Why Your Virtual Talks Feel Sterile (And How to Fix It)
At the Green Room retreat in Boston, Joe Lazer used his stage time to workshop a brand new opener for his signature keynote (the talk associated with his book about storytelling, Super Skill).
Something happened during the recent NBA championship run of the New York Knicks, and like any good speaker, Joe wanted to draw on his observations and his own LLM (little life moments) to inform and improve his speaking. That's just one advantage of being a storyteller: nothing is wasted. Everything is inspiration. I love interacting with a broken business or horrible boss, because I think the entire time, "You have no idea that you're gonna end up in my next talk..."
In Joe's case, he wasn't drawing on his observations of a marketing team or his last call with a B2B CEO. Instead, his talk opens with a story about something else:
I won't do the bit justice here. (You'll have to hire Joe to speak to your community, company, or event—and you should!) But suffice it to say, Joe's friend hired a witch found on Etsy to ensure good weather for her wedding day. After it "worked," and after Joe watched his New York Knicks fall into a deep hole against the San Antonio Spurs, he said screw it, I'll hire the witch to curse the Spurs.
Then the Knicks pulled off the most miraculous comeback in NBA playoff history (literally), beating the Spurs after being down 29 points in the game. No team had ever done that before.
There's more to the story, but Joe worked overtime (just like the Knicks, heh...) to reshape his talk's opener around the Etsy witch and an insight about storytelling extracted from it.
During our Green Room retreat, he put the new material on stage for the first time. I stood behind the curtain observing, then popped out with notes. Others in the group chimed in, and Joe walked away with a significantly tighter bit and the confidence to deliver it in memorable, personal ways each time.
However...
While during the retreat we were all standing together in the same room physically, some of Joe's paid speaking engagements happen virtually. This wasn't something I experienced when I started as a full-time keynote speaker pre-pandemic, but after 2020, I generated a decent portion of my revenue from virtual gigs, and that's persisted ever since.
Joe emailed me today (I'm writing this the day before I send this to you, because I'm a VeRy oRgAniZed PrOfeSSionAL). He asked me whether this opener could work just as well virtually, since it's such a standup comedy-esque section.
I said yes, but you need to make one small change, which can have a big impact:
When you tell a joke in a virtual talk (or share any material meant to evoke any human emotion or response in a virtual setting, not just laughter) YOU have to be the one who responds. To your own material. Sounds strange to say, but it works.
You have to chuckle at your own jokes after a quick beat for them to absorb the punchline. Then they feel a sort of release-valve or signal to exhale and laugh too. You gave them permission where otherwise they'd lack it.
You have to groan at your own bad pun. You acknowledge that was terrible and give yourself a little moment of self-deprecating humor, which endears you to them.
You need to add a subtle "oof" and shake your head after a really tough moment of somebody's story you're sharing.
You should pause a moment longer than you're comfortable when the objective was for the room to sit in silence and absorb the impact of what you said.
Because there is no room. Try as they might, virtual events do not create the same palpable, physical energy of sitting among tens or hundreds of other humans, even if you never say a word to them. Virtually, people don't have that undeniable feeling. Making your job harder as a speaker, that means they don't hear or see any reactions from others. Which means their own reactions are diminished. Which means your material doesn't resonate as deeply.
Unless you add back that feeling yourself.
In-person, the most responsive and reactive attendees do the job I told Joe (and I'm telling you) to perform. They start the reaction of laughing, or saying "oof," or exhaling, or sitting still in total silence—then those reactions and the emotions they carry start to roll throughout the room. (We say that about laughter: "rolling laughter." But any and all reaction or emotion can roll across the room. That's why silence in a big crowd is somehow even more silent than sitting quietly by yourself. It's deeper, more arresting, more moving.)
When sitting in a group, there's a kind of permission people need, even if it's unspoken (it often is) and gets conveyed in a fraction of a second (it often does). That permission is what people need to really feel the things they're feeling and respond physically to those feelings, whether laughing, groaning, shaking their heads, or sitting still in silence, not wanting to move as the moment envelopes them.
Again, that's what people need when sitting in a group. But virtually, they are not sitting in a group. They feel alone, even if they can see others or hear them in the chat, even if they're on board with the idea that they're part of a group. Because that happens intellectually. It doesn't really happen emotionally. Emotionally, they're alone. Until YOU provide that extra little bit of emotion. Then there's a connection. Then there's a reaction.
Without the speaker reacting to their own bits, however, virtual talks end up feeling incredibly sterile. Remember during the pandemic, when late night shows came back on-air but had no crowds? It's like that. Jimmy would deliver a joke that could have worked 100% of the time in any other setting, but without a reaction, you the viewer felt like something was off. Which meant otherwise-proven material felt off-putting. So the host started to laugh at their own joke, or invite the band to laugh louder, or invite the staff to sit in the crowd where audiences would be during Normal Times.
Well, in many ways, virtual talks are not Normal Times. They're not normal talks. They're unnatural settings for folks to absorb your material live. So you need to do something that may feel slightly unnatural as a result: react to your own stuff.
Your material could be great, but it won't resonate to the same degree without your own emotions added near the end of a given line or bit or story.
If you want to resonate deeper and resonate consistently through the screen, solve this problem first. It's a small change, but it makes a huge difference.