Presentation Summit 2022: Conversation with Jim Endicott

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    Jim Endicott is a nationally recognized executive speaker coach and in partnership with his daughter, Amy Wolff, travel around the country (and occasionally the world) to help speakers at all levels communicate their important messages in ways that foster deeper levels of audience trust and engagement. Jim has been a Jesse H. Neal award-winning columnist for Presentations magazine and supports clients ranging from Fortune 50 senior executive teams to smaller company teams in sales, marketing and corporate communication – Portland to Boston to Brussels and Abu Dhabi.

In this conversation, Jim talks about his participation at the upcoming Presentation Summit 2022, being held on location in San Diego, CA, and virtually this year from October 9 to 12, 2022.

Indezine.com is the official media partner for the Presentation Summit.

Geetesh: Jim, you are doing two sessions at this year’s Presentation Summit. The first is a workshop called Special Delivery on Sunday, and then you are also delivering the Broadening Your Role session. Can you tell us more about both your sessions and what audience members should expect from attending them?

Jim: The first workshop, Special Delivery, is a fun and interactive pre-conference workshop. Our small business has been fortunate over the years to have coached a broad range of individuals; from some of the big corporate leaders you see on the national nightly news to small local nonprofits and about everything in between. Those experiences teach you a few things.

In the time we have in this session, I want to cut right to the important stuff. There have been hundreds of presentation tips and technologies promised to us as game-changers, but in my experience, a few simple things make 90% of the difference. (I’ll share those and give a few participants an opportunity to try them out.) Also, in our biggest presentation moments, it’s most often not our PowerPoint decks that drive our anxiety through the roof, but rather the things we can’t see; poor preparation, history with attendees, unresolved self-image issues, or past failures we seem incapable of releasing. I’d like to share some stories about those things and how others overcame them.

In this session, we can’t solve all of life’s issues in a few hours, but we can have a candid conversation about a few important skills to master and how to view the mental battles you may be fighting.

The Broadening Your Role workshop is near and dear to my heart because it’s my personal story. I was not a natural entrepreneur when I started my business and to be honest, it was a pure hail-Mary career move. Add to that the fact I was also not a big risk taker and well… I wasn’t exactly the poster boy for new business success. Yet, my small business grew from designing PowerPoint decks back in 1998 for a few thousand dollars apiece to years later standing on the big stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center late on a Sunday night helping one of Intel’s top executives prepare for his keynote role the next morning. It’s been quite a ride and we see ourselves as very fortunate and exceedingly blessed.

I’ll take this session’s attendees through my journey and the many steps along the way, but more importantly, help empower and encourage them to find their next level too. They’ll learn how to honestly assess their current value proposition while getting ideas for how to extend greater and greater value to those they support. And in this discussion, I think they’ll be inspired to find a higher trajectory for their personal career and income. The world is full of opportunities right now. We’re going to explore how to go find it.

Geetesh: As the Presentation Summit enters its 20^th year, what are the defining moments of change in the presentation industry these last two decades, and where are we headed in the near future?

Jim: It seems everything has changed and some things haven’t changed at all.

Twenty years ago (actually 30), we were telling business presenters not to read their slides, don’t use so many bullets, and to build better skills to ‘connect’ with their audience. Fast-forward to today, we’re telling presenters the very same things!  Painfully, most presenters today fall into many of the same old patterns as their parents. It will always be easier to be average but there’s a price that will be paid over a lifetime in influence and income.

The technologies we use, however, have fared much better. We’ve gone from the early days of electronic projectors in 2002 (think $7-8,000 and 20 pounds) to routinely doing virtual presentations instantaneously to people around the planet from our home offices. In retrospect, perhaps technology has promised things it couldn’t really deliver in terms of human engagement and softened our resolve to improve ourselves.

So Geetesh, I’ll take a wild guess at the future and say I suspect our presentation skills coaching business will be going strong 20 years from now. But one thing is clear, all of us will now need to become proficient in both virtual and in-person presentation mediums (sometimes at the same time), and ‘good enough’ will be the mantra of the painfully average. Hopefully, what the last twenty years has taught us all is that technology will never trump the human element and for us to be everything we aspire to be, we can never tire in the pursuit of personal growth.

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