Meet Tim Riesterer..
Tim is my Uncle, and a phenomenal speaker. As most young kids growing up, I had no clue what my uncle did for a living. I knew it had something to do with sales. Growing up in a family of salesman, I was never interested in this career route. Once I started doing more medical education and speaking, I reached out to my dad and my uncle for some advice on speaking. It was then that I began to realize that although I wasn't selling a product, but a concept.
I realized that my uncle worked as a coach for companies, helping them perfect their product pitches. He helps people build presentations that will make customers engage immediately. Sales is a dog-eat-dog world, and you have very little time to sell your concept before they say "next."
Our job as educators is to convince our audience that what we are teaching is worth their time. It's not that they don't want the information. The issue is that in an era of readily accessible self education, there is very little reason to sit in a class and listen to a horrible teacher. I believe the incentive for warm seats comes from the need to be awarded continuing education for license renewal. This also can be done online, self paced, and in your underwear (right Sam?).
So how do we keep our audience engaged?
In this podcast Tim talks about keeping your audience from falling asleep in the figurative "hammock." The audience will remember about 70% of what you say in the first five minutes of your talk, 20% of what you say in the middle, and 100% of your conclusion.
How do we typically open up our presentations?
The majority of medical presentations I see open up with:
1. Disclosures
2. Objectives
3. Epidemiology
Can you see the problem? When the audience is most engaged, we are talking about stuff that is almost completely useless in their day to day practice. This structure is flawed and needs to be tailored to compliment what we know about neuroscience.
Ginger Locke, Michael Herbert, and many others are always posting pictures of their class utilizing the whiteboard to learn/teach. They commonly use the hashtag #whiteboardwars to place them in a feed.
My goal is to stir up some questions and dialogue for Tim to answer in a podcast episode to follow.
