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18th June, 2025 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Ed Darling – top tips for being a better communicator, presenter, and public speaker

Phil Bray 

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to June’s webinar. We have a special guest today, Ed Darling joining us from Manchester, I guess, Ed.

Ed Darling

That’s right, yeah.

Phil Bray

And we’re going to talk about top tips for being a better communicator, presenter and public speaker. Being a better communicator, presenter and public speaker. Ed, I first saw you at a PFS event in Manchester last year. I’m guessing.

Ed Darling

That’s right, yeah.

Phil Bray

And Ed is a coach, trainer and a public speaker and founder of a business called Project Charisma, which Ed will tell us a bit more about later on. So we’re going to get into some Q and A with myself, Ed and everybody else who wants to join in, in a minute, and on that topic, Dan, do you want to do your usual housekeeping?

Dan Campbell 

Hello, yes, I absolutely do. So welcome to today’s session. So what do we need to know? Well, we’ve got a very special guest with us here today, so make sure you get involved as much as possible. Ed’s going to help us speak better and be effective communicators. And of course, with communication comes conversation, so your microphones and cameras are not on, but fear not. You can absolutely still talk to us. So do that by sending us a comment via the chat, or you can use the Q and A box too and have your say. So ask questions about the things Phil and Ed are discussing. Tell us you agree, or, even better, tell us you disagree. Yardstick webinars are famously a safe space since we began them many years ago, and we’re all here to learn, so let’s make the most of the hour, I know I certainly will be. So the way the format will work is as usual, Phil will lead with his own questions for Ed, but I’ll be sweeping up your comments and questions at regular intervals. And for those of you that submitted a question beforehand, I’ve got them all here with me, so we’ll be reading them out as we go. And let me answer a question now that we often get quite early on, yes, we absolutely are recording today’s session. So a video will be sent out along with a summary of any links or resources mentioned. And of course, as per usual, we’ve got the real hero of the webinar, Abi Robinson, to thank for that. So a big thank you to her as ever for making sure that lands safely in your inbox as soon as humanly possible. Now I think I’ve communicated for quite long enough, so let’s have some of Phil and Ed shall we? Over to you guys.

Phil Bray 

Cheers Dan. Ed, let’s dive in and start with anxiety. Let’s get straight to the elephant in the room. And as I was sort of researching this and putting some stuff together, there’s so much research that shows that public speaking is one of the things that people fear most. But at the same time, webinars, seminars are a great way of communicating effectively to a large audience. So I want to start there. For you, what are the key differences between speaking at a face to face event in a room of people, compared to an online session like this on a webinar?

Ed Darling

Great question. Phil, thank you. On the anxiety front, I think it’s probably just best to say right out of the gate, I used to have terrible social anxiety. I used to have full on glossophobia, the fear of public speaking, and social anxiety, which is more generally, the fear of being the centre of attention. So if anyone’s watching and thinking, “oh my god, like I could never do what these guys are saying. I could never be a confident public speaker”. I used to be exactly where you are. And so believe me, it’s not a matter of being a gift that you’re born with. It’s a skill that you can learn, which I’m sure we’ll get into as we go further on down the webinar. But in terms of speaking on webinars, I think the biggest thing that trips people up, if they’ve got the skills to communicate in real life, they may be confident in front of an audience in terms of a presentation, and then you put them in front of a laptop with a camera and suddenly a lot of the charisma and their personality just starts to reduce. And I think it comes down to the technical aspects, first and foremost, framing, lighting and sound. So framing, right? The first big mistake that a lot of people have is they come on the webinar and they’re a little bit like this, the floating head right I can see from the chin up. And a little bit like in any public speaking scenario, we want to be able to see what you are doing. Public speaking isn’t just auditory. It’s visual as well. And our hands add to the comprehension that we allow people to feel when we are talking. I’m not just telling you what I’m saying. I’m visually representing it as well. And a lot of people, when they get on a zoom call or a webinar, they kind of feel like that’s out of the scenario, and they end up being a bit like a talking head on a radio. But that’s not what you are. You are still speaking. I can still see you. So you want to push your webcam back, tilt it down, and have a nice upper body torso experience is what you want to give people, right? So that’s the first thing, framing. Second thing, lighting. You want to have a light in front of you. A lot of people, again it might sound obvious guys, but if I turn my light off here that I have in front of me, you will see the effect is a lot different. It’s not quite as nice to look at. Looks like I’ve not had as much sleep tonight, so you want to make sure you are well lit. Not only is this going to give you a projection of being more professional, it’s going to make you feel more confident, because you can look at your own picture and go, “you know what? I’m looking pretty good here. I’m looking professional. I’m looking ready”. So lighting is another big thing that people need. And finally, we were just talking beforehand guys about my acting days, and when I was first starting out, I used to do all kinds of independent films. And this is where you are working with people who are putting together their first films, and they’re kind of still learning the ropes. And it’s very interesting, because if you’re on a professional production, you don’t really get to see much. You’re kind of in your trailer. You get asked to come on set, you do your few bits, and then you are away again. And you’re separated from the action. But when you do independent films, you’re right in the mix, and you’re kind of down and dirty with everything that’s going on. And you can see the whole process. And what I would always see is that people would focus all their attention on the cinematography, the shot, getting the picture right, make it look beautiful, and the sound would often get slightly forgotten, and when you would see the end result, you would be in pain, because you’d be thinking, “this looks great, and the script is good and the acting is good, but the sound lets it down”. And it’s exactly the same thing. If you’re on a webinar, make sure the sound is good, because people have an expectation of quality sound now, and if you don’t have that your words might be great, your content might be great, but people will still not listen because we just don’t want to hear poor sound. Final thing I’ll say on that, is to be aware of something called plosives and syllables. Plosives are the “P” sounds, and syllables are the “S” sounds, and you’ll notice that it’s not very nice to hear if it’s too strong. Now, my mic kind of reduces it a little bit automatically, but a lot of people have these headphone mics where the microphone is right, where the sound is coming out of their mouth, and all you hear is this, syllabus and the sounds, and we said seven silly sausages, and it gets very difficult to listen to after a while. So these technical aspects are usually the thing that people miss when they’re going from face to face public speaking to something like a webinar.

Phil Bray 

I’ve learnt three new words in eight minutes. That’s really impressive. Thank you for that. Yeah, glossophobia, who knew? I guess those tips that you talked about in terms of shot, sound, lighting, etc, they’ll apply as much to running a webinar as they will do an online meeting between a financial adviser and their client.

Ed Darling 

Absolutely. Yeah, it’s all exactly the same principles. Anytime you’re speaking through a camera, you want to be aware of these three things, the framing, lighting and sound.

Phil Bray 

Nice. And sticking on the topic of anxiety, if somebody is a nervous public speaker. What practical, tactical ways are there for them to ease themselves into it? Would it be, for example, just diving straight onto a stage? Would it be to run a webinar? Would it be to be on a panel? What are the practical ways that people can try and just reduce anxiety levels and start taking advantage of the public speaking opportunity?

Ed Darling

So guys when I was struggling with my anxiety, I did everything wrong. I didn’t speak about it, I didn’t look for any help. I avoided everything that started to trigger me, and I just got worse and worse and worse, until eventually answering a phone call or buying a train ticket would cause me to have heart palpitations. And I feel like the less you face your fears, the more your fears grow and the more you shrink. So you have to start doing the thing you’re afraid of, but you want to do it in a sensible way. You don’t necessarily want to chuck yourself into a keynote if you’re severely anxious beforehand, because you’re probably going to make things worse, right? So what I did back in the day is I hit rock bottom and decided to myself “right everything I’ve tried hasn’t helped. I’ve done CBT, EMDR, hypnotherapy supplements, I tried all of these things, and they kind of did a little bit, but nothing had really got to the heart of the problem”. So I just thought, “I’m going to throw myself into the things that I’m afraid of”. And I went to public speaking classes, and I went to acting auditions, which is where I ended up becoming an actor. So you want to try to find places where the stakes aren’t too high, where you’re going to feel the fear, you’re going to have that rush of adrenaline, you’re going to be given the opportunity to deal with it, but your career isn’t on the line, and your professional reputation isn’t going to be ruined. So LinkedIn Lives is a great one that everyone has access to. You can do a half an hour. Lunch and Learn, doesn’t matter if no one watches, doesn’t matter if two people watch it. That’s not the point. You’re just doing it because you’re doing it. I had a conversation with a new client just beforehand. He was talking about how they’re worried that people are going to judge if they put something on LinkedIn and no one likes it. And I think we all feel like this, but ultimately, no one’s really paying that much attention. So yeah, LinkedIn Lives, webinars podcasts trying to do small things at work. A good exercise is to kind of write this out on a piece of paper. You might put 1 to 10, and 10 might be the thing that you are most petrified of, the TED talk, the keynote at a conference, and then work backwards of all the different things that are slightly less nerve wracking than that to where you are right now. And there’s your track of what you need to do over the next six months and start working through them one by one. So yeah, I’d have quite a strategic approach to this.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, I can remember, we were helping a firm run a webinar last month, and they had 20 people sign up, and probably 12 or 15 will show up. And one of the things I said to the adviser who was running the webinar, “it’s the perfect number, first one. So if you mess it up, you haven’t embarrassed yourself in front of a load of people. But when you get it right, because you will get it right”. And they did, “then you’ve spoken to 12/15, people in one go”. And bless him, he dived in.

Ed Darling 

And you know what, Phil I think it’s just another interesting point here to think about, is that when people think about having 12 people on a webinar, it might sound a little bit of a flop, but if you had 12 people in a room, that’s a meeting room full of people, if you have 30 people on your LinkedIn live, that’s a small audience in real life. So we often underestimate digitally versus in person, what these numbers represent.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, and we’ve really seen an increase in the number of advisers, planners and other people in our audience today, diving in, running webinars, being happy to be guests on podcasts, running speaking events, that sort of stuff. We’ve seen a real increase. You’ve been doing this for a long time now. What are the three biggest mistakes that people make with public speaking? Three biggest mistakes. Just give us a quick fire list.

Ed Darling 

That’s a big question that is Phil so I’ll answer this by saying how I break down public speaking, which is four pillars, which is words, voice, body and mindset. And really, these are the four things that everything else falls into. So the words, what you say, your voice, how you say them, your body language, what you communicate non verbally, and your mindset, what you think about all of these things, and how you’re perceiving the situation going into it. So biggest mistakes, let’s start with words. I think the biggest mistake people have is not having a framework to follow or a structure, and they just kind of start talking with no end in mind, and then they end up rambling or finishing too soon, and they don’t get their message across, and the best thing you can do is start with a simple framework. Usually we use the rule of three in this which we can go into if you want to explain that in more detail. But essentially, it just makes your life far more easy, and it makes your audience’s life far more easy to follow what you’re saying as well. So that’s mistake number one, lacking framework. Number two, in terms of body language, I think that the big thing people get wrong is gestures, and a lot of people are just afraid to use their hands. And like we said before, public speaking is visual as well as auditory. Think about this. Evolutionarily speaking, we have been around for a lot longer as humans who didn’t have language and we spoke through our hands and our gestures for I don’t know, 250,000 years before we then finally invented words to put to that so we are far more ingrained as visual learners and listeners than we are as auditory and what a lot of people do is they have gestures which are very congruent. So let’s say, for instance, I want to tell you about my big idea that I just had, and I say, “guys, I’ve had this big idea. It’s going to be huge, and I really think that it’s going to be so exciting”. My words are saying one thing, my voice is saying another thing, but my gestures aren’t lining up with that. So you’ve got to embody the same feeling and emotion. “This is going to be a great idea. It’s going to be fantastic”. And now as the audience, you’re getting this congruence of what I’m saying. So that makes sense, guys, in terms of the gestures? Yeah, okay, third mistake, let’s talk voice and vocal variety. There’s many that I could choose from here to go in this guys. There’s a list of errors that you can fall into. I think the one that I probably see most common is probably filler words, and it’s something that I’m talking about all the time, but a lot of people maybe don’t think about it as much as I do. I was in Italy once doing a theatre tour, and I went from near Napoli in the south all the way up to Milan, stopping at places all the way. And every single place I stopped, I heard the same word, “allora, allora, allora”, every single Italian person said it. And eventually I heard it so often, I said to my friend who spoke fluent Italian, what on earth is this word “allora”? And he said, “Basically, Ed. It’s um in Italian”. It’s their filler word. So filler words are cross-cultural. They happen in all different languages, and they actually serve a purpose in conversation, because when I’m erm-ing or allor-ing, you can jump in, and it’s like how we can have a nice, fluid conversation. But when you are the only speaker, when you’re on stage, they no longer serve that purpose, so they need to be tuned down. And a lot of people, when they get nervous, they speak. Too fast they start using too many filler words. It becomes what we call a credibility killer, because people are paying more attention to the filler words than the actual content of what you’re trying to say. So structures and frameworks, gestures, filler words, they’re probably the three biggies.

Phil Bray 

And how do you remove your filler words when you’re speaking?

Ed Darling 

Well, you have to go through a lovely, painful process of developing vocal awareness, which is where for the next few weeks, and maybe everyone can do this, who’s listening. I want you to pay attention in every conversation to everyone else’s filler words, and every time you hear them, you’ll get a little bit frustrated and a little bit annoyed and your own filler words, which every time you hear yourself doing them, you’ll also cringe inside as well. But every time you get that little cringe feeling, you’ve developed one more little bit of vocal awareness, and eventually, with enough awareness, you can stop using them. Because the problem is that people are unconscious when they’re doing it on stage. I ask people to sometimes do this as an exercise. I’ll say, “go and speak for five minutes and then tell me how many filler words you’ve used”. And they’ll come off and say, “I don’t think I used any” when, in actual fact, it was every other sentence was an um, an erm or so. So you have to become aware.

Phil Bray 

Um, erm and so. Okay. Dan, we’ve got a nice link from Ed’s theatre tour to GP.

Dan Campbell

Yes. So GP says “being Italian, failing to use my hands when speaking is certainly not one of my issues”. Point taken. And we got a few comments actually, so we’ll sweep these up. So Helen posts a really nice comment here. “I’ve noticed a more supportive community for people new to public speaking here in the North East, events where you can practice and get feedback in a supportive environment”. And then Greg rightly mentions “it takes practice, but gestures, defining order, timelines, dates, etc, should be reversed so they appear correct to the audience”,

Ed Darling

Thinking of what he’s saying. Yeah.

Phil Bray 

Let’s deal with Becky’s question as well. I think it was Becky, because that’s the perfect question for this section of what Ed’s talking about.

Dan Campbell

Yeah, so this is one of the questions in my bag of pre- sent in questions. So thanks again for everybody that did that. So Becky says, “what tips can we have for when your mind goes completely blank on stage, and also tips for hosting panels?”

Ed Darling 

Okay, so mind going blank. So this is the kind of fear of every actor where you forget your lines, and it’s the same thing if you have scripted out what you want to say as a speaker. And this is the danger of scripting. If you want to be word for word perfect, that might end up giving you the best performance if you’re doing some really, you know, high level keynote. But the danger is, if you forget one bit, you might not be able to get back on track, and you’re going to have that mind blank. So I think again, coming back to the framework is really helpful, because if I know the kind of rough track that I want to talk about, if I’ve got a rough idea, I’m going to start with this story, then I’m going to talk about this problem, then I’m going to ask this question to the audience, then I’m going to give this solution, then at any point, I’ve kind of compartmentalise my talk. So if I do go blank and I forget what I’m saying, I at least know what section I’m in, and I’m going to be able to pick things up and carry on without it being disastrous. So yeah, if you can prepare in such a way that any going blank at any one moment isn’t going to be the end of the world, that’s kind of the best safety net, I would say. And then, more practically, if you do go blank, just give yourself a bit of time to pause. I think sometimes the more you try to chase remembering what that next word is, the more you can end up going around in circles. And you kind of have to just let it go, take a moment, take a breath, and it will come back to you.

Phil Bray 

There’s that famous Boris Johnson speech when he was Prime Minister towards the end of his premiership, when he was giving a speech, wasn’t he, and he was trying to give a speech based on a written script, he completely lost his way, and because he didn’t know the speech, he couldn’t get back into it. It’s probably on YouTube somewhere.

Ed Darling 

Yeah it’s hard for politicians, because that tends to be what happens. You know, they’re  just passed the document a few hours beforehand, and what they what they develop, is a skill called sight reading, which is where you are reading the text very briefly and then saying the words whilst reading it in such a way that it doesn’t seem like you’re reading it, but you kind of are. And they get very good at being able to do that, some of them in a way that looks more natural. So I guess, yeah, practically, they just don’t have the time to memorise things. But if he’d have had a rough idea, if someone had said to him, “look, here’s the text. But roughly speaking, we’ve got four sections of this speech. You can start with this, then go into that, then go into this”, he would have had the wherewithal to maybe get through it and make a better job of it.

Phil Bray 

Doesn’t strike me as a chap who would necessarily prepare very well for these things, but who knows.

Ed Darling

No, me neither.

Phil Bray

Let’s go back a step to the rule of three. You mentioned a few minutes ago. Can you talk about the power of the rule of three and how people can use it in their presentations?

Ed Darling 

Of course, yeah. So I love the rule of three, and it’s a bit of a mystery because no one really knows exactly why it is a thing. So the rule of three states that as human beings, we naturally appreciate and memorise things when they come in threes, we think it’s something to do with pattern recognition. As human beings, we’re all evolved to see things even if they’re not there. And three is the minimum number of anything that you need to start forming a pattern. If I put three dots in a row, you can start to guess where the fourth might be. So this is the kind of reasoning of why we appreciate threes. And the rule of three shows up everywhere. It shows up in ancient literature. Caesar said, “Veni Vidi Vici, I came, I saw, I conquered”. It shows up in modern politician parlance, “get Brexit done”, “make America great again”. All of these are called triplets, where they have this rhyming three. It also shows up in marketing. Nikes “just do it”  or “snap crackle and pop” right? So they are everywhere. And once you see this, you’ll kind of walk through life going three, threes all over the place. But they also show up in broader structure as well. So famously, every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. You go to the theater and you see a three act play. So we want to use this same rule when we’re speaking to be more articulate and more memorable for our own points. So there’s a few different ways you can use this. The simplest way is you just break things into three. If you ask me about public speaking, I’ll say, “here’s three things you need to know, very simple”. Or there’s a few other twists on this. So I like to talk about something called the past, present, future, which is a rule of three, where you talk about, here’s how things used to be, here’s how they are now, and here’s how things are going to be in the future. Or problem, agitation and solution. The problem is this. Agitate means it’s going to cause all these knock on effects. Solution that we’re going to have is this. So they’re all using the rule of three in different creative ways, and you’ll see a lot of people, again, politicians, personalities, people on TV, they kind of do this without even knowing it a lot of the time. It becomes so embedded that it’s just natural to talk in these triplets.

Phil Bray 

Nice, yeah, that leads on to a question from Colin.

Dan Campbell

Yeah. So Colin says, “how can you overcome that sudden attack of imposter syndrome in the middle of a talk, when you look around the room and think, in the words of talking heads, how did I get here?”

Ed Darling

Oh no I think I’ve just got it guys. Oh, it’s happening right now. Yeah, we’ve all been there. Sometimes you see all these eyes looking back at you and imposter syndrome. So the way I think about imposter syndrome is that the problem is we are all expected to be able to speak in public, especially in the professional world. It’s a given. It’s like you get to a certain level, you should be able to speak, regardless of the fact that most people haven’t been trained. They’ve not been taught how to do this, and they’ve never been given the skills. So if I was to hand you Phil a violin and say, “you’re going to step on stage in this orchestra right now, here’s your instrument”. Would you feel confident in that scenario?

Phil Bray

No.

Ed Darling

I thought you might tell me you played violin then so that wouldn’t work, but most people wouldn’t. You would have a natural lack of confidence, right? Because you haven’t got the skill set. But in public speaking, it’s just assumed that we were able to do this even when we haven’t been taught. And the further up the career you get, the further up the seniority level you get, the more feeling people think of themselves that I’m expected to be able to speak with confidence now. And so a gap opens up between where they are and how they feel and where they think people think they should be, my expectation and reality. And within that gap, that’s where the imposter syndrome comes, because people are thinking, “everyone thinks I’m this person who’d be able to be confident. I’ve reached this level, and inside, I’m secretly still very nervous and uncomfortable with imposter syndrome”. So in terms of how you solve that it’s less in the moment, and it’s more about a long term thing, building the foundations. But if you were caught off guard in the middle of a talk, I would say, focus back on the value you want to give. All these problems stem from being self focused, rather than audience focused, and rather than thinking about what’s going on with me and how I’m being perceived and what my problems are, try to reframe that back to “what am I trying to do here? What’s the value I want to give? How am I trying to help people?” That will pull your attention back to a more appropriate place.

Phil Bray

Thanks. Ed, so let’s take this from communicating to a large group of people to a small group. A lot of the people on this call are financial advisers, financial planners, mortgage brokers, and they will meet weekly, certainly monthly, new potential clients. They’ll all do an introductory meeting where they’re feeling each other out working whether they’re right for their client, the client’s right for them. What practical tips and sometimes these will take place face to face or over zoom, what practical tips have you got for people to build rapport quickly in those meetings with people they don’t know?

Ed Darling 

Yeah it’s hard isn’t it? When you meet someone for the first time and you have that kind of awkward first encounter, and especially when you go into that scenario with all of these expectations of wanting to make a good impression and hopefully get this person as a customer and a client. And so there’s a lot of mental baggage that you’re walking into the room with which can be quite difficult. Do these things tend to happen face to face, Phil? Or virtual? What would be the most likely thing nowadays?

Phil Bray

Dead nervous about my hands right now. Yeah, really self conscious about my hands. We did a poll on LinkedIn around this a couple of weeks ago, actually, and I’d say maybe two thirds, 70, 75% are face to face.

Ed Darling

Interesting.

Phil Bray

The rest are by Zoom. And generally speaking, not always, but generally speaking, it’ll be a face to face meeting in the financial adviser or planners office. I would say for mortgage brokers, it’s different, and it’s more likely to happen online, but for financial advisers and planners, it’s generally face to face. If anybody in the audience disagrees with that, then just put a note in the chat. But that’s probably face to face, head for most.

Ed Darling 

Yeah, yeah. So they’ve got a new prospect, someone who wants their services as a financial planner. They said, “right, we’ll meet face to face, and we’ll discuss how this works and how it looks”. And they want to build rapport in that first encounter.

Phil Bray

Correct.

Ed Darling

So the first thing to be aware of is something called the seven second rule. And the seven second rule is not the thing where you drop food on the floor and you can pick it up within seven seconds and still have a nibble. That’s the five second rule. Apologies for anyone who’s seen me make this joke before. I’ve probably said it many times now. But anyway, the seven second rule states that within seven seconds of meeting someone, we tend to start forming a first impression of them, subconsciously not aware we’re doing it, but it’s happening. And so within that first seven seconds, we are deciding, “do I like Abi? Do I trust Dan? Do I want to work with Phil?” And your prospects are going to be having those same thoughts happening to you straight away, you know? And we can’t help it, and people might think it’s judgmental, but it’s just human nature. It’s what we’re programmed to do. And so a lot of that is based on your body language, because that’s the first thing people see. So the first thing to make that impression count is make sure you’re not doing any of these negative body language bad habits that are going to give off a bad impression. So don’t have your arms crossed, because it’s called something called blocking, which means that there’s a block between me and my audience. It feels a little bit off putting. Don’t have your hands hidden, because evolutionarily speaking, we feel a little bit unsure when we can’t see someone’s hands. So Phil, you were doing the right thing before getting them out. Because the reason why our hands are our most dangerous thing, that’s where we would hold a weapon or we would conceal something. So again, naturally, if we see someone’s hands, and ideally the palms, there’s a bit of trust and transparency there. So I’d be saying, “hello, welcome. Good to see you” get a little bit of palm action in there straight away. Obviously a smile is a good thing to have. Eyebrows raised is a nice facial expression to go with. So there’s all of these little cues and these little tactics that we can use. Another thing is about positioning yourself. This is a big thing to do with rapport, and this often happens more problematically on virtual calls, where people might have two monitors, and they’ll have a monitor here, and you’re my new prospect, and you just come on the call and I’m going, “hello, Phil. Yeah, great to meet you. Yeah, really nice. Yeah. So yeah, we’re gonna be chatting about your financial planning today, yeah”. And immediately there’s this massive lack of connection, because it feels like I’m not paying you any attention. So you’ve got to be pointed towards that person, they’re going to feel more respect, they’re going to feel more attention, and they’re going to appreciate that. Because as human beings, we all like to be the center of attention in some ways. So these are all tactical things, to be a little bit more charismatic in the moment. But I think really, the more important thing underneath all of that is to have your mindset right. Because if you have the right mindset, a lot of these things just happen naturally, and we don’t have to think or force them, and that’s the ideal, you don’t want to have to go into every meeting going “right, are my eyebrows doing the right thing, and am I always showing my palms?”, and it’s just too much. So, it’s good to know these things, but it’s not necessarily great in the moment. So mindset wise, I’d be thinking, “right what am I trying to achieve here?” I want to connect with this person. I want to find out if we are a good fit. I want to give them some help, whether it ends up being a relationship or not. Let’s make this a positive encounter, and also, let’s think about how they’re feeling, maybe they’re feeling awkward, maybe they’re feeling a little bit intimidated by this conversation. They might have some worries and concerns. So let me put my focus on making them feel more calm, and then feel making them feel more reassured. And honestly, if you do that, not only will you help them feel that way, it will have a mirroring effect on you too. So yeah, give the person the thing that you want back in return.

Phil Bray 

And you were talking before we came live about the pin to pause. Now I’ve heard a lot of podcasters talk about the fact that there’s power in the pause. So whether there’s power in the pause or the pin to pause. Just talk a bit about how advisers planners can use pauses in their meetings to learn more about the person they’re sat in front of. Talk more about the power of the pause.

Ed Darling 

Well, I mean, Abi’s the Pinter master, as we know, because Abi was in a Pinter play, so she probably could share a little bit on this. And Dan seems like he utilises this in the most strategic way possible with his interviews, but yeah, the Pinter pause is this idea that in Pinter plays, he would leave these long pauses where none of the actors would speak, because it would force the audience to start filling in the gap, and then it would engage their mind. They’d be thinking, “what’s going on? What are they thinking? What’s happening?” Rather than it being spoon fed to them. And in the same way, with public speaking, a lot of the time, people want to fill every gap and leave no silence, because they are afraid of the silence, and so they just want to get through it as quick as they can. But they miss such a crucial thing in doing so, because those pauses are sometimes the most meaningful moments of your speech where people can reflect and digest, and it lets your ideas percolate. And it also, in a one to one scenario, lets people talk. So the other thing I’d be saying to these advisers if you’re having that one to one conversation, get the other person to do more speaking than you. You know it’s not, it’s not about you bringing someone in to just like blab through to them all the ways that you can help them, and all your services and this, that and the other, that’s not the best method. Get them telling you their problems, their stories, their pain points, be the listener first, and then you can actually give them a more accurate prescription of what they need. If you just come in firing off at them everything straight away. To me, that’s a warning sign, that’s a red flag that this person isn’t professional. So, yeah, sorry, Phil, did I answer the question? And I kind of quite forgot just exactly what the phrase the question was, but pin to pause or something.

Phil Bray 

Yeah, I think so. I guess the opposite of the pin to pause, is interruption. How do you, as a public speaker or as a speaker and communicator, stop yourself from interrupting the person that you’re talking to?

Ed Darling

Good question. Yeah. I think there’s a wider topic here, guys around mindfulness and presence, not to drag us off into woo woo land too much. But you know, a lot of people struggle to sit in silence for a few minutes. We’re addicted to noise. We’re addicted to thought, and we can’t stand stillness, because we’re forced to confront our own mind, which is going a million miles a minute. If anyone doubts this, I challenge you to go and sit for a few minutes after this in a room and see if you can just be still and calm and peaceful. Most people can’t. And I think there’s a translation there to public speaking, where we can’t stand silence and stillness in our lives, and we can’t stand silence when we’re speaking. We want to fill that gap as well, because we’re afraid of what might happen. So I think it’s about really learning to enjoy those awkward silences. I revel in them right now. Sometimes I do workshops, and I’ll be talking about this, and then I’ll ask a question that I know is hard, and there’ll be a long pause, and maybe a facilitator. If I was a facilitator a few years ago, I’d have been tempted to to jump in and try to carry on and say, “oh, well, well, what about this version and or maybe let me try and rephrase it for you, because I’m not comfortable with the silence”. But now I’ll sit there all day, I will wait, and I’ll smile, and we’ll have a laugh, and everyone else will have that awkward laugh as well, and it releases that tension, and then the ideas can come. So I would say, just get used to being more comfortable in silence and stillness. And the more you do, amazing things will come back from the person you’re trying to speak to, and you will give them that space for them to actually open up and talk about what they want to say.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Ed. Dan, there’s some interesting stuff coming through on the chat. One or two questions. Do you want to?

Dan Campbell

Yes, we are being spoiled here, guys. So let me have a good look through. So let’s pick up Chris’ question. So this is going to have in meetings via zoom or teams online. So Chris asks, “what is Ed’s thoughts on having your background blurred on a teams or Zoom call if holding them from home?”

Ed Darling 

Yeah. I’m not really lost either way, to be honest, guys. I mean, as you can see here, I don’t have the most amazing background going on. There’s nothing too stimulating behind me. So if I was to blur this, it wouldn’t make much difference. If you have got a nice background, and people can see a little bit then that can be good, like your doors, Phil, you got a few tactically placed things there that build your marketing is very thoughtfully done. So I guess it just depends on the scenario that you’re in. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with blurring, if you have to, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. Thanks, Ed, so let’s go to another question from GP. “So they ask in terms of body language, I tend to look into people’s eyes, and I much dislike if someone speaking to me is avoiding eye contact. Is there a statistical, so not moral right or wrong in terms of better engaging, or should I just mirror my prospect?”

Ed Darling 

Okay, like statistical as in, they’ve done studies and found out the exact amount of eye contact that you should hold and should be counting in the back of your head, “one second, two second, three second, okay, look away”. Yeah, you can overthink this far too much. And sorry, did the question say they get uncomfortable when the other person doesn’t give them eye contact?

Dan Campbell 

Yeah. So GP says, “I much dislike if someone speaking to me is avoiding eye contact”.

Ed Darling 

Right. Yeah, well, I understand that because it feels again, like we’re not getting the attention that we deserve and but it depends what else they’re doing, GP, because if they’re not giving you eye contact because they are looking over your shoulder and seeing if there’s anyone else worth talking to or checking their watch, yeah, that’s a bit rude, right? But if they’re not giving you eye contact because they’re looking down, because you can tell they’re a little bit self conscious, then that’s a very different reason for the lack of eye contact there. So I’d maybe pay a bit of attention to that. I always think about, in terms of the public speaking point of view, three reasons to share your eye contact. Reason number one, you need to get back the data from the audience. What do I mean by that? Are they listening? Are they paying attention? Are they confused? Are they engaged? Are they disagreeing? I’m going to be able to get a gist of that by scanning the room and seeing all these different facial expressions. And if I’m looking over people’s heads or staring at a point at the back of the room or down on my feet. I’m basically pulling the plug out of that data field, and I’m not getting any of it. So I can’t adapt. Why would I want to do that? Second reason, I want to make everyone feel included. Now, a lot of people, when they’re speaking to an audience, they find the one or two people in the audience who they feel most comfortable with, and they tend to just direct their eye contact at these people, at the ignorance of everybody else, whether they’re meaning to or not. But if you’ve ever sat in a room and someone’s been speaking and they’ve just not looked at you at any point, it can feel a little bit ostracising. It can feel a little bit like, “why have they not looked at me? Is there something wrong with me in this room?” And in the same way if you go to watch a band and you’re at the front row and the singer after playing the best song tends to look down, and they suddenly look at you, and you have that moment of eye contact, and you go, “oh, I was the best moment of the whole gig. They looked right at me”. So there’s something very pleasurable about having that connection. And when I’m speaking, I’m trying to make eye contact with every single person in the audience to make them all feel included in the conversation. Third reason, more of a selfish one, a lot of people, when they’re nervous, they think that looking into people’s eyes is going to make it worse, and that they are going to see this horrible, scary audience that hates what they’re doing, and they’re going to crumble. But actually, when you look at people’s eyes, it’s drawing your attention out of your own head into the room again, and it gets you more curious as to what’s going on. So the more you actually look at people’s eyes, the more confident you will feel, and the more present you will become. So three reasons to share eye contact there, guys and I use the word share purposely. It’s not about, what? What do people often say? They often say commanding eye contact, or kind of language that makes it seem like I’m dominating you with my eyes, when actually it’s not that. I’m including you and I’m sharing it with you.

Dan Campbell

That’s brilliant. And just to follow up on that, Dermott makes a good comment around that. “So one tip I’ve always used is not to look directly at someone’s eyes. Look at the gap between them. Still looks like you’re looking at them, but not quite as intimidating as staring right into someone’s eyes can be”.

Ed Darling

Well, if that works for you. That’s fine, but I would push back against that, and I would say, ultimately, what you want to do is try to get to a place where you can be comfortable looking in people’s eyes. I want to take you back into woo woo land, just for a moment, guys. I went on a meditation retreat last year, and we did this very interesting practice. I forget the Indian terminology for it now, but it involved what most people will think of the most cringy experience ever. After doing some meditation and some mindfulness, you were in a big room, 60 people, and you walked around, found someone, and then you just paused for a minute and stared into that person’s eyes. And for a while, everyone’s like “ah” internal trauma going on because you feel so awkward. But you know what? After a while getting used to it, your nervous system settles down, you stop reacting mentally, and you just start to actually look in these people’s eyes, and it’s a beautiful thing, and it’s a real shame that as humans, we’ve got to the point where we can’t look at people in the eye without feeling so much awkwardness. It’s ridiculous, really. So I understand it. I’ve been there, but we need to try to move past that, I think.

Dan Campbell 

That’s a really good point. So. I’ll read another comment out, this one’s from Karen, who says, “here’s a tip, make sure you’re looking into the camera so at your client, not at a screen, as you can then look shifty, and also minimise your own image so you don’t do that thing. I’ve seen people freeening or pouting as they are looking at themselves all the time”. So yeah, it’s a good point. Actually, I’ve been on calls where people are obviously looking at their own reflection and it’s quite off putting, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s a great point.

Phil Bray

We did a webinar last year with Rory Sutherland, somewhere in that hour Abi, there is a good point where Rory talks about how someone’s zoom background is the equivalent of the new suit, or the 2025 zoom, background, 2024 when we did, it was the equivalent of the 2010 suit. So if we could look that up, Abi, somewhere in that hour with Rory, it will be, it will be in there. So Ed, let’s find out a little bit more, assuming I can share the screen. And this doesn’t always go quite as well as we might hope, about how people on this call can work with you. And then we’re going to talk about how to deal with networking situations and social anxiety there. So hopefully I’ve filled enough there with filler words so everyone can see that screen.

Ed Darling 

Thanks, Phil. I’ll just be very quick with this, guys. There’s three ways that you can work with me. I do a one day masterclass here in Manchester, usually a few times a year, and it’s usually a small group of professionals who are wanting to jump in, get their first experience. They’re usually quite anxious or nervous. The next one, I believe, is in September. There’s a couple of places left. Second thing is my coaching program. We offer this to people both here in the UK and abroad, so you can do it both virtually and face to face, and it’s a bit more of an in depth program to take people from, again, usually nervous professionals, business leaders, who know they want to step up and be more visible, but they’re struggling to get there. Maybe they want to create a professional speech, or maybe they just want to do it internally. And we take them through a three month program where we build all the skills, we give you the confidence, we give you the chance to practice and help you to transform your skills. And the final thing we do is we go into businesses or organisations or events, and I run either keynotes, as I’m doing, I think, for the CII in Glasgow tomorrow or the day after. You guys this is your forte in the finance industry. So a 30 minute keynote for a large audience, or to train a team, and that can be anything from six people up to 20 or 30 people. So if any of those are useful, you can go to Projectcharisma.com, and that’s everything. Thanks, guys.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, Ed and I would commend everybody to go and check that out, and he’s very good at what he does.

Ed Darling

Thanks.

Phil Bray

So, we’ve talked about one to few communications in a client meeting. We talked about one to many communications on a stage, on a webinar. Let’s go into the middle. Let’s talk about networking event. And events when people on this call might walk into a networking event, a conference and look around the room and think, “I don’t feel comfortable. I’m really struggling with this”. Just talk about some of the top tips for dealing with social anxiety.

Ed Darling 

Yeah. I mean, I’ve been there, is the first thing to say and even nowadays, I’m very confident. But it doesn’t mean I’m confident in all scenarios everywhere. I think everyone feels awkward in those scenarios where you’ve got to go and meet people for the first time and kind of insert yourself into conversations, and it always feels like everyone’s already got their group, and you’re the only single person walking around trying to find a conversation to have. So I think the first thing to do is to be there, because a lot of people just avoid going to these things in the first place, right? So the first win is just getting your ticket and saying, “I’m gonna go, even if I feel awkward about it”. Then when you’re there, the next win is to say, “right, within the first few minutes of arriving, I’m going to go and just throw myself into a conversation with someone, even if it feels a bit awkward or a bit rude, I need to break the ice, because otherwise I might end up just bouncing around as a solo attendee all day, right?” And it’s going to get worse and worse and worse. The pressure builds like when you’re waiting to have your turn to speak. It gets worse over time, so get it out the way quick. And then I think the third tip I would give people is to have your pitch prepared. And the way I think about it,I think of a three part pitch that relates to the three questions you get asked, “who are you and what do you do?” Then, “oh, that’s interesting. Tell me a bit more”. And then, “oh, how did you get into all of this?” So I kind of feel like there’s three mini pitches for each of these three questions, and if you’ve done a little bit of work to prepare them beforehand, again, it’s going to take off a lot of the pressure in the moment.

Phil Bray

And for each of those three elements. What should people on this call be including in the three elements? Give us some tips for creating the perfect elevator pitch.

Ed Darling

Cool. Okay, so first question, right? You’ve gone to the event and you’ve bumped into someone and they say, “oh, hi. Phil, is it? Yeah, Phil, so tell me what you do” and what you kind of want to do in that first answer is, literally, tell people who you are and what you do so they understand. Make it familiar to them, so they actually understand. And it’s not just buzz words that have gone over their head and also spark their curiosity so it actually is interesting, and you might want to hint at who you do the thing for and what the value is as well. So if you’ve got a bit of a niche, or you’ve got a specific market, you want to be talking about these things, because you need to let people know, even if they’re not the niche, they might know someone who is. So the first section is kind of, yeah, explaining who you are and what you do, and weaving in a few interesting things that are going to get people to want to know more. Because a lot of the time people get to this question, they kind of say, “yes, I’m a financial adviser. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and I work for XYZ company”, and you’ve not left anything to be asked. First of all, and you’re not sparked by getting interesting questions to follow it up with. So that’s the first thing. Second thing, if you’ve done that, well, people are generally going to say, “oh, that’s really interesting. So tell me more about what it is that you do specifically”. And this is where you kind of want to get into the communication of your value. And the mistake people make here is, if we put it into three chunks, they get it the wrong way around. So when you talk about the value of what you do, you want to start with the big picture, and then go into the details. And what most people do is they start with the details, and they miss out the big picture. So if you ask me, “what do I do as a public speaking coach”, and I didn’t know this, I’d say, “right, well, we have workshops, and we do courses, and I have a one to one coaching program, and I work one to one with people and face to face but”, and it’s just like overwhelming, the best thing to start with is the promise. So my promise would be, I help professionals and business leaders to transform their skills and confidence so they can speak with charisma. That’s the big promise. I’ve thrown a big gauntlet down there. So the next thing we did after the promise is some proof. I need to say why it is that I can say this with so much confidence. So I might say I’ve been doing this for three years. I’ve worked with X number of clients in X, Y and Z industries. We’ve got this, that and the other credentials and blah, blah, blah, giving people reason to believe promise proof pillars is the third thing. Rather than giving people the nitty gritty details, just give them the broad brush strokes. So how it works is we transform your skills, body language, mannerisms, voice, we work on your mindset so you feel more confident, and then we get you ready for whatever’s coming up. See if you have a presentation or a pitch. We work together, and we make sure you nail it super easy to understand, right? Rather than what most people might go into if you’re a financial planner, I get you guys might be better at translating that into financial planner talk than I would be. But same thing, you know, what’s the promise that you have for your prospects? What is it that they ultimately want? What’s the proof? What can you say to build up some credibility in their minds? And that might be different for different people. And then, what are the broad brush strokes? What’s the process you take people through in a simple way? So that answers the middle question. And then the final question, guys, that often happens is people say, “well, how did you get into this? Like, this is really interesting, and what happened? What’s your story?” And this is where you want to have a little bit of a personal backstory to say, here’s how I came to be doing what I’m doing and why I’m passionate about it. So I don’t know what the typical career path of a financial planner is, but everyone’s got something interesting to say, and a lot of people don’t realise, but every life, human lives, are very fascinating. We’re all full of quirks and history. And if you can figure out something that is interesting to people, then tell them that. You grew up in a family that had terrible finance. Your mum and dad were awful, and it inspired you to be different. Or maybe you grew up in a great environment, where you’re around people who really had this nailed down. And you just took those skills from a young age, and you wanted to impart it on other people, but have something prepared where you can give people a little sense of that backstory. Because stories are more memorable than the facts and the figures.

Phil Bray 

Sounds like so much of that is down to preparation, preparing properly and being able to do that, just be able to breathe those three things.

Ed Darling 

Yeah, definitely Phil, yeah. And when I’m working with people, we go over your your 62nd introduction to death, because I want people to be so sick of it that you can pick them up and put them in put them in front of the most high pressure scenario, and someone says, “introduce yourself”, and they just reel it off because they’ve done it 1000 times beforehand. You don’t want to leave these things for chance. The most common thing that people do in public speaking is they introduce themselves. And yet, 99% of people don’t practice it, and they try to wing it every single time. And every single time. It’s a bit different, and they’re going “Yeah yeah so I am this, that, and I do this” and and every time they come away going, “I hate having to introduce myself”. If you prepared beforehand, it wouldn’t be so difficult.

Phil Bray 

That’s why when you’re working with people, that’s what you start with, isn’t it?

Ed Darling 

That’s the first thing we start with, yeah, most basic. How do you introduce yourself? I’m only teaching this because I’ve learned and been through it, through it myself, and I’ve made all these mistakes many, many times, and so yeah, we kind of learn through our own errors, but the more you prepare beforehand, the easier it is doing it for real.

Phil Bray 

So let’s flip this around. If you are at an event, conference, networking, etc, and you’re one of the people that feels confident, or at least confident enough to be there, but you see somebody else who is struggling, how can you help them?

Ed Darling 

Yeah, it’s a good question that Phil. I really like this question, and it’s making me think actually, because I’ve not been asked that before. But I think it’s about having empathy, isn’t it? If I put myself in that position, and I was the person stood on my own, feeling awkward, feeling a bit isolated, I think what you want is someone to come in and just give you that confident, warm energy. So the six, there’s six qualities of charisma that someone called Henry identified. And the first three are warmth, enthusiasm and passion. And I think the first warmth is the one that you want to think about here. Warmth is such an important thing that a lot of people miss. And so I would go up and have a chat with them and try to be really warm and make them feel a little bit more comfortable, and then introduce them to someone else. And if you can position yourself with it’s kind of like having the host mindset. This is a really good way to think about it. When you’re going into an event, even if it’s not your event, pretend it’s your event, right? If you were the host, you’d be really keen to make sure everyone’s included, everyone’s having a good time, everyone knows what’s happening. Takes you completely out of your own head. No host ever feels unsure about speaking to people right? Because that’s not the priority. They want to make sure everyone’s included. So if you have a little bit of that mindset, it’s going to allow you to bring the best of you to that scenario.

Phil Bray 

That’s very cool, host mindset. So we’re going to come to you in a minute Dan with some questions. Abi, could you just, if I do this, then this and that, could you just explain a little bit more about our next webinar? If that’s okay with you?

Abi Robinson 

Yeah, of course. Thanks, Phil. And firstly, apologies to Ed. Do not commit the communication faux pa that I did by thinking that shift and enter will just go down the line in the Zoom chat and not actually send the message, while Ed has other wonderful ways you can work with him. So please, I implore you, have a look at Projectcharisma.com after this, because I rudely interrupted, and you are quite welcome now to count as many filler words as you want that I come out with in the next 30 seconds. So yes, our next webinar is on July 23rd and if you’ve been following our blogs and scorecards over the last week or so, this will not be a surprise to you that this is our topic of choice we have been talking about, and we know that your potential clients are using AI and large language models like ChatGPT to find advisers, planners hopefully find you, and your marketing needs to be ready for that. So we’re going to be covering AI, LLM and marketing basics, the two ways that consumers are using them currently to find you and businesses like yours, and the things that you can do to improve your marketing, to make sure that if people aren’t finding you currently, they will be in the future. And as Phil has told us before, if we’re wrong and LLMs all fall down and burn, well, at least you’ll improve your marketing anyway, for humans and two minds are better than one. So it won’t just be Phil talking next month, we will also be joined by Lee Robertson, which is a name I’m sure will be familiar to most people on this call. So looking forward to it. It’s our last webinar before the summer break, so please make sure you scan the QR code and register.

Phil Bray

And spoiler alert, the LLMs are not going anywhere. Yeah. So this is a really important webinar, and looking forward to doing it. If you want to stay in touch with Ed, then there’s the Project Charisma website and a URL for Ed’s LinkedIn profile. Let’s leave those up on the screen for a few seconds while Dan we go into a few questions, please.

Dan Campbell

Yeah. Sure thing on the subject of filler words, another really quite confronting way to realise what your own filler words are is if you record a Loom video, because once you’ve recorded it, it says, “do you want me to remove all those filler words for you?” And you think, “I have not got that many”. But then when you do, your four minute video is now two and a half minutes, and you’re like, “oh, no. God, what have I become?” So, yeah, you can, you can absolutely use tech to fish them out for you. So questions, let’s go for a comment from Brian. So in the whole icebreaker mode, Brian says to people, “good question, what do you think I do? And, of course, hilarious responses en shoe”. So that’s an interesting way to approach it. Just deflect and get people to guess, yeah, but in terms of questions, so a couple of the ones that people did submit beforehand. So a nice question from Simon, who says, “would be great to hear about the importance of storytelling in presentations, and perhaps a formula for a really engaging one”. So I know we spoke about the power of three, but what else exists for a formula for storytelling, Ed?

Ed Darling 

Yeah stories are so underutilised, and especially in the corporate professional world. Again, stories are one of these things that predate a lot of our other language types, and so we are just ingrained to learn through stories more than anything else. One little framework that comes to mind. This is a rather well known one. I think a lot of people might know this, but it works very well, which is “soar vividly”, S, O, A, R, situation, obstacle, action, result, and then the vividly means, bring it to life. Raise the stakes. You know, put more descriptions in there. Storytelling is a real art, and I think there’s a lot of different things we could talk about, but a few things to think about is, you want to make sure that people can visualise in their mind what you’re saying, and sometimes just adding in little differences. I was walking down the street, I felt the cool breeze, you know, just touched me for a moment. I looked up and the sky seemed so blue that day, these little, tiny descriptions don’t have to overdo it. They help to really allow people’s imaginations to take hold of what you’re saying. And if, if your story is happening in someone else’s head, you’ve got them and then also raise the stakes as well. So whatever the story is, you’ve got to, you know, like, like in a film or a TV, there has to be something on the line. There has to be something worth fighting for.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. Thank you for that, Ed and I want to go back to a question somebody put in the chat a little while ago, because I’m quite curious as to what the answer is. It was Dermott that asked it. Let me just find it. “So one other important part of preparation for a webinar is to warm your voice up. People think it’s just for singing, but it applies to speaking too. So what can we be doing to warm our voices up, Ed?”

Ed Darling

Absolutely, I don’t know if you want to go through a vocal exercise right now, guys, before we finish, might, might be a little bit uncouth to do that right now, but there’s lots of different exercises you can follow, and what they do is they’re warming up something called your resonators. And what happens is in your head, you might not realise this, but our voice is resonating in different places. Our voice is resonating in your skull, in your jaw, in the cavity behind your nose, in your throat. And so different places resonate in different frequencies. So if you all might want to join me in saying, muuum.

Phil Bray 

Ah, okay. Dan, come on, Abi, letting me down.

Ed Darling

If you do a M, U, M, Mum, sound, you’re going to feel it more in your throat. If you do a nar, N, A R, nar, you’re going to feel it start to resonate higher up the throat. I won’t do it anymore because it’s a bit awkward, but there’s lots of these different noises that you can use. And the idea of vocal warm up is that you warm up all of your resonators. And the reason why you do that is because when they’re all warmed up, you have a more resonant voice. And a resonant voice is one that effortlessly carries. It’s not strange, it’s not tense, it’s not someone trying to project the voice and losing their vocal cords. It’s just naturally filling the room, very easy to listen to.

Dan Campbell

That’s fantastic. I like that. And I’m sure that the clips of us marring and barring available for consumption later on.

Ed Darling

That is a short piece Dan to share on my LinkedIn later on.

Dan Campbell

I’m sure Luke, our video editor, will have snipped that out first and have weaponised that. So I’m sure we’ve got that to look forward to. Do we have time for one more question just to end on? Yeah, let’s go for Paul’s question. So Paul asks, “how do you decide on the topic? So for example, questions to answer of your talk, do you ask the audience in advance perhaps?”

Ed Darling 

Yeah, the topic of your talk, if you think about three concentric circles overlapping, and one of them would be your expertise, what you’re good at, another one would be what the audience is interested in. And then another one would be, kind of what people need to know, the problem or the challenge that they have. And somewhere in the middle of all that is your best topic to talk about, which is going to be relevant to your audience, interesting to your audience, and also utilising the experience that you have. So yeah, that’s the starting place for me, but I think another thing that I like to think about here, guys, is if you’ve solved a problem for yourself, then other people will want it solved as well, big or small. So that could often be like a good kernel for a talk going forwards, problems overcome, challenges faced, etc, etc, yeah.

Phil Bray

Thank you. Ed, the council house bells in Nottingham are bonging. That means where our is up. Ed, thank you so much. I learned three new words in the first eight minutes of this webinar, and I haven’t stopped learning since. And I think everybody else on here will have learned equally well as well. Everybody go and check out the website. Projectcharisma.com. We will be sending out the recording of this later on today, with links to Ed’s site, a few other links as well, and of course a link to the recording so everyone can go and watch it back. Just leaves me to say, thanks Dan, thanks Abi, Ed, thank you very much. Fabulous hour.

Ed Darling

Thank you for having me. Guys, been a pleasure.

Phil Bray

Cheers. Everybody. See you next month.

Dan Campbell

Okay, guys, bye.