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 wi