Bad starts
Sometimes you can recover from a bad start to your presentation. Sometimes you can’t…. 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGZyG0Jchjo&feature=related
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That’s virgin’ on being bad practice…..
Virgin trains, in the UK, are having a big marketing kick on the TV at the moment. One of their adverts shows an apparently inept presenter writing his slides on the train and - at the same time - getting more and more ‘hyped’ so that by the time he arrives, he’s confident and ready to go.
Reasonable advert, I suppose….
…. but shockingly bad tactics as a presenter!
I’ve said it before and I’ll no doubt say it again - you need to rehearse your stuff out loud. There’s no way to know what’s going to work if you just ’say’ it in your head.
Firstly, there are combinations of words and sounds that it’s all too easy trip up over - though of course this will never happen in your head.
Secondly, it’s impossible to judge timing with things only happening in your head - and that makes it all too easy to miss-judge things.
Talking is a physical thing - you need physical practice. After all, you’d not practice playing tennis by just watching Wimbledon, would you…..?
Keep your head down.
Normally, I’d say that keeping your head down isn’t a good idea as a presenter and public speaker - too much hiding your light under a bushel doesn’t get you very far sometimes…
There is just one time though - and it’s pretty literal - when you should keep our head down though.
We all have a tendency to raise our heads when we’re anxious/nervous (and when we’re working in stepped auditoria) - we tip them backwards, raising our eyes. My hunch is that it’s something to do with wanting to see danger coming from as far away as possible but I can’t be sure. The advantage is that you get to see your audience’s eyes (always a good thing) but there is a huge downside - tipping your head back tightens your throat.
…. and a tight throat means you sound stressed and anxious (even if you’re not). It’s important for your credibility to keep your head down. By that, I don’t mean that you should pull your head down into your shoulders - but instead you should keep it it tipped down/forwards… lower your jaw so that you’re natural eye-line holds to hit the floor at about five or six metres away. If you’re like most people, that’ll probably feel very un-natural as we’re almost all conditioned to tip our heads up - it’s a natural stress response and we’re a pretty high-stressed society - but it’s worth the effort.
Other than it feeling odd, the hard part will be to keep your shoulders down and stay relaxed but with just a little practice you’ll find it can make a huge difference to how you sound when you’re presenting. Even if you’re not confident, you can sound it….
More 7% ranting
For many years I’ve been fighting the good fight about the myth that only 7% of the meaning of communication is in the words themselves; I ranted about it years ago, for example.
Just recently however, Olivia Mitchell waded in with a superb piece of writing. I commend it to you. It’s here.
In fact I pretty much commend the whole of her blog, for that matter!
A masterclass…
Setting aside for the moment what he says (as, if you can!), it’s worth some time to look at Presedent Obama’s recent speech - if for nothing else as a masterclass of how to be relaxed and natural… It’s currently available via the Whitehouse channel on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/whitehouse
Keep your eyes on the road
It’s Formula One season once more (and what a season!) and as always I’m stunned by the way the drivers stay calm under pressure. Make a mistake there and it’s all over - perhaps permanently.
One of the ways they do it, of course, is by keeping their sense of perspective. Just like other athletes under pressure they concentrate on what they’re doing… not on the consequences. It’s no good obsessing about the race as a whole; instead, drivers concentrate on the corner in front of them, the car to be passed or the shortest line to be taken.
What does this to do with presenting and public speaking? We often have people to our training courses who say: “I’ve got a big presentation to come up and I can’t afford to get it wrong.”
The problem is that just thinking like that makes it more likely you will get it wrong! The right approach is to concentrate on the presentation itself - not the effects of failure - just like the tennis player who’s a Match Point up (or down!) or the F1 driver who’s got a notoriously difficult corner coming up.
Concentrate on what you’re doing and let the consequences work themselves out afterwards! Of course that’s easier said than done but the effort is worth it.
This is totally of the wall…
….. and nothing to do with presenting or public speaking, but a friend of mine is involved in a fund-raiser by crossing the Solent on a duck-shaped pedalo.
See here: http://www.thegreatsolentpedal.com/
If you can possibly bring yourself to give them some support, go ahead.
And if you don’t like the work on the sound-track of the website - tough! 
The opposite of fear!
The opposite of being afraid isn’t being un-afraid.
I train hundreds of people each year in designing and delivering presentations and in public speaking … and the most common question I get asked is “How do I stop myself being afraid”? To me that’s missing the point.
The opposite of being fearful is being brave; and being brave is about having the fear and doing the damn thing anyway. I’m not suggesting that potential public speakers should be quaking in their boots and not sleeping for weeks before the big day, but there are a couple of points I’d like to make.
Firstly, fear is a good thing - at least when you’ve got it under control; more specifically, anxiety (on the fear spectrum!) is a good thing because it gives your performance an edge. Without it I’ll lay good odds that your presentations will be dull, uninteresting, possibly smug, and certainly less effective.
Secondly, there’s a lot of rubbish talked about ’stage fright’. Stage fright is a genuine phobia - it’s horrid and it’s debilitating. All too often when we talk about SF, we’re refering to perfectly normal levels of anxiety - after all, standing up in front of strangers and telling them what you’re thinking is frightening.
So where do these two ideas get me? Well, personally I’d argue that between the two of them they suggest that the important thing isn’t to remove the fear altogether but rather to mitigate it - to reduce it so that it’s not debilitating but useful instead.
There are dozens of techniques for dealing with fear and I’d like to (re-)draw attention to a recording of a teleseminar I recorded a couple of years ago. It was a bit of an experiment but despite the sound quality being only okay (rather than great) the content is hopefully helpful. Enjoy.
The MP3 is here and the slides to go with it are here.
Slide evolution
I’ve spent a long time being self-indulgent recently, so I thought it might be useful to run through how one of my favorite slides evolved by way of redressing the balance ; it’s still not fixed in stone and may well change as/when/if I get the urge….
First things first - figure out what you want to say. In this instance I wanted the slide to capture the very basic things you need to make a decent presentation. I worked this out in the way I tend to do a lot… by using a simple spidergram to get all my ideas down onto the page in any old way. It’s more important tot get everything down than it is to get it right in the first instance - you can always impose formality later but trying to be too formal too soon inhibits the creative/cathartic process. I used a white-board in my office to do it but a large sheet of paper would do nicely - just remember to start somewhere near the centre of the page and don’t use too big a pen. (Otherwise there’s no point in using a bigger sheet of paper! )
I’d go so far as to say you shouldn’t ever turst a mind-map that looks too neat! That means someone, somewhere, has cleaned it up!
This one, on Olivia Mitchell’s excellent “Speaking About Presenting” website looks ‘real’. I can’t show you mine because I didn’t think to photograph the whiteboard when I’d finished….
Okay, so once I’d got everything down I walked away. In fact I went off for a cup of tea (hey, I’m British, don’t you know! It’s what we do!) to forget about it for a while. When I came back it was with fresh eyes. The next step is easy - just change the colour of your pen and link things together that ‘go together’. The idea is to find three (or four at a push) of the big ideas/concepts that lie behind everything in front of you.
In an ideal world, you’d spot three concepts and you’d be able to categorise every word before you to one of those three ideas. For example, on our public training days I run through this exercise with people, using the subject of ‘Making a perfect cup of tea’. Often groups come up with the concepts of
- consumables - milk, tea, electricity etc.
- tools - kettle, teapot, mug etc.
- process - the things you do such as boiling the water, pouring the tea, letting it brew
There are other ways of categorising things of course - don’t let that list stop you doing your own. So, back to my slide: it turns out that I came up with a classification of only three items:
- you need all the necessary skills of presenting - the kind of things I train people in
- kit - things like your slides if you use them, projector, props, microphone if you need to use one
- something to say - and the urge to say it…. the right attitude, you could say.
When you put that onto a slide, using PowerPoint’s (shocking bad) defaults, you get something a bit like this, perhaps, after a little thought…
…. hideous isn’t it!
And instantly forgetable.
To make it a little more “audience-friendly” I did some basic housekeeping: replace the title with a ‘headline’ if you can - something that captures the whole idea in just one catchy phrase and tidy up the bullet-points a little. The result is the kind of thing thats both still ugly as hell but also (sadly) what I see most of when I’m watching presentations…
… and that’s where most people leave it.
Now for those of you who are new to designing slides, take a deep breath and do two things. Firstly, replace your headline with an image that captures the whole concept in the same way the headline does. Secondly, cut your bullet-points down to single words.
Image-wise, I went for something that was just as scary as making presentations: something that required the same three attributes - which by now I’d abbreviated to simply, skills, equipment, attitude. I looked around my hard-drive and found a picture of my daughter doing her first sky-dive. From two miles up you’ve got to have the right combination of skills, equipment and attitude, I’m sure you’ll agree. If any one of them is wrong, things are not going to end well, not well at all. 
After much fussing around to get the image contrast right I ended up with this slide:
Much more attractive and much more memorable… in idea at least. Sadly the image doesn’t cut the mustard, so despite me being wedded to it because it’s person to me, and the time I’d spent trying to get the colours and brightness right (and so on!), the graphic had to go!
To be honest, that looks better on my screen than I expected, because when it’s projected it doesn’t look good at all - the contrast in the imagage isn’t up to the mark. I tried it out in front of a “tame” audience and didn’t get a good response - people were spending time figuring out what the image was, and what it was supposed to show: clearly it was mind-boggling-ly obvious but only mind-boggling-ly obvous to me. Maybe it’s because I’d been there when my daughter jumped out of the airplane!
A bit later, poking around google-images (and, I confess, a chat with my wife who made the suggestion of what to look for!) I came up with the idea of a space-walk. This is my current version of the slide: now doubt it will evolve more in the weeks ahead….. what do you think?
The eyes have it…
Holding eye contact is a bit of a strain for many of us. For many people, there are only a couple of reasons for looking someone straight in the eye for more than a second or so - sex or violence! Keeping eye contact makes us feel anxious and we avoid it out of ‘shyness’.
Unfortunately, not looking at your audience makes them feel you’re not interested in them, so they’re less likely to be interested in you… and in what you’ve got to say.
Today’s tip is pretty simple, really - but it takes a little time to get it right so don’t be put off if you don’t manage it straight away. The trick is this - simply soften your focus as you look at your audience: that way you don’t look at any one person in your audience necessarily, but you look at your audience as a whole. That can be a lot more comfortable for people who are anxious about their performance…..
It also has the added advantage of meaning that you’re more likely to notice if something unusual is going on in another part of the auditorium - such as someone not paying attention!
It sounds too simple to be true, but it’s remarkably effective. One note of caution, however… it’s important not to let yourself look simply ‘dopey’ when you soften your focus. That means you need to make sure there’s plenty of animation in your facial expressions and gestures as you do it.
Give it a go.