Forty years of teaching people how to not be boring.

Dr. Scott Litin has spent four decades working on presentation skills, and this conversation applies to a lot more than standing at a podium. It applies to your interview, your case presentations on rotations, and every time you have to explain something to a patient.

His core idea is that you're telling a story, not dumping information. People remember a narrative. They do not remember your fourth bullet point. If you want a message to land, build it into something with a shape.

He also gets into how to actually hold an audience, which is a skill, not a personality trait. That's good news if you think you're bad at this.

What we cover:

• Why communication skills shape your career
• Building a presentation around a story instead of a data dump
• Techniques for keeping an audience with you
• Making your key message stick
• Applying presentation skills to PA school interviews
• Getting better at this if it doesn't come naturally

Resources:

PA School Interview Guide: https://www.thepaplatform.com/physician-assistant-school-interview-guide

PA School Interview Course: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/pa-school-interview-course

Mock Interview: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/mock-interview

Free Application Timeline: https://www.thepaplatform.com/services/free-application-timeline

Mentioned in this episode:

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Guys, this might be my favorite episode I've ever done of the podcast.

I am honored to have our guest, Dr. Scott Litton, here to share his presentation skills that he has been sharing on for the last 40 years.

And get your notes ready.

You're gonna take notes.

Welcome to the Pre PA Club podcast.

If you want to learn how to become a physician assistant, you're in the right place.

I'm your host, Savannah Per.

Let's get to it.

I want to thank mypa Resource and PA School Prep for sponsoring the Prepa Club podcast.

So my PA Resource is a personal statement editing service that edits only PA school essays, only edited by PAs, and most of us have admissions experience, so I am one of the editors.

Definitely check them out if you need help with your content grammar, flow, making sure that you are on track for turning in your application.

And you can use the code Future PA for a discount on any of their service options.

All right, welcome to the podcast.

I am so excited that you are here to learn about presenting and communicating.

And all of the tips you're going to hear in today's episode will translate, I think, to sort of many areas of your life.

Sorry I got really excited, but I'm Savannah.

I am a dermatology PA and I have been doing the Pre PA Club podcast for two and a half years now.

There's lots of old episodes to listen to if you're new.

But like I said at the beginning, this might be one of my favorite ones.

So a little bit of background before we jump in and I have a couple of announcements.

When I was at the aapa, which is the National PA Association, I was at their conference a couple years ago and it was in Denver.

I was with one of my friends from PA School and we happened upon a lecture about how to give a good presentation.

I occasionally lecture at my alma mater, Augusta University.

And so we ended up staying, staying and it was the best session of the entire week.

And the speaker was named Dr. Scott Litton.

I took his email down and it has been in my phone now for the past almost two years.

And I'm be honest, I was kind of like you guys when you are maybe nervous to reach out for shadowing or opportunities.

And I thought this guy is so cool and he's gonna blow me off.

He's not gonna respond.

There's no way he would come on my little podcast.

But in planning out episodes for this year, I just knew that I really wanted him to come on.

So I sent the email and he responded very quickly.

That he would love to come on the show.

And so that is what you get today.

If you want to watch this episode, it is on YouTube and Dr. Litton did share his slides during the episode, so so that may be helpful, just that you can kind of follow along a little bit better and see what he's talking about.

He also gives some examples of some kind of stances and things to do and not to do while doing a presentation or a talk.

But like I said, this will translate to giving presentations in school, which I had to do in both undergrad and PA school.

Interviewing for again, PA school Pennsy Jobs just there is so much great knowledge in this episode and in this conversation, so I'm very excited to share it with you and I think it's going to be just very valuable moving forward.

So we will get to that in just a second.

But I wanted to let you know about a couple things coming up as well.

If you are signed up for the newsletter that should have gone out today and because it goes out the last Friday of the month, if you're not signed up for the newsletter, you can be it's thepaplatform.com newsletter and that has all of the podcasts and blogs and information on events we're doing so that you don't miss out on anything.

So that went out today and what you'll see in there is that we have a couple things coming up in February so we have the webinar of the month which is going to be on February 18th at 8:30pm and we're going to be talking about personal statements.

So that should be fun.

It is definitely personal statement season.

And then I have a tentative virtual shadowing day in the Life event scheduled with Archana.

The PA ya'll may know her because she's been doing some events as well.

She is one of our pre pa coaches and so that will be on February 23rd at 8:30pm I'm going to go ahead and put links to those in the description of this episode so that you can go ahead and register, sign up and get those emails so you don't miss out on those opportunities.

So yeah.

And if you need any help throughout this season as you're getting ready for your application, follow us on Instagram the PA platform.

Feel free to comment or send me a question or my email inbox is always open and check out everything that's on the PA platform.

If you are still in interview season, doing mock interviews or looking at the PA School Interview guide, don't forget to use that future PA code for a discount on those as well.

All right, let's jump into our conversation with Dr. Litton and I think you're going to love this.

So I'm so excited to be talking to Dr. Scott Litton.

He is someone I originally heard from at an AAPA conference in Denver.

It was an amazing talk about presentation skills.

And then I think we decided the other talk was about kind of delivering bad news and talking to patients.

And they were so great.

So I reached out to see if you would be willing to come on and share your knowledge.

And I just love your passion for teaching and helping us as healthcare professionals and future healthcare professionals realize how important presentation skills and communication are.

So I'm very excited and I would love for you to introduce yourself and jump in to talk, telling us about you and teaching us well.

You're very kind, Savannah.

I'm delighted to be here.

My passion is helping people improve their skills at presenting themselves and presenting information, whether it be to patients and their families, whether it be to other students, whether it be to administrative meetings, because this turns out to be the career maker or breaker.

So I am a 40 year veteran of general internal medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

And 20 years or so ago I started a program of workshops to help learners improve their skill set at presentations and presenting themselves.

I've been interested in education throughout my career and I've run a lot of continuing medical education meetings.

I'd read evaluations from our medical students and it was sometimes disheartening because I knew so many teachers and speakers had their heart in the right place.

They really put time into these things and sometimes they didn't connect and it didn't go well.

And our students back then, I'm sure now the PA students are much kinder.

But the medical students 20 years ago would oftentimes share opinions as opposed to feedback.

Feedback helps somebody improve.

Opinions are opinions.

She was good.

He was boring.

Don't invite him back.

I didn't learn a thing.

How do you share that with somebody?

Because it doesn't help them get better.

So based on some of these evaluations and knowing that the teachers wanted to be better colleague, and I started a workshop which I've taken over to help people.

And in this workshop we go over the basic skill sets, we videotape learners and then we look at the videotapes in a group session and group critique in a very friendly, collegial manner.

And it's been Extremely successful throughout.

And it's given just me a lot of excitement to help people and watch them make little changes in their delivery and the way they present themselves and change their careers.

I love that and I love your passion for it.

And the way you just talked about those reviews brought back some memories of both when I was in PA school and probably had similar thoughts.

And also I've lectured at my old PA program and I got some similar feedback, things that I couldn't do anything about.

One of them was I couldn't see her behind the column.

I was like, oh, well, I don't know what you wanted me to do about that.

I was told where to present from, and I didn't know you couldn't see me.

So it was very interesting being on the other side and getting some of those comments.

Well, in every other aspect of our profession, if we have difficulty doing something, whether it's drawing blood, doing a lumbar puncture, doing a skin biopsy, like in your world, someone takes you by the hand and helps you get better in presentation skills, what happens is you hear something like this.

Scott, I can tell you put a lot of time into that presentation for the students.

Boy, you had a lot of material in there.

Next year, we'll probably ask one of your colleagues.

Not because you weren't great, but we want to give others an opportunity.

Then you leave the room and the scuttlebutt gets out.

God, don't invite him back.

He didn't connect at all.

And then you're crossed off the list.

So that's why we wanted to do something to help people improve.

Not just people figure, hey, you went to college, you got a PA degree, you must be an outstanding speaker and teacher.

Well, oftentimes that's not included in the curriculum.

Yeah, not much.

We had to do one presentation at the very end of a master's paper, so I had to stand up and talk about plantar fasciitis for about 20 minutes.

I'm sure it was very riveting and engaging.

Just kidding.

It was not.

But.

Well, but, you know, that's one of the things that we talk about and that I like teaching.

How do you make something that doesn't sound riveting?

Riveting.

Right.

So can I give you an example?

We call it a hook.

Just because you're asked to speak on a topic doesn't mean anyone is really interested.

So you want to make them care.

You've got to convince them early on that they want or need to hear more.

So here.

Here's an example, a typical presentation on diarrhea.

Oh, gosh.

Okay, good morning.

Today we're going to talk about diarrhea.

And people are going, okay, get me out of this room.

This is going to be dreadful.

Fact after fact, I'm not interested.

As opposed to this.

Let's say you're sitting in PA school or one of these things.

And before you see a patient, this is the way the presentation would start.

Good morning.

You pick up the chart in your first patient today.

She's a 48 year old woman complaining of three weeks of diarrhea.

Your heart sinks, you're thinking, what else do I need to ask her?

What history do I need to take?

Anything on examination that's important.

What about testing?

Do I get these stool tests?

What would I order?

Could I empirically give her Imodium and see if she gets better?

Wonderful questions.

And over the next 15 minutes, if she's your first patient, you'll have the answers to all these questions.

That's a hook.

Nobody cares about diarrhea now.

They want to know or they need to know.

Yes.

So that's one of the good setups.

Even on plantar fasciitis.

Starting with a case or starting with the word imagine is a great way to hook people into your presentation.

Okay, you've already convinced me I need to rework my acne and rosacea presentation before I give it next fall.

So I'm on it.

Okay, let's hear your presentation.

And I just want to hear kind of your key components.

What.

What should we be putting into a presentation?

What should we be doing differently that most people struggle with?

Okay, well, let me.

Maybe I could share a screen and just go over a couple things quickly.

I don't want to do death by PowerPoint, but we can.

Let's hope not.

Let me.

Let me go back to the home screen here.

See, I've got.

I've got this set up at the end instead of the beginning.

So here we go.

So one of the things, when I start out a presentation, and remember this is a more formal way to do presentations, but the skill set is the same whether you're talking to family members, colleagues, students, patients and their families, or a research meeting.

A lot of these things still fit in.

So one of the things that you want to do is hook people.

So one of the things I do at the beginning is, I might say, if we can stay connected for the next 30 minutes, I'll make you a promise.

I Promise you will walk out of this presentation with a few tools, tips and techniques to make future presentations go better than they've ever gone in the past.

Then I want to emphasize to people that I put my email address on a slide, a handout, a whiteboard, and I ask, what does that tell your audience?

Well, it tells your audience that you're approachable, you're willing to interact.

And then I ask people, why are people afraid to put their email out there?

Well, the majority of people say, well, I don't want to get 100 emails, I don't want to get spam.

This is never abused in a professional audience.

You rarely get anything, but when you do, it's wonderful.

It might be an all expense paid trip to go to a PA school to interview because you were so impressive in your presentation.

It could be a case or somebody gives you a story to include in your next presentation.

It could be a compliment.

It could be an opportunity to collaborate with somebody or do a research project.

So you rarely get anything, but when you do, it's good.

And then I mentioned, like I told you before, how I got interested in this topic and how from my interest in helping people get better at presenting, I became embedded into our Mayo Medical School.

All the students take a workshop before they graduate.

I teach all the internal medicine residents in the Mayo Clinic system in Jacksonville, Arizona and Rochester, Minnesota, and I've gone all because I have a niche talking to medical presenters, how to get better.

I've had the opportunity to travel to all these locations, give either a grand rounds or a workshop on this topic.

And then I stop and remind the learners.

One of the reasons that I put this in is for credibility.

And one can give themselves credibility in a variety of ways.

Who you worked with in college on a research project gives you credibility.

The fact that you're in a college university, a PA training program, gives you credibility.

So you don't have to have a professorship to have credibility.

But this gives me credibility as a speaker.

Why should we listen to this person?

Oh, okay, maybe he knows something then in our workshops, what we do is I email a couple articles I've written and maybe Savannah, you'll be able to attach those to your website in some way.

But a couple articles that I've written that has a lot of information and helpful information in.

I ask the learners to read the article and then video themselves doing a three minute or so presentation on anything they want.

It can be medical, it can be anything.

Then they upload it to my Dropbox, we get together and assign Time on Zoom.

First, we discuss the reading, and I'll go over a few of the topics with you in a minute.

We discuss the reading, what was impactful to them, and I highlight a few other things.

Then we show each video one at a time, one at a time, and critique them.

What went well, what could be improved.

In fact, I have them draw a little score sheet.

And on one side is a plus, the other side is a delta, because there are no negatives, there's positives, and there's opportunities to change for the better.

And then we have the speaker, him or herself, after the video, speak only on positives.

That's really hard for them sometimes, but it makes them focus on what they did.

Well.

Everybody does things well.

Then we go around the room.

Now, what would you change if you were doing this again to be even better?

And then we end up talking a little bit about how to look great on Zoom.

Savannah looks great as always on Zoom.

I had to, at the last minute, move this computer around so you might see a messier background than I want.

But anyway, we talk about that and then finish up.

So I explain why do you need this skill set?

And a lot of people say, well, we might be talking to patients and we have to communicate.

And all those things are true.

But when you do this, well, when you present yourself well, doors open.

You get opportunities, you get into the program.

If you're applying for PA school, that was your number one choice.

You get the job you wanted, you get placed on national committees, you get opportunities to collaborate with others.

But when you don't do this, well, they find somebody else.

There's a lot of people out there.

So then we talk a little bit about the reading, and these are just sort of some of the topics.

And I'll just go through them since I know we have a little time today, and I'll just go through them with you.

Introduction.

We talk about introducing yourself if you need to.

You know, if there's not a formal introduction, like when I would give the anticoagulation case study presentation to our residents, and if I didn't, you know, we had a big program, they didn't all know me, and I might walk in the room and they're thinking, well, why do we have a general internist giving cases in anticoagulation?

Why didn't we get somebody good like a cardiologist or a hematologist?

So I'd explain to them that day in and day out, like them, I see a variety of adult patients with medical issues.

But part of My time is spent in the anticoagulation consult clinic, of which I was a founding member.

And it's from that background I want to share a few cases with you that if you don't see this week in practice, you may see next week.

Talking about the name badge.

The appropriate place for the name badge, if you're wearing one, is the upper right.

That's because if we ever are allowed to shake hands again or bump fists, people can follow right up and see your name.

When you wear it on the left and you're shaking hands or bumping, they have to look across the torso, which is kind of embarrassing because they obviously don't remember your name.

And it can look like kind of rude if they're looking across your torso.

And where in the world are people supposed to look when they wear the badge?

Down at their belt level.

That's a little creepy for everybody in the room.

So we recommend you put the badge in the upper right.

But when you're speaking and presenting at a conference, you take it off, because anything on your person that can be distracting will detract from your presentation.

And we talk a little bit about PowerPoint in medical presentations.

Unfortunately, PowerPoint is often the currency that people expect to see great speakers in history.

If you think back, it was recently Martin Luther King's birthday, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, some of these people that connected Obama, they were great speakers.

They didn't use PowerPoint in medicine.

People like PowerPoint.

It can be your friend, it can be your enemy.

Enemy.

And in general, less is more.

How much on a slide.

You don't want slides in full sentences.

Worse yet, paragraphs.

So there's something called the rule of five or six.

No more than five or six lines.

No more than five or six words per line.

And in certain situations, you can have custom animation appear.

Here's the most important thing.

Meeting the needs of the audience.

When I'm giving a presentation, I know everyone is tuned into an FM radio station, wiifm, wherever you are.

What do the Callwell letters stand for?

What's in it for me?

I know that the audience is thinking to themselves, three questions.

So what?

So what about diarrhea?

Why should I care about diarrhea?

What's in this for me?

That's where you want to limit your information to what does your audience want to know?

What do they need to know?

Not how passionate are you?

And you want to tell them everything.

Organization of a topic.

We talked about this.

But the hook, the importance of a hook.

Just because you're talking about something doesn't mean anyone wants to hear it.

So you got to sell it to them.

The best way is starting with a case like I did with that middle aged woman who had watery diarrhea.

Another great word to use is imagine.

Imagine when you applied to physician assistant school that there were two things that if you include in your application, it takes the acceptance rate from 40% to 90%.

Well, before I talk about what those two things are, let's talk about the application process.

You're sitting there going, all I want to know is the two things that hooks you into wanting to hear more.

So that's another thing.

The body, limited number of facts, but facts tied to stories.

Patient cases are stories, personal stories, stories of people.

That's what people remember.

If you've ever listened to some of the long, sometimes never ending State of the Union addresses that the presidents give, they always have some special people in the audience.

Veterans, teachers, people who made a difference.

And they tell a story about these people.

And that sometimes all the audience ends up remembering.

And then don't forget to summarize, don't forget to summarize.

Lots of times people will go on and on with the presentation and then they'll go, okay, that's my last slide.

We're done.

I didn't know they were finished.

I was daydreaming.

Everybody daydreams a little bit.

They weave in and out with their thoughts during a presentation.

But if you say the words in summary, if you only remember three things from today, please think about boom, boom, boom.

Limiting unnecessary information.

Voltaire said to modify his quote, the quickest way to become boring is to tell them everything.

So just because you're speaking, especially when you're younger, we feel that if I don't talk about everything known on this topic, I will not be thought of as credible.

If you tell them everything, they remember nothing.

So pick out the things you think they want or need to know.

What I tell people sometimes with organization, if they have trouble with organization, start with your summary.

Think of a summary slide.

What do I want them to do?

Walking out of here.

And then go back and create your presentation.

If you're doing a presentation, you have no honest way to know how long it's going to take you unless you practice out loud with a timer.

Because if you're in bed at night and you have the laptop on your lap and you're trying not to wake a spouse, a partner, a baby, and you do it in your head, it takes this long.

Then you get up there, it goes this long.

How Often have we seen a speaker when the red light beeps that their time is off, go through the last 10 slides like this because they didn't time it well.

Delivery is important.

Nobody speaks too slowly.

People generally speak either very, very fast, very fast, fast, or about right.

The fewer filler sounds like ums and ahs that you have, the more professional you sound.

And I'll share a story about a third year medical student that I had in one of our workshops.

And she reminds me a little of you, Savannah.

She was enthusiastic, she smiled, she really had a great interaction with the audience, told a great stories.

I still remember about her grandmother, but she had 58 ums in a three minute presentation.

She never heard one until we played it back and pointed them out.

And she was devastated.

But she doesn't say um anymore.

This is all these things are teachable.

The way I teach umers and ahers like I used to be to get rid of them is you can't.

I share.

You cannot fix something you don't know you're doing.

And most of the time people don't hear their ums and ahs.

So the first way to cure them.

And I toy around a little with this, but I tell people you gotta hear them to eliminate them.

So the first thing I share with people, wear an imaginary shock collar for a day or two.

Now, don't set the volume, don't set the voltage up really high.

Just a little tweak listening for the ums and the ahs.

So when you're speaking.

And pause instead for a while, it's going to be difficult because it's like suppressing a cough in a theater.

You're going to want to, but you'll suppress it.

You'll want to, but you'll suppress it.

But in no time at all, you'll be able to eliminate 80, 90% of the filler sounds.

And it just makes you look professional.

Here's one of the hardest things for medical personnel to buy into performance, make it a performance.

Now, when I say performance, you needn't sing and dance and tell jokes, but you have to connect.

You have to engage the audience.

The easiest way to engage an audience, just like the easiest way when you meet a new patient, is to engage them, is simply to smile.

So the audience wants you to be successful.

They want you to appear friendly so they can ask you a question.

Yet a lot of people are so worried about the 28th fact, which won't be remembered anyway, they're frowning if you can't be enthusiastic about your Topic.

How does anyone else want to care?

Stories.

Stories are remembered.

Facts are not, unless they're tied to a story or a case.

And so that's how you engage the audience with stories.

Let's talk about hand gestures.

I think I can move away from this setup here and show you a few things.

I was hoping you hand tricks, because I remember this.

Yeah.

Okay, so a couple of things.

First of all, when you're being formally introduced, especially if it's a big deal and you paint, you write your own introduction.

Short, sweet, maybe 20 seconds.

And you ask the moderator to read it just as written.

And then, people, what are you supposed to do when you.

When you're being formally introduced?

Well, a lot of people stand like this.

We call this the fig leaf.

Other people stand like this.

This is the firing squad.

And I tell guys, especially, get the hands out of your pockets.

They're wondering, what in the world is he doing down there?

So we recommend stand.

Smile.

Hands at your sides.

Now try this.

Sometimes, if your hands are at your sides just like this, for even 20 seconds, they feel like heavy blocks of wood.

But if you touch the thumb and index finger together while they're down, they feel a little lighter.

Then I remind people.

Okay, Scott, you're on.

I remind people, bring your hands up above the waist, ready to use them.

Some people do all their speaking down here, all their hand gestures here, and it looks silly.

They look like penguins or trained seals or something.

That doesn't work well.

So bring your hands up, ready to use them, just like you're talking to friends and family.

You don't even know what you're doing after a while.

But try to avoid what we call a closed posture.

Anything between you and your audience is a closed posture.

So hands together, closed.

Grabbing a wrist, grabbing your ring, grabbing a finger.

All closed, closed.

And the most obvious closed posture is standing behind one of these lecterns when you speak.

So I'm sure we've all seen TED talks, and if you've seen a TED Talk, TED speakers always are out in the open, full body, because your body language is so important.

60 To 70% of our communication with each other and with patients is through body language.

I know when I walk in the room to see a patient, if I kept him in her waiting a little bit, they're like this in the chair.

I've got some work ahead of me to improve the interaction.

All right.

Making it a performance.

Hand gestures.

The other thing is handling nervousness.

Most anxiety doesn't show.

Public speaking is one of the biggest fears of.

Of everyone.

In fact, I joke a little bit that at a funeral it has been shown that 80% of the congregation would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

And there are actual real articles that show people have a bigger fear of public speaking than spiders, electrocution or any other kind of death.

There are some people that are that afraid of public speaking.

We film people in our interactions.

I used to film people live before the pandemic in the room, but now they film themselves.

When I filmed them live, they would come out going, oh, that didn't go well.

I was so nervous.

Can I do it again?

I said, no, let's just look at it.

It'll be fine.

We show the video I share with the audience.

You know, so and so told me that they were really nervous doing this.

Did she look nervous to you?

All the overwhelming thing is no, most anxiety doesn't show.

They've surveyed speakers and his or her audience.

Rate your level of anxiety 1.

Cool, calm, professional 5.

Shaking, sweating, nearly incontinent.

Most speakers rate themselves a 4.

Audience rates them a 2.

Biggest fear of the speaker is nervousness.

Biggest fear of the audience Boredom.

Yeah, so it but one way.

You know we all have these iPhones or iPads or Z phones or X phones.

You or somebody else film yourself practicing and watch it.

It's not as horrific as people always think it'll be.

If you're a humorous person like I kind of am or try to be, sometimes it's okay to put that into your presentations, but the best humor to use is self directed.

These are the mistakes I've made.

I want to share them with you so you don't repeat my mistake as opposed to pointing somebody out.

And of course, nothing, nothing improves your presentations more than practicing.

The more you do it, the more comfortable and confident you become.

And so then I always end this with so in summary, if you only remember three things that we visited about today, think about your organization next time.

Start with a hook, make them care.

A story, the word imagine limited number of facts and if you can tie them to a story and then finish with a good summary.

In summary, make it a performance.

Smile, energy, hand gestures, enthusiasm.

And here's the most important thing I think you need to everybody needs to remember when they're doing presentations.

Your skill as a presenter will be remembered far longer than any facts in Savannah.

We've already talked about this, but I'd ask the audience for a moment.

Get in your mind.

A speaker who you have heard the last couple of years could Be anyone could be anywhere.

But if he or she were speaking again, you'd actually make an effort to go listen to them.

They were so impressive.

So once everybody has a person in mind, answer this question.

How many facts do you recall the last time he or she spoke?

And I know what the answer is.

Overwhelmingly, most of the time.

But you remember the person.

They were brilliant.

They really connected with the audience.

They were enthusiastic, they told great stories, they were approachable.

You knew you could call on them if you had a question on that topic.

They were funny.

But you don't remember all the stuff.

So we belabor.

It's important to have stuff.

Don't get me wrong, but you're all bright people.

It's not hard to look things up and hit a home run with that.

But it's the intangibles that make the difference in a presentation.

So I've been doing all the talking, but I'll get out of this and happy to visit.

About any other things that you've thought about.

Gosh, I love it.

That's where everything you just shared, I just think of how applicable it is in so many different areas.

Even interviews.

I think students can take all of these tips, whether they're going into their interviews for PA school or their interviews for PA jobs.

Like you said, it's so important to make a connection and present yourself and show that enthusiasm.

I really, I've recorded almost 200 episodes and I think this is going to be one of my favorites that I've ever recorded.

Just because it's so helpful and there are so many great tips, even for myself.

I'm an Ummer.

I know that.

So working on it.

Thanks for the reminder.

You brought up interviews.

You know, I used to be on interview panels.

Let me give a couple of tips that maybe people know, maybe they don't.

But absolutely.

All these speaking things, speaking slowly, smiling, being enthusiastic.

One thing I always remind people before you interview at a school, at a place for a job, first of all, Google the place so you know a lot about it.

So you don't come in acting like you haven't put any time into learning about the place, the job, the school, the curriculum.

If you know who the interviewer may be, Google him or her.

People love to answer questions about themselves.

As you can tell, I did all the talking for the first part of this.

People like to talk, but if you show that boy, I read two of those articles that you wrote on this topic and that's what got me interested in this school.

You know, those sort of Things are good.

You don't want to, you want to be truthful, but all these sort of things are helpful.

A handshake.

When we do these again, you know, don't break their hand that hard.

But don't be a wet fish either because that gives an impression right off the bat.

Be early, be early because things happen.

You don't want to show up late.

Dress for success, Dress in a nice outfit.

And I always remind people, write a follow up thank you note to people that take the time to interview.

Handwritten is preferable, but we don't do that much anymore, so at least a good email and thanking them.

One of the things I always share with people is if they ask, well, Listen, we get 100 applicants for each position here.

What's so good about you?

Why would we want you?

That's really a stumper for a lot of people.

And it kind of.

So what I always remind people to do is, boy, it's hard for me, hard for me to think about positive things about myself.

But let me share with you what my preceptors have said about me.

And you know, I read my evals and they said that I was one of the most committed students that they've ever worked with, that I showed caring and empathy on my preceptors, that kind of stuff.

And so that way you can, you can really highlight yourself without sounding boastful.

Well, I didn't say this about me, they said it about me.

That's where I find people struggle is they just, and I do too, have a hard time bragging on yourself and your accomplishments and your strengths and that that is a difficult thing sometimes.

I really liked your point too, about how anxiety doesn't show.

Because when I'm doing mock interviews, sometimes people get really worked up and or afterwards they tell me how nervous they were.

But you're right, usually they don't come off as nervous.

They come off as confident or excited.

And that outshines their anxiety about how they're going to perform.

Yeah, a little, little nervousness is good.

It gets you kind of revved up a little bit.

That's okay.

But just think of the presentations that we've all sat through.

How often are we sitting there looking at the presenter going, boy, he or she looks nervous.

We're sitting there listening to them, trying to figure out how this is going to affect us.

Is there anything in there I can use?

I just don't want to be bored.

So we're forgiving people if somebody missteps or a slide doesn't work as long as the presenter doesn't make a big deal out of it, the audience doesn't either.

Yeah, I agree.

And it was funny when you mentioned putting your email in the slide.

So that's actually what I did when I was in your presentation.

I in my notes.

You had it on that first slide, I think maybe at the end too.

I know, as I think in the app for the conference also.

And so after your talk, I just really wanted to connect and get you on the podcast at some point.

And so I wrote your email down in my phone, in my notes app and over Right when I emailed you, I was going through because my notes are a little bit of a mess and I found your email and I said I've got to email him.

I didn't know he'd email me back or be available, but I just said, kind of like you said, he was approachable.

He seemed to really love this.

Maybe he would want to share.

I'm just going to send him an email and see what happens.

So that's really cool that you highlighted that.

And that's exactly how we connected.

Yeah.

And you're not the first person that has connected with me after quite some long episode of time.

I remember speaking to a group of nephrology dialysis nurses because one of the nurses was at a session that I did kind of like you a couple years before and she either kept my hand out or whatever.

And when she was designing a program, she emailed me and I participated in the program.

So it's always helpful.

Yes, for sure.

Well, I definitely appreciate all of your tips and so tell us a little bit about these presentations and workshops that you do.

And if someone is in a PA program or some type of program works a hospital, who knows if anyone would possibly want to connect with you and what would that look like to do something like that?

Well, first of all, I'm pretty good at email and I don't have a fancy website like you Savannah, so I'm kind of old fashioned and I get connected with email and I think you'll have it on the site or you'll have the spelling of my name, but it's litten L I T I N dot S C O T T at mayo M A Y o dot edu and what I generally do during this pandemic and even after, because it's certainly easier than flying all over the country, is we get about three or four learners and we put, we try to come up with a time that we could do a zoom session together.

And we do it, as I mentioned before, a reading assignment, uploading a video to my Dropbox and then meeting in the Zoom session.

And they usually run for three people, about an hour and a half to two hours.

So I usually have people block off a couple of hours of time.

If the program has money to support this, I'm inexpensive.

If the program doesn't have money to support it, we can work that out as well.

Because I enjoy doing these, I enjoy helping people, and that's not an issue.

That's awesome.

I really hope that I would have loved to have something like this when I was in PA school, especially when after didactic, you're about to be sent out on clinical rotations where you're presenting to preceptors and trying to get acclimated so quickly to different environments.

You're expected to present on topics on some rotations and then have to do presentations to your whole class.

I think this would have been so helpful.

So I really hope that some PA programs and students who especially are maybe interested in talking at conferences or other places reach out and really connect with you too.

Yeah.

And I'm embedded at Mayo Clinic into a lot of residencies and fellowships and they build this into the curriculum and just cost account for my time as one of the faculty members for their.

Even though I'm a general internist, I'm embedded into the family medicine, the hemoc, the cardiology, the pulmonary critical care, all these sorts of things because it's important for all of them.

I love that so much.

Well, thank you so much for your time, Dr. Litton.

I really appreciate it.

Well, as you can tell, just like you being passionate about doing these sessions, I'm passionate about helping people present themselves better.

So it's been my privilege.

Okay, guys, I hope you found that as valuable as I did.

And Dr. Litton is awesome.

If you would possibly be interested in having him speak to your group or your PA program or whoever you think could benefit from this information.

His email is in the description and feel free to reach out to me and I can get you in contact as well.

Thanks again to Dr. Litton for agreeing to do this.

And he doesn't have any social media really, so I would tell you all to go thank him, but if you have something that you want to pass on to him, please let me know and I'll make sure he gets it.