Why I Wrote Stand Up in 10 Steps (It’s Not Just for Comedians)

People are sometimes surprised to learn that when I coach executives on their presentations, I hand them a book about stand-up comedy. Mine, to be fair. But still.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned from 750 keynotes and years of coaching at Second City: the techniques that make an audience laugh are the same ones that make them lean in, remember, and act. Comedy tips are engagement tips. A comedian just finds out faster than anyone else whether they’re working — the feedback arrives in about four seconds, and it is not subtle.

Why good people give bad presentations

Twenty-five years of watching presenters — in comedy clubs, conference ballrooms, and boardrooms — and the same problems show up every single time. Death-by-PowerPoint isn’t a slide problem. It’s these:

• They’re just trying to get up there and get off. Survive-the-slot mode. The audience can smell it from the back row, and nobody remembers a talk whose main message was “please let this end.”
• They tell stories without endings. The number-one mistake new comedians make, and new presenters make it identically — a promising setup that wanders off and never pays off.
• They don’t know who they are up there. So they default to Corporate Presenter Voice — and come across neither believable nor confident. (You can waste three years figuring out who you are on stage. Or you can do it as an exercise in an afternoon.)
• They don’t read the room. The room always tells you how it’s doing — fidgeting, phones, the quality of the silence. Most presenters are too busy reciting to listen.
• They have no plan for the what-ifs. Tech fails, tough crowd, a question from left field — comedians call them hecklers and crickets, and we write our comebacks before we need them.

None of these are talent problems. Stand-up is ninety-percent preparation — which is the best news in this whole article, because preparation is learnable.

I started stand-up over twenty-five years ago and motivational speaking about ten years after that. The moment I stood in front of my first corporate audience, I recognized the situation: same fear, same fidgeting, same four-second feedback loop. And when I started teaching stand-up at Second City, my comedy students’ worries were word-for-word the same as the executives’: “I want to look the audience in the eye without bringing my notes up.” “I thought I was going to throw up before my first set.” “I want to get it right before I go back — that’s IF I go back.”

So I wrote the ten steps down. Stand Up in 10 Steps is a hands-on workbook — for comedians, corporate speakers, and anyone who just wants to be funnier — and the steps walk you from “stop putting it off” to your first open mic: keeping it simple, writing about what you know best (you), figuring out how the audience actually perceives you (I call it the L.A. Casting Call — it’s confronting and it works), deciding what you really want to say, owning the stage, and writing your heckler-and-cricket comebacks before you need them.

Because here’s what comedy actually does for a message — it’s an amazing superhero cape:

• It relaxes your audience and captures their attention.
• It shows you’re human and relatable.
• It connects your audience to your content.
• It saves them from going into screensaver mode.
• It helps them retain your message long after the elevator.

And these are a few of the techniques that do the heavy lifting — on a stage, in a boardroom, on a Zoom call:

• Your hook — the promise of something intriguing. It’s what makes people stay, whether they’re holding a drink or an agenda.
• The Rule of Threes — set a pattern, then break it. Still the fastest way to make a point land.
• Specificity — the exact detail is funnier, and far more memorable, than the general one. “Q3 was challenging” puts a room to sleep. The exact moment the projector died in front of the board does not.
• Authenticity — the funniest version of you is just… you. Same goes for the most credible version.
• Bring it full circle — tie your close back to your open, and end on your strongest thought. It’s what they’ll walk out remembering.

The book is $9.99 CAD, and 25% of the proceeds go to City Street Outreach — a great organization I’ve worked with for years, bringing food and warmth to people sleeping on Toronto’s streets. So your better presentation also buys somebody a hot meal. That’s what I call a callback.

Or let my AI coach take the first pass

Not ready for the workbook? I built a free AI Presentation Coach that runs in your own ChatGPT. You tell it what you’re presenting and who’s in the room, hand it your slides or script, and it walks your whole talk through my “From ‘Meh’ to Mic Drop” method. Here’s how it greets you:

Full disclosure: I use this thing myself. Twenty-five years on stage, and it still keeps me sharp. And I recently showed it to a former leader — an executive, seasoned at presenting, the kind of person who does this all the time. They went in thinking they were a pro and came out genuinely surprised: it caught things they didn’t even know were learnable. They walked away wanting to be a rock star.

The Resilience Arsenal is what-if planning that frees you up instead of stiffening you. A few tricks up your sleeve for when things go sideways means you don’t have to wear your preparation like armour — you can relax and show them the real you. If you’re excited about your topic, be excited.

It scores each of the four parts of the method out of 20, for a total out of 80:

• 🪨 Hook, Line & Thinker — your story structure: shape a talk people actually want to follow, with an opening they can’t look away from and a payoff they’ll repeat at lunch.
• 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Making it YOU-nique — your personality, your perspective, your authentic humour — so you sound like you, not a corporate teleprompter with a pulse.
• 🎤 Reading the Room — keeping people involved, whether they’re six feet away or hiding behind a muted Zoom square.
• 🧰 Your Resilience Arsenal — preparation for tech fails, blank stares, awkward silences, and all the other tiny presentation ambushes.

And it’s honest. That leader’s deck didn’t get a participation trophy:

Then comes my favourite part — it offers to roll up its sleeves:

It’s free, a free ChatGPT account works, and it’s private by design — I never see your slides. (Fun fact from the research: people are 3.75× more likely to solve a problem after a good laugh. Those YouTube binges? Research.)

And when you want a human in your corner

I do one-on-one and group coaching sessions — virtual or in person — for speakers, leaders, and teams who want their presentations to land. If that sounds like your next step, get in touch and tell me about the room you need to win over.

And if you take only one thing from this: stop trying to be a perfect presenter. The audience doesn’t remember perfect. They remember human — specific, prepared, and slightly braver than comfortable. That’s the talk people remember — and more importantly, they remember what you needed them to.