Dr. Robert Portnoy, Founder and Master Trainer at the Learn to Present Academy, helps professionals transform dull, lifeless, needlessly confusing, and cluttered presentations into captivating and memorable experiences that magnetically focus attention and energetically drive results.
Applying his expertise as a Mayo Clinic speech pathologist and Fortune 500 corporate trainer, Dr. Portnoy observed how business goals are often compromised by broken communication. Managers who criticize rather than coach, customers whose needs are ignored, scientists whose technical jargon confuses instead of clarifies, and long-winded executives whose crucial messages get lost in pointless details are just a few of the communication disasters that can cripple a business.
According to Dr. Portnoy, ineffective presenters are losing clients, customers, and audience attention nearly every minute of every interaction. Noticing this hole in the marketplace, Dr. Portnoy created the Learn to Present Academy. Get the complimentary toolkit here.
Whether through interviews, sales proposals, employee development, aligning goals to work performance, executive briefings up and down the hierarchy, success depends on clear and purposeful communication that is repeatable, consistent, and effectively managed, which Dr. Portnoy says can be reliably learned from the systematic method available through the Learn to Present Academy.
Let’s get to know Dr. Robert Portnoy.
Dr. Robert A. Portnoy, Ph.D., SLP, SPHR, Master Trainer-The Learn to Present Academy
Dr. Portnoy, you trained as a speech pathologist? What do speech pathologists do exactly?
Speech pathologists work to fix problems that keep people from talking normally. I’ll give you some examples to show you what I mean.
When I was in first grade, I couldn’t say my R’s and L’s like the other kids. I remember seeing a bird in our backyard and I yelled out to my sister, “Wook,” instead of “Look.” So, I went to speech therapy to fix what was called an articulation problem. After my session, another kid came to work on his speech problem, which was repeating sounds over and over instead of talking smoothly. He was stuttering. And years later, when my uncle tried to talk after his stroke, he couldn’t find the right words to match his thinking. His speech problem, caused by brain damage, is called aphasia.
What made you decide to become a speech pathologist? Was it your own experience as a young child or watching how your uncle’s stroke impacted the way he talked?
My own experiences paved the way of course, but what really motivated me was the idea of fixing a problem and the joy of accomplishment that came with it.
Fixing a problem, how so?
When I was a teenager, my father who was a TV repairman, taught me how to fix TVs. What a joy seeing the delight on the customer’s face when their TV worked again because I fixed it. When it came time to think about a profession, I wanted a career that could bring me that same sense of joy. One of my first college courses focused on how to help people overcome speech problems, just like I was helped way back in first grade. There was my answer – a career in speech pathology and I decided to focus on speech problems caused by brain damage.
Why did you choose that area?
Mostly because of what happened to my uncle after his stroke. One day he talked like everyone else. Easy to understand. The next minute, he was disabled. No one could understand him.
Imagine how that made him feel. He could still think clearly, but he struggled to find the right words to say. It must have been devastating for him. Sadly, that’s where my motivation came from.
Did it bring you the joy you were searching for?
That and more. I experienced tremendous satisfaction in helping my patients and their families understand each other again. The smiles, the connections that had been severed, now restored, the gratitude. There was my joy.
Now you’re a speech coach, which I believe is different from practicing speech pathology. How did that happen?
In my work as a speech pathologist, I was often asked to give presentations about my research and my clinical experiences. One of my first presentations was in a huge conference room. Just as I began, I looked up from the podium and saw hundreds of faces excited to hear what I had to say. What a thrill that was!
You found joy all over again, right?
It was exhilarating! And when I finished the presentation, dozens of people lined up to talk to me. I loved it. Sounds like you found a new profession as a speaker.
In part, as a speaker, yes. But more so as a teacher. People wanted to learn from me, and I wanted to teach them. I spent the next several years as a professor teaching students, supervising faculty, and I wrote two textbooks on leadership. The college where I worked even asked me to teach leadership to their business students.
How did you make the change from college teaching to coaching presentation skills?
Several students in my business classes were executives from a local Fortune 500 company, offered me a job as a corporate trainer, and off I went. In this new business role, I worked in corporate training centers teaching leadership and presentation skills to managers and executives from all over the world, who quickly turned to me for one-on-one coaching. Most of them wanted to become more compelling presenters, so that became my new focus which I could seamlessly do, thanks to my training in speech pathology.
So, in a way, you came full circle, right?
I suppose that is right. The difference was that these executives were already relatively normal speakers. What held them back was their inability to hold the attention of an audience. Either they were too boring or too technical, or both. When they started talking, people stopped listening.
How do you fix “boring”?
Great question! The secret sauce is to change the presenter’s mindset. Most presenters talk about what’s important to them as presenters instead of focusing on why the audience should care. What bores an audience is a presenter who doesn’t connect with them. People want value from a presentation. The challenge is to figure out how to position your content while delivering that value. To say that another way, a great presentation is about the audience, not about the presenter.
Changing a mindset is one thing, but don’t presenters need to know how to make people listen? Of course, the mindset sets the foundation for your presentation. Your skills need to do the rest.
So as a presenter, what skills do I need?
Let’s stick with the mindset idea for now. The very first thing to do is to focus on what’s important to your listeners, not on what’s important to you. Whether presenters realize it or not, listeners want answers to four questions. Those are: Why should I listen to you in the first place; why should I care; what do you want me to remember; and what do you want me to do?
What if listeners never actually ask these questions?
As your listener, I may not, but you can be sure I expect the answers nonetheless, which if I don’t get them, I’ll stop listening. So, prepare your presentation with these questions in mind, then structure what you will say around the answers.
That’s great advice! I never thought about a presentation like that before.
Most presenters don’t. Instead, they just jump right in and assume their material will speak for itself, which is a surefire way to shut down a listener’s attention.
Okay, what about the skills?
Back to the mindset for just another minute. When you answer those four questions, you will be delivering your presentation from your listener’s point of view. There’s your secret sauce for conquering boredom. By hearing the presentation from their point of view, your listeners will get from you what’s important to them. This new mindset focuses on value. The skills to deliver that value focus on variety.
Say more about variety.
Sure. We all live a fast-paced life, which means that we don’t pay attention to any one thing for very long. By building variety into the way we present, we as presenters first have to capture attention. Once attention is captured, we need some changeups to reignite attention before it fades.
Changeups?
Yes, here’s an example. When a presenter from the financial consulting industry describes an expected rise in interest rates, his changeups can first capture attention and then different changeups can sustain it. He could start off by talking at a rapid pace by saying, “We just heard the Feds will probably raise interest rates by ¼ percent.”
Immediately after rapidly saying that phrase, he could slow his pace considerably when saying, “Everyone take a deep breath, stay calm, and remember, our investment strategy is long term.”
So, his changeup would be speeding up, then slowing down, right?
Yes, at least one of his changeups would be the speed, his pacing. Another changeup could be how he emphasizes certain words. Maybe saying particular words louder or longer than other words. Let’s consider what he said again, this time with different changeups...
“Everyone take a deep breath, stay calm, and remember that our investment strategy is long-term."
He could emphasize the word “deep” by saying it in a louder voice, prolong the word “calm,” and then pause after saying the words “and remember” before finishing.
That makes sense. What other changeups could he use?
The ones I’ve mentioned so far are changeups in the presenter’s voice; in other words, what his listeners hear. He could also use changeups in what they see.
By using gestures?
Yes. In the same example, when he says, “Everyone take a deep breath,” he could open up his arms in a widening gesture showing that he’s reaching out to everyone. He could also show what he means by the word “deep” by moving one hand up high and moving the other down low.
We hear about eye contact all the time and for many of us, it seems awkward to do that, almost like staring at people.
Eye contact is often misunderstood, particularly when thinking about how powerful it can be. Instead of staring, which I agree can make people uncomfortable, use your eyes to look at one person at a time. Talk only to that one person for a few seconds, then drop your eyes naturally, then look up at another person.
Making eye contact in this way makes people feel engaged and personally drawn in. It certainly helps to lock their attention so the presenter can drive home a key point.
These are great skills. What other skills could keep people paying attention?
Telling stories, not just for fun or entertainment, but to help drive home that key point. Remember how I answered your question about what speech pathologists do?
Sure, when you told the story about speech therapy as a young child.
The reason I told that story was to bring you into my world. It was as though you saw that bird in my backyard and then heard me yell while mispronouncing my words. The story continued as I told you about the other kid, the one who stuttered, and then ended with my uncle’s devastating loss of speech. All of that was a story. I could have just answered your question with the facts about speech pathologists. Instead, the story pulled you into my life and then answered your question in a way that made the answer meaningful to you and easy to remember.
And it made me pay attention.
Yes, hopefully, it did just that. Stories are powerful tools that presenters can use to harness and funnel attention so that the point they want to drive home will be heard and long remembered.
At the beginning of our interview, you talked about the joy you wanted from your career. Are you finding that joy as a speech coach?
There’s no joy like seeing the change in somebody who has been quiet and shy and nervous all their life. Someone who’s been a monotone and boring presenter. Seeing them all locked up and stiff and looking down at the floor. And then watching what happens as the coaching starts to take hold. There’s nothing like witnessing the confidence that beams from the person that you’ve helped, so proud of what they’ve accomplished. That’s why I do what I do. No matter what I may have given them, they give me back so much more – that burst of joy that I will savor for a lifetime.
How can we get started if we want to take our own presentation skills to the next level, maybe even to top-tier presentations?
Actually, it’s easy to get started. Just download “The Ultimate Presentation Skills Toolkit” with our compliments from our website. It focuses on the listener’s point of view and will help you build a solid presentation right from the start.
What would be the next step after the toolkit?
We offer a self-study training program called “The Learn to Present Master Class” that includes our proprietary training system, video demonstrations of actual presenters, quizzes, assessments, a final exam, and a certificate of completion. We also offer one-on-one personalized coaching and group training to corporate teams, schools, and professional associations.
This has been a wonderful interview, Dr. Portnoy. Thank you for sharing your ideas on how to deliver top-tier presentations.
