Delivering Powerful and Confident Presentations with Megan Heffernan

Effective communication is often as crucial as the brilliance of your idea or the quality of your work. Sadly, even a brilliant concept can lose its value without the ability to convey it effectively. How can you become a proficient communicator to ensure your exceptional idea is recognized? In this episode, we were joined by Megan Heffernan, the Founder of Megaphone Coaching. Our discussion covered the nuances of effective communication skills, their application in diverse settings, and the importance of self-awareness in public speaking. Megan is passionate about assisting individuals in improving their presentation abilities, whether in public speaking, sales demos, webinars, and beyond. Tune in to unlock your communication potential today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Delivering Powerful and Confident Presentations with Megan Heffernan Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the lessons I learned many years back is that, sometimes, just as important as the quality of your idea or the quality of the work that you do is how well you communicate that with others, how well you convey it. And, most unfortunately, sometimes, you could have a wonderful idea but if you don’t have an effective way to communicate that with others to get anyone else on board, whether it be investors, whether it be customers, whether it be people within your own organization if you’re more in a kind of a large corporate role, then that idea ends up not really being worth that much, even though it could be a truly genius idea, it could be something truly amazing. My guest today, Megan Heffernan, the founder of Megaphone Coaching, helps people with the communication of their ideas and communication of their work as well as building relationships. --- Megan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much. I am honored to be here. Super excited. Super excited. I’m always excited and I always love it when my guests are excited. Anyone out there in the audience listening, I hope we can get you to that point too where you’re in a place where you’re excited to be doing what you’re doing and you’re excited to be talking about what you do. So, Megan, tell us a little bit, just get us a little oriented about the people you work with and how you work with them. Thank you, Steven. I love --- the operative word here is “quality.” I heard you say it a couple of times and I’m in the business of elevating quality communication. That’s the currency I trade in, helping people think better of and put a little more time in and take greater care in their communication. And I use “care” actually as a product and an acronym of have your communication be clear for the C, aware for the A, regardful and refined for the R, putting the little polish on that communication, and engaged, connected to who you’re talking to. I think a lot of people walk around waiting for an opportunity to foist an idea onto a person rather than connect with them deeper in idea and I love, love, love helping presenters, any kind of communicator but presenters in particular, prepare for their upcoming communication, whether that’s a webinar or a gala or a town hall or a sales demo. Anytime words are leaving their mouth and needs to land effectively on somebody else’s ears, that’s the sweet spot, that’s so exciting, it’s organic, it’s in the moment, and it’ll never happen again. And so I love the gift of communication too because there’s this exchange of a person to person or a group to a speaker that won’t ever be replicated really. And I think we’ve fallen back, we’ve gotten away a little bit from protecting that connection and we’re relying on our mediums or our platforms, our resumes, things like that, to deliver our message for us and I think we could do better. So, now, what’s the difference between communicating in a formal sense, so your bread and butter of I’m about to go and give this presentation, I’m about to go give a sales call even or TED Talk or something like that, versus some of the more informal communication patterns that we see where you’re just at a bar, at a restaurant, at a gathering and you’re just trying to get people engaged in what you’re talking about? That’s great. No, thank you. If you were to look at my website and see a product list of services, I help with the formal presentation, presentation skills, storytelling, virtual effectiveness, and then it also says that I help with interpersonal communication, relational awareness as well, but what I ended up trying to impart onto people is there really shouldn’t be that huge delineation between that type of communication. To make the larger, grander front of formal presentation feel more informal, more interpersonal, more relational is what we’re after, where we were trying to replicate that one-on-one feel to a larger quantity of people. And there’s some tools that I’ve learned in coaching training and that I’ve practiced at the communication firms where I’ve worked and, now, as a business owner myself, one of my main principles is drawing that to people’s attention, that you already have the skills at your fingertips because you do it all day every day, we’re doing it right now, interpersonal communication, that we need to extend and we need to extrapolate out into these more formal settings and the goal is to kind of demystify that “other than” feeling, that public speaking is elsewhere, out there, different than, that it’s something to prepare for, that is something different in feel than how you and I might feel right now in this one-on-one interaction, because communication is like breathing, we’re doing it all of the time and I want people to feel like they have access to that, not just at the time, which when you have that date circled on your calendar of, “I have an event coming up,” it’s hard not to give it a lot of power and a lot of sort of mysticism and our physiology feels that, our body manifests that. So, I think our interpersonal communication gets us ready for that thing that’s on the calendar and we can be practicing every day all the time so that it doesn’t seem like, “Ready, get set, go,” it’s like, “Oh, I’m just doing this on a larger scale.” That makes sense. And so the same principles can apply, your CARE acronym, of being engaged, being polished, being --- sorry, I’m having trouble remembering with the first two letters were --- Yes, clear. Clear. You got it, clear, aware. Yeah, so all that stuff can apply the same when you’re just kind of talking with your friends casually, you just met up and you’re just having a conversation versus when you’re on stage in front of hundreds, thousands of people, potentially, it’s the same idea, the same methods need to be kind of applied to both situations. Absolutely. And there’s a methodology or a principle that I learned in training called the levels of listening or the levels of awareness. So I didn’t brand it or copyright it, it’s actually a principle I believe that has roots in the Navy SEALs or Marine Corps where they’re trying to teach self-awareness but also other centered awareness and then situational awareness. So, you can imagine if you are in a squadron or you’re out on the front line, you have an awareness of where your fellow soldiers are around you. And in community with that, there’s an energy etiquette type of thing where I take some of the oxygen when I speak but there’s the both of us here so I want you to have your fair share as well, in terms of that levels of awareness, and I give away this little teaching to my clients that has a two-way mirror film inside this little plastic holder and so the two-way mirror film is my kinesthetic, tangible way to illustrate this principle of levels of awareness because you can see yourself in the film, it’s self-reflecting, but then you can see through it to whomever you’re speaking to or your audience that you’re in connection to so they’re in existence all the while and then you’re holding on to it so there’s this idea of what is the gift we have in our hands? Well, the level three, and I can walk through the levels if you want. The level three is the situational. So these levels of awareness, this is something that, as you said before, applies to both the formal “I’m giving a speech to a thousand people,” as well as, “Me and my four friends are all out to dinner,” and every kind of other conversational communicational in between. Does it also apply to written communication? Does it also apply to like, if I’m going to write out a document or if I’m putting together a PowerPoint presentation or something that people are going to consume asynchronously, this kind of applies to pretty much any form of communication, right? It does. Any form of communication has a receiver on the other end, someone hearing it, someone reading it, and my intent with coaching presenters is who are you writing for, not so much what do you need to say. What do they need to hear in this moment? Because they’re there after all, we don’t want to begrudge them the learning. If we wanted to just write a white paper article or an opinion piece and post it and not have any kind of interaction, that is the medium of communication. But when there are others present, when it is intended for an audience, that audience must be accounted for. Otherwise, it’s not public speaking. So I kind of put the public back in public speaking. And sometimes they’re forsaken. So the level one, level two, level three is associated to me the speaker level one, what I know of this topic, level two, what I want you to experience and explore of this topic, and level three is our event. So, the speaker, the audience, and then the event. You can you can kind of break it down one, two, three like that but then there’s also some more granula