001: Communicating with Inspiration and Clarity with Mawi Asgedom

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I am here present at the Mawi Learning worldwide headquarters in Elmurst with Mawi himself. Thanks so much for being the inaugural guest here on The How To Be Awesome At Your Job Podcast.

Mawi Asgedom
It’s my pleasure to be here Pete. I’ve been following your work as you know for a long time. It’s a deep honor to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Shucks. I’m the one honored, you’ve been a huge mentor. Thank you. We could praise each other for half an hour but that wouldn’t be very fun. We heard the bio, tell us a little bit what’s the personal life, the interest, what’s fresh and interesting for you these days?

Mawi Asgedom
I have 3 kids and a wonderful wife named Erin My youngest in only 11 months old, he is fresh and interesting and awesome. I love hanging out with him. Actually Pete this is bonus Pete, I had a good friend who told me that you can make a choice, you can say, “Hey my kids they wear me out. They tire me out,” or you can look at it and say, “These kids are gifts. I love every moment with them.” Having that attitude has really been a lot of fun with these kids so far.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. I’m so glad to here that they’re not a drain, they provide energy and that’s cool and you’re having and they’re just adorable. Hanging out we were playing some of the Frozen game on Xbox I remember.

Mawi Asgedom
Sure. That’s a good memory.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty engaging, pretty engaging. As well as the game everyone plays who escapes me, where you built stuff. What’s it called?

Mawi Asgedom
Minecraft.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I should know that. Minecraft.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah Minecraft.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Minecraft as well. Good times. They’re adorable. It’s cool. You’ve got so much stuff to say. I want to quickly here … You have an inspiring story, many people have heard it, many audiences ask you to maybe share it a bit more briefly so we can get a taste of where you’re coming from and then we’ll unpack a lot of stuff there associate with the inspiration and the clarity that comes through in your communication which I think will be really valuable to hear.

Mawi Asgedom
Absolutely Pete. I was just watching America, it was last month when the Powerball got up to 700 million, everybody was going nuts. You know what I was thinking Pete? I was thinking I already won the lottery just to come to this country, because I used to live in a refugee camp in a small hut made of straw and mud in Sudan. Had no hope, no chance that I’d get to go to college and have my own business and have this wonderful family like I just described to you. I probably would have been recruited into a rebel group in the Ethiopian Eritrean war, I’m from Ethiopia originally.

Instead I was resettled in Illinois when I was in first grade, and learned English. I had a whole brand new opportunity in life. Like I said, it’s like winning the lottery. My parents always taught me, education is the way. Get educated, right? Had a lot of ups and downs but eventually I was able to make my dream come true of going to college, graduated from Harvard University. One of my favorite memories is to see my mom, her beaming face on graduation day. After that I feel lucky, the US isn’t just a place where you can go to college, it’s also a place where you can be a business professional.

You can pursue your dreams in so many ways. Folks that are here on your podcast, they take it for granted that they live in the economy that we live in, where you really can start and be a part of so many types of business. Even to have a podcast like this, doesn’t exist everywhere. Deeply, deeply appreciative just of the opportunities I’ve had, and excited to share a few of the things that I’ve learned along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Thank you. You can sometimes experience the hour long, hour and a half long version. How many times would you say you’ve done the speech where you’re sharing your inspirational journey? Hundreds?

Mawi Asgedom
I’ve spoken to over 1,000 school districts around the country in more than 40 states, places as far away as Taiwan, which they just invited me back last week. I’ve shared it everywhere. It’s a lot of fun, but you’ve also got to keep it fresh by adding lots of stuff, otherwise you can get tired of telling the same old story again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. I want to dig into this a little bit here, talking about, you’ve got some pretty cool credentials on the speaking front. You were the commencement speaker at Harvard for 30,000 folks there and have done many other big audiences there, as well as the writing front with your book, “Of Beetles and Angels,” that was a quarter million, I think, sales, and are doing another run soon you mentioned. Great stuff. I’d love to maybe dig in a bit on each of these sides, the speaking side as well as the writing side, with the courses and such, to get after what are some key take-aways in terms of rules for success. How do you structure your communication so that it is inspiring, that it is clear, that people connect with it?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. That’s a great question and I always found it funny when they show those surveys where they say that people are more scared of public speaking than they are of death whenthey survey people. I think for a lot of professionals it brings them a lot of anxiety, “Oh I’ve got to present in front of my boss, or the board of directors.” I used to work for a consulting company, “We’ve got to present in front of the client. What if we don’t do a good job? If I don’t present well enough I might not get that promotion.” People get so nervous, you’re being judge in front of others.

I’d love to share a few thoughts that can hopefully be helpful to folks. One of the most helpful things I learned was, I remember I was speaking Oklahoma. I was a young speaker, it was maybe my first year I was 22, 23, had just graduated from college. They asked me to share my story, so I got up there and I told the whole story. I was a refugee, came over. I told every aspect of the story, and the principal, he did me a huge favor. When people give you feedback Pete, if you listen to that feedback it can change your life, instead of getting insulted by it.

He did me a favor, he said, “Hey, you know what son? I love your story, but you’ve got to remember something. Even if you’ve been asked to share your story, the speech is not about you. Even if you were a refugee, it’s always about the audience.” You’ve got to frame up and always ask yourself, “How do I make this relevant to the audience?” To me, that’s the number 1 rule of communication, whether speaking or writing, is if you don’t know what audience you’re speaking for, or what audience you’re writing for then you’re in big trouble. In fact people ask me, “Hey Mawi, do you ever get nervous when you present?” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s when I don’t know who the audience is.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah?

Mawi Asgedom
If you were to tell me, “There’s a group of people in the next room, you don’t know who they are, you don’t get to see who they are. You’ve just got to speak.” I’ve got to tell you that I don’t know what I’m doing. The first thing I’d advise to anybody is, when they’re being asked by a boss or a coworker or even maybe it’s a synagogue or a a church or a mosque and they have to present something, you want to step back and you want to think, “Okay, who’s my audience? What are their challenges? What do they worry about? What keeps them up at night?” What a lot of professional speakers do, which I’m sure Pete you’ve done this in your speaking career, which I know you’ve spoken all over the country, is they actually send out questionnaires, where it’s very detailed.

I always know the demographics, the pinpoints, all that kind of stuff. I even go as far as having surveys that I send out ahead of times. The last conference I spoke at last week, to be able to have a PowerPoint slide where I can tell them, “Hey guys, I asked you guys what your top challenges were. I have written anecdotal stuff but I also have survey stuff where 38% of you said it was this, 42% of you said it was dealing with conflict in this way. Guess what guys, I’m going to share a lot of things but you can bet halfway in my presentation, some part, there’s going to be a major section addressing your top 2 pain points. We’re going to take care of that for you.” I think there’s nothing in my opinion more important than starting with your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay that’s fun. I’m imagining in a corporate environment, that sounds fundamental.

Mawi Asgedom
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Know your audience. I guess I’m wondering, in practice what are some ways people fail to do this in a work environment?

Mawi Asgedom
Sure. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re presenting to some clients that are coming in. You’re working with some folks from Texas or something.

Mawi Asgedom
Right? Let’s say that they just came from a town that has been having a lot of hardship with the downturn in oil or something like that. Having thought about that a little bit ahead of time, having thought through some of those repercussion, making sure that you’ve taken that into consideration for any things you’re going to be talking about. That’s an important thing, that’s a big deal right now in Texas. We’re talking right now in February 2016, oil is $30 a gallon. Thinking thoughtfully, and really what I want people to think about, what it does for you Pete is, instead of the pressure being on you, like, “What am I going to say that’s so brilliant?” Your focus is now on, “What can I do for them?” That’s what frees up your genius. When you’re looking at it as, “I have to look awesome,” the stress goes up, anxiety goes up, and you can’t even get to the point where you’re creative and flowing. That’s really where that insight is, it directs your energy and your creativity in a much more powerful way.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes sense. It sounds like the word self-conscious, it’s like I am conscious of myself and then that’s freaking me out. I guess I’m also thinking about, in practice you can see this a little bit in terms of the slides people choose to use. It’s like the slides are for them, “This is my outline because I don’t know what’s coming next.” As opposed to, “This is something that will serve you as a handy visual reference.”

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I’ll give you another example of that. There’s a client I have that’s my biggest client. When I speak to their board of directors, I know what kind of people they are, they have low attention span, they don’t like to read a lot of stuff. The font, I have a rule, doesn’t go less than 40.

Pete Mockaitis
4, 0.

Mawi Asgedom
4, 0. That means I have like 6 words a slide. When I’m doing a workshop to that same client with a different group, I might have 3 or 4 bullets with a font of 24 because I know what the attention span in that group is. I thought it through. Again, knowing your audience, knowing how they process things, the kind of decisions they’re used to making, the kind of presentations they’re used to getting is very important. I often preview my slide deck against my top champion for that meeting. I would preview it, for example I’m working with the curriculum department there, I’d preview it with the head of department, he’d get back to me and say, “You want to change the font size. You want to do that.” Again, you have to work with whoever’s inviting you to go present, to help you understand what’s going on and get their feedback, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. At Bain we did that often, we call it pre-wiring, because we had to have a jargoning term for everything. It made all the difference. It just flowed, it’s amazing how big decisions could get made because it was almost a formality. The main players had seen it in advance and it went. Okay very cool. Audience is number 1, primary, fundamental. Any other critical rules there?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I heard something once from one of the top speakers that I think a lot of people would say of the last 50 years, spoke to a lot of corporations as well. His name was Zig Ziglar.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Goals!

Mawi Asgedom
That’s right man.

Pete Mockaitis
I listened to that with my dad.

Mawi Asgedom
That’s right, he had that southern twang, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-uh (affirmative).
Mawi Asgedom
He had locked up that market, right? He said something, I was at a conference one time in Hawaii and had the pleasure of hearing him speak. He said something which blew me away. He said that at this point in his career, he was in his 60s when he shared this, 60s or 70s, twilight. He said he figured out that speeches always went much, much, much better when he rehearsed them day, even if he had already given the same speech 1,000 times.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Mawi Asgedom
I thought to myself, “If Zig Ziglar, the top of the top of the industry, who makes millions of dollars doing this, who has all these stories that seem to come out of nowhere. If he’s saying, ‘Guys it ain’t natural for me.’ If he rehearsed every time … ” I do the same thing, if I have a speech at 7:00am, I wake up at 5:00am Pete. The head does not shave itself. I shave the head, I shave the stuff. I get up pretty, I already have my deck. I rehearse the whole thing, even if I’ve already given the presentation before. It’s the extra little magic that you get. You get that from rehearsing.

That’s what separate the excellent from the incredible presentation. The good, from the excellent, is that you took the time to actually rehearse that and think about, be there in that day in time. A lot of people get lazy. They say, “Well it’s going to be too much work. I can just scroll through it,” or, “It’ll be too rehearsed and polished.” No, no. It won’t be too rehearsed and polished, you will just be more comfortable. You’ll be more relaxed and you’re going to have a much better connection. By the way, one other rule I have is, things always go wrong with presentations. The mic doesn’t work. The other day I was doing a presentation and the PowerPoint system they had wasn’t working.

Pete Mockaitis
Now the computers update themselves without your permission.

Mawi Asgedom
I’m telling you.

Pete Mockaitis
The robots are taking over.

Mawi Asgedom
I’m telling you man, it’s crazy right? If you’ve rehearsed ahead of time you can just go to the next room. Say, “I need 5 minutes,” get out a sheet of paper, re-outline it without the slides and do your job. Under no circumstance by the way is it okay to say, “My PowerPoint’s not working so I guess that gives me excuse to do a bad job.” No. Do you want to think like a professional? As a professional under all circumstance you bring your A game. You don’t give yourself any room to make excuses. You’re out there, you present, you hit a home run. Rehearsing is a core part of that.

I rehearse all the time. Last week I had one of my biggest keynotes of the year and I lost my voice at the end of the day. It’s probably because I was MCing at night as well. But earlier, I had rehearsed the entire presentation. Everybody said, one person came up to me afterwards and said, “Mawi, you spoke for 50 minutes. How do you remember all that stuff?” I told him, “You know what? I put about 40 hours into that.” I put a lot of energy and time. Anyone who’s listening to this podcast, if you have a really important presentation coming up, where you have to do well, do not skip the step that even Zig Ziglar did not skip. You’ve got to rehearse, take it seriously. It’s effort and work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m convinced. I’m convinced. I’ve seen that in my own speeches. It seems like there’s more little uh’s, um’s, little vocal pause that slip in if I rehearse even the day before, as compared to the day of. I’m always balancing, how early should I wake up? Will I be less energized? Is there a downside to that? I hear that, the prep the morning of, excellent. Any other key rules?
Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I would say there are some other tips out there. I would say what I said earlier, which is expect things to go wrong. It’s that if you’re giving a speech and someone falls asleep, if you’re giving a presentation and the CEO who makes the decisions stops paying attention, if you’re giving a speech and the power goes out and you slides go out, again the natural thing to do is to panic and to think, “Crap, what the hell is going on? I don’t know what to do.” Also that voice in your head that makes excuses like, “It’s okay for this not to work out.” No, what separates the amateurs from the pros is, they go into it and they say, “Under circumstance I’m going to do a good job. If things go wrong, I expect them to go wrong.” I’ve had fights break out in my presentations before. You can use that as a teachable moment if you’re ready.

Pete Mockaitis
Was that in a high school or a corporate environment?

Mawi Asgedom
In both quite frankly, okay? You could use that as a teachable moment. You can say, “Hey you know what? There are some factions here. Let me teach you a teaming method that will reveal that and will show you what’s going here.” You’ve got the be ready for everything. Really, people expect the world to be fair to them and everything to work out, it’s not a fair world. Things go wrong all the time, what makes it fair is your response. A professional response is, “I’m going to use this somehow or some way to still get the job done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I like it. Very good. Any more on the speaking side or should we shift gears to the writing side?

Mawi Asgedom
I think there’s a lot more I can share on the speaking but I would love to get over into the writing and share some stuff there.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Your book, “Of Beetles and Angels,” was a huge smash success, sold a lot of things, copies. That’s cool. You’ve got another run coming here. I’m currently ogling, or is it ogling? Admiring … I’m looking at your Cody award for your leadership course that you’ve got going. You’ve won an award for this online leadership course, which involves lots of writing. Whenever I’m chatting you, like, “Hey what’s going on? How are you doing?” It seems like there’s a lot of editing that you’ve got going on. I’d love to visit a couple of these points. You said to me once that even though you did history and English at Harvard, you learned more about writing a sentence much later than you did at that time in college, despite all the papers you were writing, despite all the brilliant knowledge that they were pouring into your noggin. Tell us a little bit about that.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. Writing, sometimes I call writing, I refer to it as guerrilla warfare. You get stabbed more often than not. That’s saying a lot for someone who’s a refugee who fled guerrilla warfare.

Pete Mockaitis
What do you mean by guerrilla warfare?

Mawi Asgedom
It’s that, just when you think you’ve seen everything and it’s all good, and I missed that there was not momentum. I lost momentum with those extra 3 sentences. I just had an extra 7 prepositions I didn’t need to have in that paragraph. I lost, I wasn’t engaging enough in this way. What I’m getting at is, what kills you with guerrilla warfare is when you don’t pay attention do details now you got stabbed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Life and death.
Mawi Asgedom
If you want to nail writing, I’m telling you, if you want to be good that’s how I look at it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Mawi Asgedom
You’ve got to look at the details. People get really lazy with their writing and it really hurts them. I’ve written 8 books now. Each one has required a lot of editing. What really helped me understand it was, like you said I graduated from Harvard, I was a history major, I won awards there for my writing as well. When I wrote, “Of Beetles and Angels,” I had an editor who had worked for the Seattle Times. He was used to having, and his editor beat him up, to fit everything into a 160 words in a column. Most of us don’t have that experience, we have the opposite, write a 20 page paper, write a 18 page paper.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true, yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
But really, what’s harder, they say it’s harder actually to give a 5 minute speech than a 50 minutes speech.

Pete Mockaitis
Wasn’t there a famous person like, “I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have the time.”

Mawi Asgedom
Exactly, right.

Mawi Asgedom
That’s a quip that’s been retold many times. Same thing with writing, it’s much easier to write endless amounts of stuff that’s not that good than to be crisp and good. Working with this guy, he looked at my book, “Of Beetles and Angels,” I’ve never seen so much red ink in my life. There was blood everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Guerrilla warfare.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. Another tip I will give for anyone on writing is, when someone gives you feedback, especially if you put your heart and soul into writing something you think is pretty good, you’re going to be mad. You’re going to be like, “Are you joking me right now? Pete Mockaitis wrote this brilliance, how you guys say this about this?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s brilliant.

Mawi Asgedom
You’ve got to always take a day, take some time and think about it. Don’t judge it right away because usually people have some merit when they give us that feedback but we want to judge it right away. That’s one of the things I learned. What this guy, Dave Burger, did for me was, he really helped me understand a couple things. One of them was how to get rid of unnecessary words. This is also very important in PowerPoint. There’s a lot of PowerPoints that could be a lot better if you cut out all those extra prepositions, all the unnecessary garbage. For example a simple thing that I learned that is a signal, the kind of thing that I now do regularly for all my writing is, something simple like the phrase, “In order.”

Pete Mockaitis
“In order.”

Mawi Asgedom
“In order,” we all use the phrase, “In order,” a million times. It seems like a harmless phrase. But if you’re trying to fit 6 words onto a PowerPoint is, what I learned is you can pretty much always delete that word.

Pete Mockaitis
“In order.”

Mawi Asgedom
If you say, “Pete is going to the restaurant in order to eat,” you could just say, “Pete is going to the restaurant to eat.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Mawi Asgedom
“My company is going to work with your company in order to increase sales.” No, “We’re going to work with you to increase sales.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Mawi Asgedom
That’s what … A lot of where, when I say, “Wow, I’m really looking at someone as a master writer,” it’s in their ability to delete unnecessary words, and getting good at that. That’s one of these other-

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “At this time,” “Now.”

Mawi Asgedom
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got any others? Any key phrases that need to go?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I would say, “So that,” you usually don’t need that, “that,” you can just say, “So.” Instead of saying, “He proposed to his girlfriend so that he could marry her,” “He proposed to his girlfriend so he could marry her.” Again, it seems innocent, to even those of us who went to schools like Harvard. It seems like yeah, it’s a perfectly fine sentence. When you get in with the folks who actually really understand the mechanics of sentences, they’re able to distill it and I challenge anyone on this podcast, it’s actually pretty fun to do. When you’re working on a PowerPoint or something like that, to say, “Hey, how can I be as clear and concise as possible?” Knowing that the more words I have, the more my central message might get lost.

In our courses for students that we create, you will students if there’s too much text on the page. I’m always challenging my team, first of all how do we lead with engaging hooks that make people want to stick around? If we haven’t engaged and hooked someone it’s over. You have to hook people. Then from there, can you boil your point down to a simple, kind of pithy, kind of like bam there it is, then flush it out and then quickly give the users some application points and end the lesson, make it. I compare that next that to a lesson that endlessly draws on and says, “This and that, and that,” hasn’t hooked anybody, doesn’t have good examples, doesn’t have a key central point. These are all fundamental elements of communication.

Pete Mockaitis
Now let’s talk a little bit about engaging folks in the course. Did you tell me that you had the highest completion rate in your course of all courses? It was a crazy stat about the completion rate.

Mawi Asgedom
There’s a stat. My partner, my biggest partner is an organization called Florida Virtual School. Last year they had over 200,000 students at their school. We do all their leadership courses for them. There’s over 100 courses that they offer. The courses are of every kind, it could be biology, biology, math, different math courses, whatever it might be, driver’s ed. Last year out of all the courses that they offered that had more than 500 students in them, one of our courses had the highest completion rate, even beating out driver’s ed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Mawi Asgedom
That means that more students who started our course completed it.

Pete Mockaitis
Very nice.

Mawi Asgedom
Driver’s ed is a very easy course, trust me I’ve seen the course.

Pete Mockaitis
People want their driver’s license, they’re motivated.

Mawi Asgedom
They’re motivated, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
If you go into it with prioritization of engagement, saying that that’s a key value, people don’t prioritize enough Pete. They’re like, “Let me just convey this information, and people are just going to like it.” No. How are you going to make it compelling for them?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us, how do you make it compelling for them?

Mawi Asgedom
It goes back to what we talked about before partly, okay? Know your audience, think of what stories and examples are really going to relate to them. Again you’re talking to those guys from Texas, do you have an amazing story about something related to the oil industry that will really capture their attention if that’s the industry you’re in. Stories are fantastic. A lot of times with PowerPoints someone will have 86 different text and fonts and stuff up there. One powerful image.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Mawi Asgedom
One powerful image and just one word, you can talk about that for a few minutes and really capture people.

Mawi Asgedom
Right? Then bam, right? It’s amazing. That’s one of the things I would say for sure.
Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us, what makes a story engaging and amazing and rocking, in terms of bringing that?

Mawi Asgedom
Sure. What I like a lot of times is … I’ll give you an example of 2 stories. Pete went to the restaurant, he ate, he came back home. Pretty boring.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Pete went to the restaurant, he got robbed, he got beat up, they stole his money, and he couldn’t remember which way home was. What’s going to happen next? What’s the difference? There’s some conflict in the second story.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Having some tension, some conflict, is critical for a good story. Without tension it’s boring, automatically.

Pete Mockaitis
Like any movie or literature, yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Absolutely. Understanding what tension is appropriate like, “Hey guys. Last year this division and our team lost 90% of sales, had 90% decline in sales. Some folks are saying it’s because of this, this and this that happened specifically.” You tell that story in there, you’ve got their attention. You’ve got to use the language that appeals to them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. Stories, engaging, concise, what else?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah, I would say a lot of times people lose sight … This is something I had to really learn over time, people don’t lose sight of momentum. Just because you have one slide that’s a good slide, and the next slide is a good slide, understanding the rhythm that an audience is going to experience in, or a presentation in, is critical. Like knowing when you’ve made too many points in a row, knowing when you need to have that checking in and saying, “Hey guys, what did you think about this point? Was there any questions about this one? There’s a lot of other groups when I’ve gotten here that asked this.”

Really watching for momentum and what’s happening is critical, because a lot of times people will tell you, “You know what? All these sentences are fantastic, all these paragraphs are great, but they lost the rhythm of the writing.” They lost the rhythm of the deck and they don’t quite understand why it’s not a good deck or why it’s not a good piece of writing. That’s something that if you look for it you will find it. Always check for the right momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, when you say rhythm and momentum, you’re telling me one rhythm or momentum mistake would be if it’s like, I’ve got example, example, example, example, but instead I should mix it up, like there’s a joke or there’s an image or a story, what do you mean by …

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. What I mean is that, you’ll see this in writing a lot, someone will describe the hills for too long.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Okay? Someone will describe even conflict for too long.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Like they were constantly getting beat up and they didn’t realize the audience needs a respite here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Mawi Asgedom
The same thing happens in the corporate world when you’re presenting. Understanding when you’ve shown too many examples of how sales went down. They don’t to see 150 examples of that. You’ve killed it, you should have transitioned over to, “Now how can we lift sales back up?” You should have had a moment for the audience to talk to the person next to them, where you say, “Hey, has it been true at your organization? If so, how?”

Being able to space in, when you present and when you write, those interactive moments for people to process and learn with each other, critical when you’re doing a PowerPoint presentation, being smart about that. I actually space those out. I write them in ahead of time. I plan, if it’s going to be a 45 minutes presentation and I have my deck that I have written out, I know exactly the key engagement questions I’m going to ask, which slide I’m going ask it at, whether they’re going to talk to each other or only going to think about it in their own head. A good presenter has through all that ahead of time and has planned for it.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know if there’s any magical rule of thumb but you said 45 minutes you’ve got the engagement things planned, do you have a rule of thumb you’re using? Like, every 15 minutes, or don’t go longer than 9 minutes?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. This is something I thought about a lot. I think for 45 minute you probably can’t do … It depends on the group size first of all, but let’s say for example you have an audience and it’s going to be more than just a handful of people around a table, like 6 or 7. Which there you’re just having a conversation really. You’ve got to be more relaxed, even you’re being formal you’ve got to understand that you’re having a conversation. When it’s 50 people, 100 people, I don’t think you want to do more than 3 or 4 of those in 45 minutes because what can happen is, if you do too many of them it will take away from your presentation and what you’re teaching.

It will also force you to not give people enough time to talk with each other. You have to cut people off to quickly, because you want people to have a good 90 seconds, 2 minutes, to actually talk at least. Particularly if you’re asking provocative questions that really matter, they’re going to want to discuss with each other. If you haven’t asked provocative questions, then that’s your fault, shame on you.

Pete Mockaitis
2 minutes is what it takes because you’re so intense?

Mawi Asgedom
Hey, you know what?

Pete Mockaitis
Flight of the Conchords, couldn’t resist. All right, we talked about hooks, engagement, conciseness, concision.

Pete Mockaitis
Anything else in the writing world that we’ve got to capture?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I think also realizing your own limitations is critical. I think I’m an above average writer. I get people to edit my stuff all the time. I get people to look at it all the time and I learn so many key things from them. If you’re here, at this podcast, listening, understanding that we all need help with our writing and that’s not even that someone is a better or worse writer than you, it’s that they see angles or things that seem off or something that can be offensive, that you haven’t recognized.

If you have an important presentation, you don’t want to go into it as the only person who’s seen it. That’s one of the biggest mistakes you can make. It could hurt your career. I will stand by that, I believe it will hurt your career if that’s a habit that you have right now, that you consistently are giving these presentation. If you need to create a presentation buddy, you look at each other’s stuff and you give each other feedback and get a committee of folks to look at that. Because I know it can feel lone- Sometimes people don’t want to do it because they’re ashamed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Mawi Asgedom
They don’t want someone to review their stuff. I actually look forward to it. I love getting the feedback from people. The reason is, it does 2 thing for me. 1, automatic rehearsal. I have to have a completed product that I can share with you and go through it with you and explain it to you. There’s some rehearsal there. Then 2, it makes you better. Who doesn’t want to get better?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I like it. Feedback is love, as they say in one of my favorite places. LeaderShape. If you’ve got all your greatest hits, off the top of your head for speaking and writing, do we? You probably have thousands of them but … For time.

Mawi Asgedom
I would say actually, the one thing I would say is something that if you really want to take your presenting to a whole level and you’re willing to go for it, what I always relish the challenge of is, when you have an audience of 200, 300, 400 people, having an activity where they all engage with each other that’s a little bit creative. For example, where you say, “Hey, I’m going to ask you to meet somebody. I want you to act like this is the person you’ve always wanted to meet as long as you lived.”

You have 10 people in the audience not do that. The audience goes nuts, they meet each other. Then you have them think about, what about the people who aren’t doing this activity? This was a minute of their life but what if this is their life at your workplace for a year, 2 years, 5 years? That’s an empathy building activity. To get activities like that right requires some long term vision for your speaking, that you’re trying to build out some tools, engagement things.

I think that’s pretty tough to do. Come up with good activities that work for 400 or 500 people, 200 people, 100 people, that aren’t just like, “Talk to your neighbor about my last point, how does it apply to you?” Which there’s a place for that, we already talked about that. But there’s other engagement you can do to build energy in the room. That I would say if you want to venture off into that, that means you’re committing yourself to really pursue the understanding of speaking at the highest level.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’m intrigued. If I’m thinking about a smaller environment, you’ve got maybe 8 people in the conference room and you want to bring some energy in. Anything leap to mind that’s effective?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. What I would do for example if I had 8 people that I want them to do something would be, I might say, “Hey guys, let’s have some fun. I’m going
to give you an impossible scenario, I think this is pretty much impossible to solve. You are going to work with your partner. I’m going to give you 90 seconds and we’re going to see how each person does on this.” Something that’s a little more interesting, force them to talk to somebody, where it connects to what you were going to talk about anyway.

For example going back to an earlier example, here’s an impossible situation. You have a debt that is far higher, your debt obligation is far higher that your revenues and there’s no way you can pay it back. Here’s what you have, let’s all think about what would you do to get out of this? Let’s talk about that. That’s a real situation challenge right there, at the beginning that you could do. You could tell them, “It’s just to get your juices flowing guys, let’s think about this, let’s talk about this, because guess what, in business we sometimes have to solve impossible things and we don’t back down from that.”

Now you’ve got the energy there. I would say that’s a simple one off the top of my head, but what I’m saying is to really nail it for your audience you have to put 15, 20, 30 minutes of thought into it, run it by a person, experiment with it over time for your groups. No speaker can tell you exactly what that looks like for you. You have to develop that based on your own personality and the kind of audiences you speak to over time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, very good. Thank you. We’re in our final moments here.

Mawi Asgedom
Let’s do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d like to transition to the fast phase.

Mawi Asgedom
Uh oh.

Pete Mockaitis
In which we pull all the wisdom and cool discoveries that you and try to share them with the rest of the world. Here we go. Tell me about a favorite truth bomb. Something you say, and when you say it people start nodding their heads, taking notes, retweeting.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. A lot of people have financial problems and one of the things I always tell them is, “Everything is cheap until you multiply it by 12.” Okay?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Mawi Asgedom
That’s like all those recurring bills, you go out to pizza once a month, $40. That’s not bad. Multiply times 12, $480.

Pete Mockaitis
My Spotify.

Mawi Asgedom
I’m telling if you make $48,000, 1% of your money just went to pizza, but you don’t feel like you’re spending any money, right? Everything is cheap, tell everybody. All look at your recurring expenses. Everything is cheap until you multiply it by 12. Go ahead Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, we can retweet that, yes. Tell me about a favorite book, one that influenced you positively.

Mawi Asgedom
A lot of awesome books out there. One of my favorite books is a book by Gary Keller, founder of Kelly Williams, it’s called, “The one thing.” There’s a lot of business books out there that quite frankly I don’t think are that helpful because they will just repeat the exact same thing. Work hard, be nice, smile.

Pete Mockaitis
The first third of the book is telling you, “Right now this is the most critical book you can buy.”

Mawi Asgedom
I tell you, right? People waste … It’s rare when you find a good business book, or an amazing business podcast, that actually has some interesting ideas, some things you can use. This book, “The one thing,” it crystallizes some really amazing concepts. My favorite of which is that at any one point there’s one thing that any of us can do, just one thing, that is the most important thing in whatever sphere of our life.

As a dad, there’s one thing that I really should be focused on. I should really be thinking about what that one thing is, and I execute on it. As a leader of my company, there’s one thing that if I do it everything else becomes irrelevant or easier. What is that one things? How do I make sure I execute on it? I love that focusing and all the other techniques he has in the book. I think it’s wonderful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome, thank you. Tell us about a favorite website or blog or podcast or internet resource that you find yourself turning to a lot.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. This is kind of funny. I’m a big junkie for politics.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Right? We spoke about guerrilla warfare earlier, right? I’m always jumping over to different political websites. I see what’s going on, things like Politico, things like Washington Post, New York Times. I read those all the time. It’s amazing and interesting to see the wide variety of views in our country. I go to Fox News a lot, see what they read. I read all of them just to see how different people are thinking and how they’re interpreting the same piece of news. I find it fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite time saving trick or tactic that you use?

Mawi Asgedom
My favorite tactic is, when I can look at myself and I can say, “I’ve gotten more done by 10:00am than most people have gotten done in the whole day.”

Pete Mockaitis
When you’re waking up.

Mawi Asgedom
Those days when I’m up at 4:30 and I blaze till 10:00. I’m like, bam, I can just drop the mic at 10:00. I’ll drop it because I’ve rocked it so hard, I find that the world doesn’t bother me as much. I don’t have to respond to emails, I can think at a higher level. I’d say getting alone time in the morning for 2, 3, 4 hours, that’s when you get the most done in my opinion. That’s what I focus on a lot of times.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tell us, do you have a favorite quote or motto?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Piece of inspiration you return to.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah, one thing that inspires me. I know a lot of people have heard of Helen Keller, she’s a super inspirational woman who was deaf, blind, had so many challenges. She said, “I will never consent to crawl when I have the impulse to soar.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
For me to think about … Because people look at me and they’re like, “Mawi, you’ve lived in refugee camp, this happened to you,” a lot of challenge that I describe in this. They’re like … But when I look at people like Helen Keller, and for her to say something like that, that lights me up. Knowing that she wrote books when she was blind. Knowing that graduated from Harvard, as a female, in 1918 from Radcliffe which would later go on to be part of Harvard.

Knowing that she was an activist for the causes she believed in, when everybody else would assume she would accomplish nothing in her life as a deaf, blind person, when you see people like that, I think it forces all of us stop making excuses and to not live a life where we’re just not pushing up against our limits. I love that woman. I love her quote.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Favorite study? An experiment or a piece of research that you find yourself thinking about often or referencing frequently?

Mawi Asgedom
There’s a lot of great studies in education right now. One of my favorite research points is around ultradian rhythm. Which is basically the concept that … A lot of Harvard classmates of mine, a lot of type A personalities I know, they do some chest thumping and they’re like, “Yeah, I can work 24 hours straight. I’m a beast.” You’re a Bain guy, you know what’s up with this.

I saw this research that showed that actually you work much better if your work for 90 minutes, 120 minutes, and then right around that time you start to get a little bit tired. If you get up and take a walk for 10 minutes, or play guitar for a few minutes, or go step outside. It’s so relevant to people in the corporate world, that you’re actually not being productive if you are at the computer just staring, furiously typing away from 8:00 to 12:00.

Your body is going to give you signals at around 9:45. You’re not wasting time when you get up for 10 minutes to walk around. You’re not supposed to be, by the way, working during that break. Free your mind. I love that research. That’s how I’ve written 8 books, I take breaks strategically. I build it in.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. How about maybe favorite tools? Whether it’s a gadget or technology or software or thinking framework that you find using often.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I love, I can’t live without the Google system.

Pete Mockaitis
Google Maps and Google forms and …

Mawi Asgedom
All the business tools, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Calendar. It’s all synced up. My speaking calendar, everything is all synced up to my phone. You know what’s crazy Pete? I think we don’t even understand how good we have it. When I started my speaking career in 1999, 2000, if people wanted to see me speaking you know what I had to do Pete? This is going to seem so ancient to you. I had demo tapes made for a few thousand dollars. Someone would call from New Jersey, I’d have to go over to my bookshelf, get a envelop, put the demo in there, write a letter, do all the stuff, ship it out. It cost money and time. I had to have a staff member do that. We now call that one page on a website.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Mawi Asgedom
Okay? We don’t even realize how productive technology has made us. The internet and the Google systems, the things it allows to do, has completely changed my life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fantastic. How about a favorite habit that you found game changing, or helpful? You mentioned the early morning stuff.

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. I would say the early morning. One of the things I suffer from is insomnia Pete. Instead of sitting in bed from 3:30 to 8:30 I’m just going to get up at 3:30 and blaze and work and get it done. That’s a habit of mine that has helped me a lot the last 5, 6 years, is I refuse to just sit in bed for 6, 7 hours. I’ll get up and I’ll get a lot of stuff done. If I’m tired the next day, I’m tired, but at least I got my stuff done already.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Favorite way to find you if you want to learn more about you, what you do? Is it your website, or Twitter? What’s your thing?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah, mawilearning.com, M-A-W-I learning dot com. That’s a great spot. I’ve started using Twitter a lot more now because my team has made me basically. I am on Facebook. I would say MawiLearning.com is a great place to find me. We have a summer conference for folks who are interested in education. People also can meet me in person there, here in Chicago. You’ve been to that Pete, and I know you’ve enjoyed that. Yeah, that’s that.

Pete Mockaitis
Favorite parting tip or thought or a call to action?

Mawi Asgedom
Yeah. One thing I thought about a lot, and I think folks in the corporate world will really be able to identify with this. I hope I’m not convincing you right now to quit your jobs and do something else, because that’s not my intent. I remember when I was giving the graduation speech at Harvard, it’s a lot of pressure. It’s 30,000 people that you’re speaking to. It’s graduation day, you don’t have your notes, you have to speak from memory, and there’s not a podium it’s just a thin mic in the crowd.

They assign you a mentor to help you with that, who reviews your speaking. You have speaking training with him 2, 3 times a week. By the way, one of the things he taught, this is a more minor point, was, “You’ve got to hit the adjectives when you speak because the adjectives describe.” Instead of saying, “Wow, that’s a beautiful car,” you say, “That’s a beautiful car.” Now all of a sudden it pops. That’s another little speaking tip for people, hit the adjective.

Now, actually the really sad thing about the situation Pete is that he actually had cancer. He was in charge of the entire writing program at Harvard, very well known in the community. I got to work with him as he was at his deathbed. By the end I had to ride my bike to his house because he couldn’t get … It was a 15 minute bike to campus anymore he was so sick. He shared something with me that I’ll never forget. He said, “As I look back on my life I’ve had the chance to do so many things.” He said that the thing that really meant the most to him was that at the end of the day he did what he wanted to do.

It was really simple, but he says, “I didn’t spend my life doing stuff I never wanted to do.” He says, “That seems so important to me now.” That was pretty profound for me to hear as I was leaving Harvard, to hear this mentor who was dying of cancer, and he died very shortly after my speech, talk about how important that was. I would challenge all the folks on the podcast, are you doing what you want to do? Are you doing some stuff you don’t want to do? Some stuff you had no business doing? What are you going to say when you’re in Richard Marius’ situation later on?

Are you going to say, “Well I spent my life doing stuff I never wanted to do, or I didn’t want to do and now I’m at my deathbed.” To me that’s sad. By the way, I’m not saying do what I do, or what Pete does, because we’re all different. I have a lot of friends who love being in the corporate world. Who, that’s what they are meant to do. They enjoy it. Really that speaks to them. I have friends who are more like myself who float around a lot more and like running their own small business, that kind of thing.

I would challenge anybody here, life is too precious, we live in too great a time and too great a country where we have these opportunities to do anything less than what we really want to do. Search your heart, figure out what that is, and find a way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. Mawi thanks so much for kicking us off in this inaugural episode of the The How To Be Awesome At Your Job Podcast. This is always a good time hanging with you here in your smart thoughts. You can check out the follow up stuff, the show notes, transcripts, infographic, cheat sheets and fun stuff and links to all the goods at awesomeatyourjob.com/ep1, that’s the letters E-P, Arabic numeral 1. Thanks a lot.