This blog is about presentations & public speaking - how to make 'em, how not to make 'em and how other people are making 'em. Feel free to read, use and comment on what you find here. And good luck with your presentations...
It’s women’s work
I’ve just spent a day in the company of a professor from the University where I work sometimes. The fact that she’s a female prof is “neither here nor there”: she’s the world expert in what she does and her gender is no more important than the colour of her eyes.
Except that it is.
Why? Because she’s a woman and I was traveling with her to watch her make a presentation…. and being a woman has certain specific issues when it comes to presenting. First things first, let’s deal with the obvious issues about being a female presenter before we start to think about the complicated stuff.
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Avoid necklines that show cleavage. I’m not saying you need to wear roll-neck sweaters all the time but remember that the audience is there to hear what you’ve got to say, not get distracted.
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Big and/or dangly jewelry has the same issues. Necklaces and ear-rings are particularly distracting if you’re not careful. Anything that flashes, hangs or dangles isn’t a good thing. It’s about your message, not your looks.
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Wear something as neutral as you can manage. What I mean is this: don’t give people an excuse to “write off” what you’re telling them. After all, remember that you’re the expert and you’ve got something important to say. (otherwise you’d not be saying it, would you!). With the best will in the world however, you’re always going to get someone who doesn’t want to hear your message: why make it easy for them by giving them something use as an excuse.
Okay, that’s the obvious stuff out of the way. Now let’s talk about some of the more complicated and controversial stuff.
First the complicated thing…..
Women’s voices tend to be higher than men’s That’s because women’s vocal folds work at almost twice the rate of men’s (yes, I hate that kind of generic average too, but you get the idea). As a result of this, amongst other things, women’s voices are more susceptible to ’shrieking’. Shrieking is what happens when things get tight around the chest and throat. The pitch of the voice rises slightly but more importantly the tone changes too….. tension will tend to sound like nerves, or even fear, and sometimes also uncertainly, insecurity and – perhaps most importantly of all – a lack of authority.
If you’re the speaker or presenter, you start with authority and sounding like you don’t mean it is the last thing you need. To make matters worse it becomes a vicious cycle: knowing you don’t sound like you’re in charge makes you more tight, which in turn makes you even more tense-sounding, giving rise to an increased amount of “I’m not in charge” being carried in your voice.
So what do you do about it?
Well let’s get back to stating the obvious for a moment: if you’re the presenter, you’re the main authority, be definition. Remembering that will help. So will this tip: it’s good for women in particular but useful for men, too…
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Breathe out before you give the first words of your presentation and start your first sentence half way through your out-breath. It’s important that you don’t stop and breathe in again before you start to speak. It might take a bit of practice.
The reason behind it is this. As you breathe in you’ll use your diaphragm muscles and your intercostal muscles to move your rib cage. The former is good, the latter less so – they’re the muscles associated with your “fight of flight” syndrome and making you feel more nervous. The air held in the top of your lungs is under the greatest pressure and is also the ‘nervous’ air. Letting it out before you start to speak means that the rest of your exhale (out-breath) is at a lower pressure – the air flows more slowly and you sound much, much more calm.
Combine that effect with this:
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Know your first couple of sentences absolutely off by heart so that you can say them clearly and calmly without thinking about it (practice, practice, practice)
and you’ll be away!
Now for the controversial point……
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Check your bra fits you perfectly.
That’s generally good advice at most times but you’d be amazed at how easily your breathing can be inhibited by an ill-fitting bra. Not being a woman I can’t give anything more specific than that in a public forum but rest assured, although it might sound silly it can be a very significant problem. 
What can business learn from theatre? part two: attitude
I started writing this on the way to the last gig of the tour I did as the technical manager for the Northern Youth Dance Company (how good are they? National Ballet Magazine said “This company reminds me of the point of Dance”!). For me it’s something of a paying hobby these days but I’ve just had the privilege of working with some of the best people around (indeed my dancer-daughter insists I should be paying them.) These folks do it day in, day out, 14 hours a day for 49 weeks a year, 6 days a week for the amount per day that most of us would charge our ‘normal’ clients for an hour’s work. So why do they do it? Attitude.
Theatre technicians might grumble, they will complain: they’ll sulk, grouse, bitch and behave like children…. but when the Stage Manager says “I want it now.” S/he means exactly ‘now’ and exactly ‘now’ is when he gets it. No messing, no excuses.
Ask yourself this question, how often do you hear of a major IT contract being late and/or over-budget? I stopped listening to that kind of report a long time ago, just accepting it as part of everyday life. And yet cast your mind back to when the stage show of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” started. For one performance (in the previews only!) there was a safety issue so the car couldn’t fly and it was headline news. No one had to negotiate with the staff to work through the night to mend it. No one even asked them to. It was simply a matter of pride and expectation to them that the problem would be solved in time for rehearsals the next morning. It was. Not a single instruction was given and not a single extra penny was paid.
That’s attitude.
And that’s what business can learn from theatre. I suspect that, as many of us here are self employed, it’s something we are more familiar with than our corporately employed cousins but even so there’s the temptation to miss a deadline if things get on top of us (I’ve done it myself when my wife was in hospital.) The deadlines of theatre are absolute: they cannot be compromised and audiences do not forgive. Ever.
The expectations are higher (perhaps because deadlines are so fixed and public) – and maybe that’s the real thing we can learn…..
Anyone got any thoughts?
What can business learn from theatre?
Think of them as conversation pieces…)
I’ve “worked in theatre” on and off for a long time and even now, though most of my income is corporate presentations training, I still do a fair whack of it. There’s an irony that the day’s theatre-pay for an 18 hour shift will be the same as two hours pay from one of the big corporate clients. So why do it? Well that’s the key to one of things we in business can learn – attitude. The second key thing we can learn are specific techniques. I’m going to talk about them in two short articles – but I’d be really interested in your responses too; my experiences are pretty much limited to touring theatre and skewed towards the technician side of things….
Techniques
Actors learn to use their voices and to present themselves well. If you can’t get an audience to empathise with you, you’re dead.
Obviously that’s a key skill for anyone in business who has to make presentations. By that I don’t just mean the formal stand-up-and-talk style that we all think of as doing a presentation – I mean things all the way down to presenting a progress report at a meeting, sitting down with a potential client for the first time or even answering the phone.
Not long ago I got a private message on Ecademy from someone who’s just read my voice production book (Little Big Voice, Piquant Ltd, 2000), saying how pleased they were to learn something new and how they’d not expected to, as they were already a professional speaker. Yet the technique my co-respondent was referring to came from the metaphorical day one of drama school - and yet the effects were simply “stunning” at her next public speaking engagement! Talk about skill transfer from theatre to business presentation-making!
There’s an old saying that if you can fake sincerity then you’ve got it made. Call me cynical but actually faking it isn’t hard. It’s just a matter of learning how to breathe, how to stand and which words in a sentence to stress. Communicating and presenting at work is just the same: it’s all about being straight and honest.
Most of my income these days is from working by corporate training who want to be able to make better presentations to with their clients and potential clients – the principles of my advice is often the same (the details change!); start by treating your clients as an audience and figure out how to start from where they are. For a theatre Director the task of getting your audience to where you want them to be has three steps:
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Decide where you want your audience to be by the end
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Decide where your audience are now
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Figure out how to get from one to the other
Simple though those principles are, I’m always amazed at how often they’re not applied by anyone trying to communicate – be it selling, researching, promoting, reporting, asking…… whatever. (It’s one of the more common issues we cover in our Telling People courses.) People forget to start thinking about their presentations by asking themselves the second question and they sub-conciously start to make assumptions….
Let’s talk about other techniques - presentation equipment. No theatre technician worth his or her (pitiful) wages is going to be phased by even the latest equipment. You’ll not see one of them flustered when they’ve got to patch their laptop into a new system, even one with wiring that looks like a bowl of spaghetti.
You know what I mean – the presenter you’ve paid good money to come and hear just stands there looking a bit flustered and asks the person in charge “How do I plug this in?”! (For the record, folks, it’s called “patching” not plugging, if you want to sound like an insider. )
Working in the theatre you learn the principles of making different machines talk to each other and can apply that after on a little thought. No two theatres have the same kit, so you learn the ‘high level’ how to do it
What do you think folks, what other technical skills can theatre bring to the ‘real world’ ? Next time I’m going to talk about “attitude”…..
Presentation by Tony Robbins - critique
Okay, this might be the bravest or dumbest thing I’ve done on this blog but I feel quite well motivated, so I’m going to do it now, before I “bottle-out” as we say in the UK.
I’ve read in many places about the TED presentations (such as Garr’s Presentatation Zen blog) and I have to confess I’ve not (yet) watched them all, but I have watched the one by Tony Robbins. For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he’s described variously as things like “the world’s leading motivational speaker”. For me to critisize him is pretty presumptive, but I’m going to risk it.
His presentation was apparently a good one at first sight, no doubt about it. Certainly the audience loved it - if you don’t get bored and stop watching, you’ll have seen the standing ovation at the end…. and yet I can’t help but feel that this ovation was in part at least, set up for him by previous speakers. Watch the other presentations and you’ll see what I mean: by comparison to thier content, TR was just a wind-up act.
His voice was high, in the chest and rough: all of those contribute to a sense of urgency and excitement in the audience, certainly, but also to a (longer term) feeling that he doesn’t actually mean what he says… which is ironic because for the second half of the presentation at least he was talking about emotions. Heaven alone knows what he was talking about for the first half of his presentation - I’ve forgotten already and I only watched it a few minutes ago! A victory of presentation style over presentation substance.
There is a sad but wonderful irony here too, that the second half of his presentation didn’t really even make sense overall - sure, each sentence and paragraph individually was sensible (even if it was nothing more than a hyped up re-packaging of Maslow’s pyramid of motivation with sexier wording) but the overall presentation structure didn’t hold water. (Watch the presentation yourself and see!) Why not?
Because he made the biggest mistake that presenters can make! He forgot to keep an eye on the time he had left for his presentation! Given that there was a great big count-down timer on the floor at the front of the stage, that takes some doing! So why did such an experienced presenter as TR make such a basic mistake - a mistake that meant his presentation lost focus, rushed, skipped things and ultimately just stopped and finished un-satisfactoraly for everyone?
Well, I’m probably biased because I’ve heard lots of bad things about TR and this is the first of his presentations I’ve ever actually witnessed for myself but it seemed to me that the clue lay in how well his presentation was being received…. very well indeed at the time.
I believe that’s because his presentation became a “self-presentation”. He, TR, became the focus, instead of his content. He’s a great presenter, no doubt about it, but that’s a basic mistake: perhaps a less powerful presenter would have retained the necessary ounce of self-doubt to be just that little bit more humble in his/her presentation.
A presentation is not about the presenter, it’s about the message. It seems to me that TR forgot the basic mantra of presentations:
A presentation is not about telling people what you know. It’s about telling them what they need to know, in the way they need to know it.
Go through the video again, and count the number of times you hear the word “I”.
The Times gets in on the voice & presentation act!
Today’s Times contains an article about voice/confidence/health. It’s got some useful tips - although there’s the common mis-understanding about the words you use only accounting for 7% of the meaning of a communication. (See my earlier blog - 7% rant) but it’s generally good stuff.
There’s an interesting point that about a third of us are now in professions where our voice is our prime tool. I don’t know where that statistic came from but if it’s valid it’s got serious implications for how we treat our voices/bodies. It’s particularly good to see the journalist recognising that she’s making presentations left right and centre in her work. My personal experience is that most “professionals” are “presenting” several times a day - the just don’t always relalise it!
