tellingpeople

We’ve just finished GCSEs in our house. Of the whole family, there’s only one of us who was sitting the exams, but we were all nervous! Some of us have more reason than others: unfortunately, nerves are infectious. I’ve heard arguments that it’s to do with pheromones of the nervous person being breathed in by the people around them and I’ve heard people say it’s just down to us interpreting the nervous person’s body-language. Whatever causes it, the effects can be potent.

If you’re one of a group of speakers when you’ve got to make a presentation, as often happens in meetings or conferences, you could find yourself suffering from other people’s nerves. So how do you fight this?

Well, it’s not easy, to be honest.

Part of the answer is easier said than done – just stay focused on what you have to do and ignore other people – but another part is quite straight-forward: stay away. If you can, sit near a window (or door) to keep yourself in a flow of fresher air. This will keep you cool as well as unaffected by pheromones. Sit down, don’t stand, which will make it easier for you to avoid the wind-up activities such as pacing, hopping from leg to leg and so on.

Then concentrate on your hands: make a point of keeping them open and “floppy” so that there’s no rigidity in the tendons there. You’ll find that keeping the extremity of your hands in this (artificially) relaxed state will help hugely to keep the rest of you relaxed.

This is partially ‘cos it works in its own right and – of course – partially ‘cos it works as a kind of mantra, keeping you from stewing in your own presentation nerves.

A simple presentation trick, for sure – but simple is best when it works (like our presentation skills training)

Following on from a presentation I’ve just given at ITWORKS2006 I took a stroll around the stands. I walked around for nearly 30 minutes and only one person spoke to me (and she was a very nice young lady); other standholders ignored me. Nearly half of them were either

• on a mobile phone
• doing their administration/accounts
• filling in a crossword

C’mon guys, have some common sense! I don’t care that you’re “only doing it until a visitor arrives”: no visitors will arrive if that’s what you’re doing! You have to present yourself as available and friendly!

Good grief!

Another tip for presenters on stands – or rather for their managers – don’t send extraverts. Extraverts thrive on bouncing off other people. That’s great if there are lots and lots of visitors to the stand all the time but if there aren’t (as there wasn’t at 10:15 this morning) they tend to collaps in on themselves, struggling to look enthusiastic. People who get their “emotional energy” from inside their own heads (introverts in the jargon) are arguably more suitable…..

The Service Network, the group I was speaking on behalf of, are going to put my overheads up on their website: I’ll link to it when they do.

In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine!

~ Simon

As a voice & presentation skills trainer there’s a big news story around at the moment – Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to his software design. The big example of how his personality impacts upon his software (for me, but I’m biased ) is in the presentation software, PowerPoint. BG’s great at what he does but what he does is… squeeze in lots of features: that’s how he works, a great details man.
It’s how all geeks work and God bless ‘em for it. But that’s not the right way with presentation software.

That needs to be written from a user-perspective more than any other package, because “most users don’t want to be” – not many people like giving presentations, so they use the software to hide behind…. and if the software drives them in a particular direction they’ll naturally tend to go in that direction.

So if you couple fear with the tendency of the software to encourage you to think in a lots-of-details-and-bullet-points-sort-of-way. and you’ve got a recipie for a bad presentation.

…. and I think that stems from the top at MS.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens….. maybe the package will develop a little more “usability” even if it doesn’t develop many more features. It would be great if it did!

Simon

The beginning of things is a fine time to get things right. So it is with buildings, plans, articles and – more importantly – blogs. I’m going to be writing about communicating with people in real life, face to face situations and the like. About how to do it; how important it is; and how horrible it can be for everyone when it’s not being done (or at least not done well!). …such as how I’m doing it now…..

In short, this blog is about voice & presentation skills. You don’t need ‘em? Then don’t read ‘em! (But I be you need ‘em more than you think….. read a few and see )
Shame that’s a lesson not learned by the two teams in the recent BBC series of The Apprentice recently! I’ve never seen a greater bunch of Prima Donnas – who utterly fail to communicate with each other. Despite the mobile phones and the posturing, the ‘read my lips’ attitudes, the raised voices and the trying-to-shout-each-other-downs there’s precious little actual communication going on…. at least the way it’s been edited and broadcast.

If communication is about anything, surely it isn’t just about saying something – and being heard….. Spitting instructions into a mobile phone from the back of a taxi isn’t communicating. That’s just about saying something so you look like you’ve done something when the cameras play things back to you (and you can try and justify your incompetence to yourself, retrospectively.) Communication is actually about the person on the far end of the phone receiving the words, hearing them, listening to them and taking them to heart (or head!).

That’s what the contestants don’t seem to have grasped yet mind numbingly obvious though it is. Postures from Project Managers standing at the front in planning meetings don’t cut it – no matter how important what they’re saying might be – if no one is listening.

As the old strapline for the film Alien had it In space, no one can hear you scream…. and if no one’s listening, no to will hear you strop, paddy, shout or present, either!

And it’s not just about silly games. Sometimes it’s important and about real life. There’s a Government campaign about to start up in the UK at the moment, highlighting the need to have informed consent before having sex. Otherwise it’s rape. Just because she hasn’t said ‘No’ doesn’t mean she’s said ‘Yes’. Communication is a two way thing. Always.

…… I’m not suggesting that the contestants on The Apprentice are potential rapists, but they do need to learn to communicate, pretty bloody fast as Sir Alan would say.

Cheers…… Simon

PS: This post – and maybe a couple of others in the future – first appeared on Last Thursday, the networking site.