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...
You hear what you see
A friend of mine sent me this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=7-ZnPE3G_YY today. It’s very mildly offensive but if you can cope with a someone taking the mickey out of Songs of Praise, have watch/listen.
What it shows, pretty clearly, I think, is that we’re visual animals: you know they can’t be sining the words you see on the screen but somehow that’s what you hear. I suggest presentations aren’t much different in one way.
You have the screen with your PowerPoint (or whatever) on it and you have you standing, talking. Given how important we now know words are compared to what you hear, which are your audience going to concentrate on first?
Dead right - as I’ve said before (and will say again!) your audience will concentrate on your screen first and if you’ve got a bad slide, with too many words on it, they can’t help but ignore you and concentrate on it for a while. So what’s the solution? Simple, strip your slides down to the absolute basics. Instead of sentences have phrases; instead of phrases have words; instead of words have images.
Big Breaths Doctor?
“How do I deal with the nerves?” - the most common question I get on our public courses.
Everywhere I go on the web there’s a list of presentation tips: one of the most common is (unfortunately) to “Take a few deep breaths”. It’s not actually wrong, but it’s not any use, which is why I say ‘unfortunately’.
If you’re nervous you’ll tend to breathe in your upper chest, using your fight-or-flight syndrome: being told to take big breaths simply means you’ll do more of the same, but bigger…..
…..unless someone tells you differently.
Next time you’re nervous try this: don’t just take big or deep breaths, take low ones. By low, I mean that you should try and breathe down into your belly, or even your shoes. The idea is to get the air down into the lower part of your lungs, using your diaphragm muscles, not the muscles you use to breathe when you’re scared – your chest muscles.
Using your chest muscles only ups the level of adrenaline in your systems – getting the air lower in your lungs will reduce the adrenaline and replace it with some of the feel-good hormones.
It won’t cure the problem, but it will certainly help!
Raw power
How do you make the beautiful PowerPoint slides – that you spent hours crafting – visible to your audience in high ambient light? (Well, the good news is that at least you were worried about it: most presenters don’t even think of it!).
There are four (simple) things you can do. The most effective is look carefully at the lighting in the room you’re in – often it’s possible to isolate just the front lights so there’s less shining directly onto your screen. Sometimes it’s even possible to physically move the lights (if they’re spotlights) so they shine to the side of your screen instead of directly on it – but only sometimes. Not only is getting less light on the screen the easiest to think about, it’s also the most effective. Try it first!
Secondly, you can get a better screen with better reflectivity patterns – I’ll often use a blank area of wall: generally they’re less reflective of (badly) positioned lights and as my projector is pointing straight at the wall, it’s got a better chance against light coming down from the ceiling.
Finally, you can get more raw power in your projector. The unit of measurement for this is the Lumen. Most “bog standard” projectors are in the range of 1000 to 1500 Lumens but I never go anywhere without my 2500 unit. It’s slightly more expensive, but not when you consider people not being able to see your slides or you having to hire a unit for the day!
It’s going to use more electricity, of course, and be less environmentally friendly, but the simple solution here is to check before you buy that it’s got an ‘eco’ setting – so that when you don’t need the full power, you don’t use the full power: mine cuts down to 1500 Lumens in it’s set-up menu. Simple.
The next thing is…
A phrase that’s struck me, as it drifts through the dividers is “The next this is….”. So far the presenter has used it three times in as many minutes. It grates on me - badly. Firstly, using any phrase so often, repeatedly, will annoy someone in the audience. Secondly, to have three “next things” in as many minutes means that there are too many “next things” for the audience to truly take them on board (people can only handle three new concepts in a 20 minute presentation!).
Thirdly, and most importantly… if the only way to introduce your next point is with an inane phrase like that, it implies (strongly!) that you’re just giving your audience a list, without form or structure. If you haven’t got a logical link between two things you want to talk about (and “the next thing” doesn’t count as a logical link!”) then your presentation isn’t designed properly. All you’re doing (probably) is talking to them in a relatively unstructured (and therefore ineffective) way.
Think about it – if you’re in the audience and there’s no link between two points, or three, or four… or even five (she’s cranking through them next door!) - how long would your concentration last?
Well, all I can tell you is that in the time it’s taken me to type this, things have changed next door. I can still hear the presenter, but now I can also hear people talking to each other instead of listening…. and that’s not a good sign!
I wonder if there’s a way I can give her my business card as she leaves………!
Apprentice Ghazal dries
Ghazal dried in mid-presentation in the second week: freezing mid-presentation isn’t common but it’s not unknown either, sadly.
Usually people keep going and make a hash of it because of nerves, so it might be that having to actually stop altogether was the lesser of two evils. Of course, it would have been better for her not have not gone to pieces in the first place! I can’t see her making it all the way if she can’t handle the pressure of business presentations – they’re as unavoidable as taxes when you’re in business.
I’m guessing Ghazal’s problem was one of two common mistakes. It’s hard to tell from a TV programme but it looks at first sight as though Ghazal’s mind wasn’t on the right place. She may have prepared the presentation but she hadn’t prepared herself – you need to do both, obviously. Alternatively, it may be that she was thinking too much about the outcome of the presentation and what was riding on it: that means she got herself nervous in proportion to the possible gains/loss of the presentation, not in proportion to the task itself.
In short, she just wasn’t ready for it!
It’s not just about knowing the skills - you’ve got to have got them so far under your skin that you don’t think about them any more.
It’s like learning to walk – when you’re a toddler you’re consciously working on walking. Once you get older and better at it you forget about how to walk and think about where you’re walking. For poor Ghazal it all got too much because she was trying to do too much at once!
Advanced presentation skills
News!
We’re just launching our advanced presentation skills training to the public. So far our only advanced courses have been in-house for our corporate clients but now we’ve decided to run them publicly too. It’s all brand new,
so feel free to spot the mistakes on the web-page when you have a look!
Why now? No particular reason - there’s no great master-plan! In fact, as we’re all off on holiday for 10 days it’s probably not a good time to do this, but what the hell!
To find this kind of training useful you’ll need to have either been on one of our basic presentation skills training days or have some experience of giving your own presentations. Either way you’ll need to want to get better and be prepared to help the other people on the course. It should be fun - we’re looking forward to it.
A decent 20 minute lecture online…
And all about presenting too! It’s from Gillian Kerr and I agree with her basic point - define your objectives, define your audience (and make sure you speak to both their surface objectives and the un-stated objectives).
Having said that, the slides are simply awful! Far, far, far too many words: she makes the mistake of providing all her information on the screen. So what does the audience do? We read the slides and then spend a minute or two getting board while we wait for her to catch up with us because we read faster than she speaks.
Shame, ‘cos she has some really good points to make, but I’ll be almost none of you get to the end, because you get bored (like I did) for that very reason. Listen here.
What should she have done? Well, for my money she should have had only a couple of key words (a short phrase at most) for each of her bullet points, so that people listen to her, not read the screen. Simple.
