chapter four to that little story and that idea. And it's what I call being in alignment. Step four of my sort of methodology that I take students through when I coach them is  After we work on body language storytelling, which we should probably get into as well and then doing some practical tips to start recording yourself and watching it back and, getting recordings of you in your natural environment.

We go a bit deeper into your personal life and your history, and we go where do you come from in your childhood. What happened to you growing up that made you do the work that you do, and is there any part of you that you're maybe ashamed of, or you don't want to show to the world, or you wish were different?

And we start having those conversations, because the reason that we do that kind of work,  Is if you can align all of those things just psychologically for yourself if okay This was my childhood. It made me this way and maybe i'm a little ashamed of that But i'm owning it and all of that brought me to where I am today And that's why I do what I do and i'm honest and transparent and real about that.

That's a powerful person You know when you see those people It's you're just like wow, this person is a force to be reckoned with whatever they're doing. I'm investing i'm buying from them I'm working with them. I'm saying yes to their request. Yeah, but I do think we should also talk about the storytelling. Yeah, we should,

Katty: Especially because the candidates that we work with. The creatives, whether they're writers or they're visual artists, they are storytellers. And they can probably tell the story of their piece of art that they've created.  But I think when we're talking about an interview session, the story of their career trajectory of their arch, passion like all of that sometimes doesn't come across as a story. There's not a through line in that. So I'd love to talk about that. 

Will:  I have two story frameworks that I like to work with.  One is for your presentation and the other is for your personal story. So let's just get into the personal one because that's the one you're asking about. It is what I call the founder origin story, but those are for startup founders, but anybody can use this when they're telling their own story. 

It has three components, your childhood origin, your youth realization, and then your adult choice. Do you mind if I ask you, if I workshop this with you, Katty, right now, if I ask you some questions? Okay, cool. It's a great thing to see an example. So yeah, Katty,, where were you born?

Katty: I was born in Iran.
Will: And when did you leave Iran to go to the States?
Katty: In 1979 during the revolution.  I was 13.

Will:  So 13 is an interesting age because it's on the precipice. It's on that edge between, childhood and youth, but maybe that is where it all starts for you or just, and of course, there's no complete story. We're trying to tell it in a short amount of time.

What do you think about growing up in Iran or leaving when you did in the circumstances that you did.  What do you think about that set you on the path that you're on now in terms of what you're interested in or what you became focused on.

Katty: I'm a huge traveler and just like I different cultures or something that just you know, that's what makes me happy. Learning about different cultures, and experiencing different cultures, because I see myself having come from two different cultures and became this congruent piece of the two cultures together. So that piece of it has, I think, influenced me, shaped me from the beginning. 

Will: That's really interesting. By the way, my wife talks about this a lot because she's Pakistani, but then grew up in both Australia and Canada. So she has this like Eastern and Western two things, but a lot of people talk about this as a third culture.  They call it third culture kid.

You're not quite from the culture of your parents, but not quite from the culture that you're growing up in. You exist in this third place. That's what I'm hearing from you.  So that could be really interesting to bring to the forefront.

Will: We don't know this stuff about people because people never tell these stories.

Katty: Humanity comes through, right? Yeah.   Yeah. Suddenly, you're not a name on a piece of paper. You're an actual individual.

Will: Yeah, with real experiences and difficult things you've been through, and yeah, 100%. That's the purpose of storytelling, really. Is to connect with other people by humanizing ourselves, and then they see our humanity, they feel it in themselves, they give it back, and it's that great rebound ping-pong effect.

In general, with storytelling, specificity is really powerful. Whatever story you're telling we want, I always tell people you want to be specific with it because it actually helps the listener hook in more.

Katty: How do you do that in a business environment with somebody looking at somebody's resume or their LinkedIn profile? How do we tie that into a story, but it's more of a professional story? Obviously, we want to show the full individual. I imagine if you have a 30-minute interview that you got to be, to your point, concise. But you got to also be able to tell that story, but you also want to talk about your skills and what you've accomplished and like all of those things. So how do we business storytell? 

Will: Yeah. So what I would say is you have to spend some time in this emotional place thinking of the stories, remembering them, extracting them and figuring out which ones. But as you said, they've got to be relevant. So let's just get the last piece and then I'll show you how you can weave it all together.

Katty: I think it was just having the self-realization and introspection on who am I and what's my purpose and what's my why and that actually really builds into the Artisan philosophy of, we're here about building relationships based on trust. Because we do is help people in that career trajectory to find the next right thing for themselves. And that is really our purpose. So my personal purpose is infused with the company purpose.

Will: And it is for all the best founders. And that's the thing too, is that people need to realize is if your life story doesn't make sense with the work you're doing, then it's, you're not a very attractive person to work with. But for you, so the piece I'm still missing is just the specificity of I realized that I had to do this kind of work.  What was that realization?

Katty:  I don't know if I have a defining moment. I got to think about that. I would imagine that it went back to pre-Artisan work when I first started working and realizing that it fed my soul to help other people. And it's just, like I was saying, it's shown up in different jobs that I had before got involved with Artisan.

Will: And these are things that we want to work on. We want to think about and really like practice. We don't want to make it too rehearsed, but we really want to have those thoughts in our mind when we're introducing ourselves. So then, okay we'll take it. And this is a very simple version.  We've only spent 10 minutes on this, but already here's what you would do in the interview.  I realized helping people be the best versions of themselves actually fed my soul.  I knew I had to do something like that. So that's why I started Artisan Creative. And, you can give a quick little elevator pitch.

So that story takes almost no time. And, but it, but we know so much about you. And you're so human for us. Within 20 to 30 seconds.  So that's what I always advocate for. People are like, oh, I don't want to waste time talking.  about my story doesn't take that long. If you've got it down.

Katty: You got to take the time to workshop it and figure it out beforehand. 

Will: Exactly.What are the points? And that's why, childhood origin, youthful realization, and adult choice. If you get your point for each one, you can cover one to two sentences for each point.

Katty: I love how quickly you did that, Will.  So where can people find you if they want to go through this process for themselves with you? I know you do quite a bit of coaching virtually for a lot of people, right?

Will: The way people generally find me is through my LinkedIn. I try to post I do post every day there, and I'm always giving advice on public speaking, specifically pitching and presentations, but also being on stage and communicating with people, and also a lot of stuff on entrepreneurship.

And so I'd say for your audience, even if they identify as entrepreneurs or not, learning the philosophy of entrepreneurship is really important because it's about problem solving, and that will never be a bad thing to learn. And then I also have a news, a weekly newsletter.  So if people want to follow my newsletter, they can find it.

But anybody can get in touch with me through my through my LinkedIn, through the DMs.

Katty: Fantastic. And of course, I will be sharing all of that information out with the audience too. But I think this is really powerful to recognize the impact that our voice and our tone and all of that can have in any kind of interaction, obviously we're focusing it more on the interview, but in any kind of interaction, even colleague to colleague,  even internal meetings, like all of those.  That energy and that passion is going to come through our voice. 

Will: Absolutely. And it's just that is what I call the final 10%.  If you do all this hard work on your presentation or your pitch or you prepare for your meeting, you get your notes done, you make a presentation, you make a report do this PowerPoint, and then you get up there and you just…It's such a waste and it can torpedo the whole thing. And it's just that final 10%.

If you give that final 10 percent of effort and preparation and training and stuff, then you honor all that hard work you did. So don't let it fall flat at the finish line. That's a, that's my takeaway message.

Katty: Yeah. Actually, you know what, let's have this one be a takeaway message. I remember this so well that when we were speaking a couple of years back, you were talking about just like warming up the face muscles.

Will: Yes, you know that people go on stage and or in an interview or on a call with a client and Like none of this has been warmed up.  Yes, it's not a awake just to warm up these muscles. I can give  you two exercises that you can do to completely change the way that you're going to sound and look.

So the first one is it's an exercise called Big face, Small face. So you want to get your mouth muscles moving your eyebrows going and get your eyes open. Because right now I'm really tired, you can even see my eyes are closed. I have a 17-month old toddler. She gets me up at 5 in the morning every day, and I'm not meant to get up that early.

But, so when I was preparing for this, I had to, do these exercises. Big face, small face looks like this. You go, like that for big face, and then you go for small face. So you open your eyes really, and your mouth really wide for big face, and then you scrunch your face forward for small face.

So even if you're in a waiting room, you can still go to the bathroom, you can find a quiet corner and just do some tongue twisters. And the tongue twisters can be the classic ones that maybe everybody knows. Unique New York, and you exaggerate the mouth muscle. Unique New York, and you start to breathe and use more of voice.

So you do the tongue twisters and the big face small face and try to get your breathing and your voice going  and you'll just feel so much more awake and energized. There's more other warm up techniques you can use but just those two will really set you up for success and you'll, you're doing something silly and goofy so it takes away a lot of the nerves. So we'll do a  big face, little face,  and then a unique New York, red leather, yellow leather, how now brown cow. And you just do, you do those and you're ready to go. 

Katty: Thanks for giving us the sendoff here to really, finish this conversation with energy and with passion.

 The Artisan Podcast is brought to you by the good people at Artisan Creative, a digital, creative, and marketing recruitment firm with 27 years of experience, placing freelance and full time talent across multiple verticals.  For more information, check out ArtisanCreative.  com and we look forward to meeting you.