SPICE IT FOR A HOME RUN!

Ever been in a situation where you have

the focus of just a few of your audience members? The others having diverted their
attention to something else, their phones and computers or maybe chatting to a
person adjacent to them. Maybe you have wondered what the greatest difference
between an amateur and a professional speaker is, what makes it so challenging to
move your gaze from the pro?

The answer is emotional stimulation, or spices as I've chosen to name them. To

spice your presentation means to add emotionally stimulating content. If you spice
your presentation effectively, if you use spices perpetually through your presentation,
you can spellbind an entire audience for 90 minutes almost irrespective of the
subject itself. Yes! that is how MAGICAL public speaking spices are.

FREQUENCY

Now the next important question is – “how

often do you need to spice your presentation?” On average a public speaking
amateur has a spice every seven minutes, a professional has about one every
minute and a world class public speaker uses an average of eight spices every
minute.

ARE ALL SPICES CREATED EQUAL?

 No, they are not ceated equal. Spices
have different amounts of emotional impact giving them different levels of effect, a
good story, a good laugh, a strong provocation, a chock, an unpredictable twist or
cliff-hanger can give the highest score possible, whilst subtle emotional changes like
the use of strong varying colours, pace changes, functional gestures and functional
movements usually get a lower score.

To get the most out of spices, combine the strong with the weaker ones, create
strong variation and contrast all through your presentation. My suggestion for the
average or professional speaker would be one strong spice every minute and 2-3
weaker spices throughout that minute. If you are aiming for world class, we are
looking at 4-5 strong spices every minute and 4 weaker ones.

20 SPICES IN 20 SECONDS!

Here's a cool introduction video to spices.

And 39 seconds in to it you can see me educationally and humorously breaking the
then non-existing world record of "Spices per 20 seconds"!

1. But before playing it! Get a pen and a piece of paper. Play the 39 second to
59 seconds sequence a couple of times and see how many spices you can find!
When you feel that you've got them all, play the rest of the video!
2. Keep analysing spices like this in all presentations and meetings you attend
to!

Finally, why not challenge my world record of 20 spices in 20 seconds! If you do!
Send the video to us and if all the spices make sense and the support the subject
we'll treat you to something special!
CAN SPICES BE USED IN ANY PRESENTATION?

“Can spices be used in any presentation

and meeting?” Not only can they, but spices should always be used. In our modern
society our brains are craving emotional stimulation more than ever and when the
brain doesn’t receive stimulation it turns off. The only presentation that would benefit
from no spices is the presentation which represents content that you, for some
reason, don’t want people to remember.

But saying that, some presentations enjoy particular type of spices. For instance, a
funeral speech would benefit more from metaphors, similies and stories then
provocation, raise of hands and mobile voting. So, use your common sense to use
apt spices for the situation.

YOUTUBE OR TED-TALK

If you are a YouTuber or want to deliver a

truly successful TED-talk, you will need to increase the number of spices by a large
margin! The simple reason being that the attention span on the internet is lower than
in real life. Have a look at one of your favourite TED-talks or YouTubers and enjoy
the brilliant pace of the spices. Sometimes they are down to one spice every five
seconds. Do the same and you will increase your success rate dramatically.

THE BEST ADVICE I CAN GIVE

 Teaching the concept of spices for several
years, I have learned that it is a technique everyone benefits from tremendously, and
there is one piece of advice I want to repeat, and that is to dare take the extra step.
Dare to use spices, challenge yourself, start discrete and then include more and
more, make them increasingly powerful. Your audience will absolutely love you for
using them.

One second piece of advice is to believe in yourself when delivering the spice. If you
believe in it you cannot fail, but if you do not believe it will work, the audience will
sense your apprehension and you will not be as successful. One of the most
challenging spices of all is Roleplay and that is true for me as well. In the beginning
when I was trying it out and playing with it I did not fully commit to the roleplay, but
after learning and being inspired by the British comedian Eddie Izzard I really just
decided to let go and that is where one of my big transitions happened as a public
speaker.

The picture is me, the year is 2019 and it was the first time ever I dared to try out the
spice to get the entire audience dancing with me. I am (to others) a terrible dancer
but I had a plan and I built the confidence and it the dancing has since then become
a huge success!

DOWNLOAD THE JP SPICERACK

Full resolution download here.

THE JP SPICE RACK

Spicing your presentation is what makes the fundamental difference! For the
average presentation add one spice every 2-4 minutes. For an excellent
presentation, add one spice every 1 minute. If you want to go PRO, add one spice
every ten to thirty seconds!

DRAMATURGY

Dramaturgy is the fundamental

combining element behind movies, books and life. In theater it is seen as the study
of dramatic composition and the representation of the main elements of drama on
the stage!

If you live life without drama, whether good or bad, life quickly becomes boring. The
same things apply to movies, books and most importantly in this chapter –
presentations, meetings and keynotes! That’s where emotional stimulation comes in
or "spices" as I like to call them.

But what’s very interesting is the way people generally “plan” their dramaturgy curve.
Obviously, most people don’t plan it all, which results in a dramaturgy curve that
starts out very strong and then crashes helplessly toward the end. Imagine living life
like that.
 Hey darling shall we get this movie; it says that it gets more and more boring
as it goes along.
 Hey love, shall we go on this vacation! It says it starts off with sunshine then
moves into rain which is elevated to a monsoon somewhere midway and then they
finish it off with a grand spanking stomach flu!
 No, you wouldn’t! But 95% of all people build their presentations exactly with
that dramaturgical curve. It’s even common among professional speakers even if not
as common.

Let me introduce to you, three dramaturgical curves for you to learn from and
follow.

THE CLIMAX

You start off slowly and build, and build,

and build until the audience is absolutely wild and ecstatic. The thing I love with this
one is that as you start off low, the expectations are low for the entire talk, but then
oddly enough, it keeps getting unexpectedly better and better and that surprise
contrast is beautiful to use and see. I like to use the dramaturgical climax in
speeches and meetings but sometimes on stage as well just for the fun of it.

THE WHALE

This is the absolute classic of classics.

The tail fin represents a good solid start where you grab everyone’s attention. You
then take it a little bit easier toward the middle and finish of with the boom! What’s
interesting with this one is that it requires minimal preparation but will still deliver
solid quality. For some unknown reason we human beings have such a limited
emotional attention memory that as long as you finish any kind of presentation of
with a strong boom, you’re good! The ending is a large part of the audience take
away and somehow often an interpretation of the entire talk.

THE JP ROLLER COASTER

This JP Roller Coaster is of course my

favorite, pretty obvious since I named it after me =). I use the classical whale as a
fundament; good start, fair middle and strong ending. But the defining difference is
how I play with three forms of contrast in the middle section of the presentation.

Contrast 1
The first one is where I create contrast between feelings where the most common
ones would be (fear vs pleasure) or (tears vs laughter) or (chock vs calm) or
(compassion vs egoism).

Contrast 2
The second contrast is created between (emotions vs logic) where I occasionally
remove all emotional stimuli and allow them to land in the logical reasoning of it all.

Contrast 3
There is actually a third contrast as well and that can be found in my delivery where I
move between (intensity and presence).

I believe a large part of my success as a speaker comes from the results I achieve
by building my presentations and key notes according to my signature roller coaster.

GETTING SERIOUS

One of my coaching services is what I call an "Activity Analysis". Its a simple tool in
Excel but with tremendous power! The tool allows me to analyse a speakers' live or
recorded video and plot every single spice they use, and index them according to
which hormone and signaling substance it would have produced. If I do it live I can
also take the audience response into account which makes it even more accurate.

What the speaker has at the end of the talk is a complete analysis of where the
Activity and Energy in the talk is low and where it's high, and by so they know exactly
where to and how to improve their talk. With the knowledge they get from knowing
which hormone and signaling substance was produced they can fine-tune their talk
to create exact emotional stimuli they want to bring forth - and by so, which decisions
and actions should be taken by the participants.
Now the second bit where I plot the signaling substances may be a bit to complex for
you. But you can definitely do the energy-plotting yourself! Here below you can find
an "Activity Analysis" that I have filled out so you can see how I've done it.
And here's the link so you can download and use it yourself!

In the near future, the "Activity Analysis" will be a fully-fledged service built into the
JP University. The tool will be available to you as a Public Speaker for purchase as
an add on, which will allow you to receive a professional analysis of your talk. But
until then, go ahead and play around with the template below yourself!

THE ANALYSIS
 THE COLORS

This section is not part of this chapter per se, however I wanted to give you an
explanation for why there are different colors in the "Activity Analysis". Each color
represents which signaling substance and hormone each spice produces
(approximately).

 Yellow = Dopamine
 Orange = Serotonin
 Grey = Endorphins
 Blue = Oxyotcin
 Black = Testosteron
 Green = Cortisol

As we can see, and what is important in a talk, is to start your talk by inducing
oxytocin (bonding) and ending with testosterone (action). More on this subject will be
covered in a future chapter as it's an entire subject by itself. Until then you can learn
more about your signaling substances in both the Storytelling course and the WOW-
self leadership course here at JPU. If you don't have the entire Matrix in JPU you can
also watch my TEDx talk "The Magical Science of Storytelling" which will give you
more insight into the subject!