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...
Travel by train and traveling voices
I’m sitting writing this tip on a train down to a training day I’m doing and there’s a couple talking to each other a few seats away. For “him” I can hear that he’s talking: for “her” I can hear every word quite comfortably. Why’s that?
Because women’s voices are (generally) higher pitched than mens’.
As any Hi-Fi freak will tell you, their woofers (bass speakers) lose ‘focus’ more quickly than their tweeters (high-range speakers). For them it’s a pain because they need to spend a lot of time putting their tweeters in very precises places. For women presenters it’s more of a blessing however, as it means that their voice carry more easily to their audience, where-as men’s voices tend to become ‘blurred’ and lose clarity much more quickly.
What can men do about this? Well, lots of things, but the most simple is to make sure that, rather than raising their voice and speaking louder, they speak with better diction (all the way through their presentation, not just at the start!).
The best way to do that, of course, is to warm up your face before you start to make your presentation. Yawn – hugely – and rub your face to get the muscles warmed up. Better still, make a point of doing some tongue-twisters every now and then to get the muscles around your mouth and lips used to working hard. Good old Peter Piper is a good one – and so is Mary Mac’s Mother.
Why are most presentations and speeches so bad?!?!
…..because everyone else’s are. Simple.
I’ve been chewing over this question quite a lot this week (yes, okay, I’m sad but voice & presentation skills training is what I do) but it was brought to mind particularly by the (very good) speech by Tony Blair and the (excellent) speech given by Bill Clinton. By general consensus these people are great speech-makers. (I’m referring to the Labour Party Conference, 2006, by the way.)
Equally, by consensus (it seems to me), the quality of speech-making and business presentations in this country is generally very low. It’s a sharp contrast. When I challenge people about this on my training courses it seems to be that there is a certain kind of ‘legitimacy’ about not being able to make even a half-way presentation. People giggle about it in the same way that “it’s okay” to struggle at maths or map-reading or…..
Crimes committed with PowerPoint seem to be accepted in the same ways people seem (often) to accept that it’s okay to do 80 mph on a 70 mph motorway.
Personally, I’m inclined to say that neither option is acceptable - but it is widely accepted like that because everyone else believes the same thing. In other words, making bad presentations is acceptable to most people because everyone else makes bad presentations: it becomes the acceptable norm to be bad.
Lots of people say “I need to make presentations and I’m rubbish at it.. but I’m going to sort it out, honest.” - but ask them “When?” and you’ll get the standard “When I get around to it” in the same way as they’re going to get fit, join the gym, give up red meat, drink less alcohol, take up a new hobby or whatever “when they get around to it”.
Hopefully the bar has been raised by comments this week about the recent political speeches - but somehow I doubt it. People are happy in mediocrity it seems - although that could just be because I’m feeling cynical this morning! 
What do you think folks - am I just unduly dour or do I have a point (or both?!?!?)
Simon
ps: I posted this article earlier on Ecademy (a social business networking site): you might be interested in the comments there as well as commenting here……
Powerpointless
Powerpointless is one of those words that, when you hear it for the first time, you not only know exactly what it means but also wish you’d invented it. (Thanks to Alan at The Media Coach for it!). The problem, of course, is that people never think their own powerpoint - or powerpoint trick (dissolve, fade, zoom, twist or other effect) – is pointless: it’s everyone else that’s the problem, they say.
Rubbish.
Less is more – because a presentation is not about showing off or showing how pretty you can make things. It’s about telling people things in the way they need to know it. The less distractions you have therefore, the better. Simple and elegant is preferable.
Of course, there are times when one does need to have some ‘flashy’ powerpoint
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When your point is boring and/or irrelevant and/or weak and you need to cover that up;
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When you’ve not structured you presentation well enough and you need to distract from a clumsy change of direction or topic;
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When you’ve got a ‘hollow’ presentation (with no substance) and you hope you can hide that by using an overly flashy packaging;
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When you’ve been very serious for a while and you need to lighten the mood etc..
As you can tell, I’m not a fan and I’d only count the last point as a valid one - although this too can easily be overdone if you’re not careful. A twenty minute presentation shouldn’t need to have more than one such occasion at the most.
Anything longer than 20 minutes, by the way, and you run into a whole other bunch of problems!
In short – keep it clean, keep it simple…. and don’t try to hide the inadequacy of your presentation’s content by hyping up the packaging. There’s no use having diamond-encrusted wrapping paper around a toy plastic ring!
A presentation is not about the package - it’s about the content. The act of presenting is the means to the end, not the end in itself
A Lady, don’t you know!
I spent some time this week in London, working with a female professor, attending meetings full of presentations. The fact that the Prof I was with was female didn’t matter one jot – she was the best in the world at what these people needed to know about….
….except that it did matter.
Why? Because being a woman brings with it very specific presentation issues (see here too) – quite apart from the obvious old-fashioned, chauvinistic ones of men not wanting to listen (and sometimes preferring only to look instead). I’m thinking particularly of women’s voices.
Vocal chords in women typically work at around 225-250 movements per second – nearly twice that of men – so it’s particularly important not to stress them. That means it’s even more crucial for women to get their posture right to protect their voice-system. Unfortunately, women are also typically shorter than men and so tend to raise their heads to look at people.
Today’s tip…… don’t. Keep your head tipped comfortably forwards by a couple of degrees and look your audience in the face by raising your eye-line, not your head! It’s odd at first, but you’ll soon get the hang of it!
