Michael Parrish DuDell

What about acting and improv has prepared you for giving effective keynotes?

For me, it’s about, staying in the moment. It’s about listening to my audience as much as it is talking to my audience…

…I walk into rooms as a speaker, as an advisor, as whoever I am in that room, and it’s my job to very quickly assess the situation and cast myself in a role that’s appropriate for that scene. That’s strictly improv training right there.

What is it that really gets you going about giving these talks?

…By the end—just 60 minutes—I can convince them to try something, to take a step in the right direction. And when that works, which often it does, to be able to hear, “Hey, I walked into this room and 60 minutes later I had something that was valuable to my organization today, valuable next week, next month.” That’s incredible. That’s 60 minutes. There’s some real insight there. That becomes really addicting when it happens.

What do you think is your secret to winning over that part of the audience that doesn’t love your topic [millennials]?

Being totally authentic, being totally transparent…I have to convince them that I’m worth listening to. I think a lot of that is self-awareness, not taking yourself too seriously, and understanding that you are there to convey an idea.

If you wanna know a speaker trick, what I do is I stand in the back about 20, 30 minutes before I go on, and I listen to the introduction. I listen to the speaker before me. I listen to any kind of reference that’s made in the room. And I start every single speech with something that is completely unique to the room, that just happened, because what I have found is that by doing that, automatically, they look to me as somebody who has a shared experience.