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...
Questions - or not
Someone who recently introduced me at a presentation I was making checked with me - very courteously - whether I wanted to take questions as we went along or at the end. Taking questions is a point that this blog posting handles rather briefly: as does this post: and this one…. and, well never mind - you get the idea. I’ve even blogged about it myself here.
Referring back to my original question (during or after) I’m going to rather over-state my case for the sake of making a point…
I strongly feel that any questions your audience might have should come along afterwards, not during. This is because your presentation should be so clearly and tightly structured that there’s no need (and no chance for) people to ask you any questions as you go along.
Questions in the middle of your presentation come from loose ends. They come from you having started a train of thought running in the head of someone in your audience and then not having dealt with it. If you’ve really, really understood what your audience wants to know, your presentation should be a seamless move from where-they-start to where-they-want-to be.
Questions at the end tend to be along the lines of your audience taking what you’ve given them and then applying it to other circumstances, places and times; typically they’ll be applying them to their own circumstances. If they’re doing that, it’s good in a big way. It shows that you’ve sold your concept to them and they’re trying it on for size. That’s fine - you should be able to deal with that kind of thing - if you can’t you have to ask yourself hard questions about what you’ve just told them! 
I told someone recently who was showing me his Powerpoint slides (and asking for feedback with the question “Does it hold together?”) something quite vicious (kind of!):
- firstly - if you have to ask, the answer is probably “no”
- secondly - when you’ve finished talking about a slide (any slide) there should be an obvious “what next” question in your audience’s head. They should be thinking “So….?”. Your next slide should start with that question.
Okay, that’s a bit literal - don’t try to make that happen unreasonably; but it does give you a way to see how well your slides (and more importantly the whole of your presentation) holds together. Use the idea as a tool to look critically at what you’re saying.
America the Brave…
I sat down this morning to do some research on speaking styles with reference to the American Presidential election campaign. I was particulalry interested in the Democratic race for the nomination (because there’s nothing interesting about the Republican non-race).
I found this: pretty much job done, in many ways.
Essentially, the article discusses in a little detail the fact that Obama’s at a bit of an advantage because his style of public speaking is better than Clinton’s. (I’m inclined to agree - Clinton can sound badly like a fish-wife if she’s not careful.) Ironic, isn’t it, that she’s the wife of one of the best public speaker the modern world has seen!
Clinton’s response? Far from trying to improve her style, she’s tried (hard) to move beyond issues of style at all, already accepting, implicitly, that it’s a battle she’s lost. But it won’t do. It’s not working. People aren’t always able to hear the content of her speeches because the style of delivery can rub them up the wrong way.
And closer to home (this blog is written by a presentation skills trainer in the UK) look at the relative popularity of Blair and Brown. One of them was a natural orator, one of them not so. You may or may not like or approve of either of them (or what they say) but the statistics are on my side!
So scared it hurts
I recently did a session for an organisation whose brief was to help the voluntary sector in our part of the country become more professional and organised. The day was, obviously, about making a presentation to potential funders and had a “Dragon’s Den” format for the afternoon.
Take-up wasn’t good, sadly. They’d organised the day on the grounds that this was what people wanted and needed, because they were anxious about it - because pitching for funding is a critical part of any project. It turned out that people were so anxious about being bad at public speaking they were too anxious to even try it in a training environment. What’s more, people tended to come alone, rather than in pairs - the benefit of moral support being out-weighed by the shame of being seen to be a bad public speaker by a colleague!
So, so sad!
How did it come to this?
Well let’s not get too despondent. The people we’re talking about care very much about what they do - otherwise they’d not be doing it. That’s great: I’d rather work with people who cared than people who wanted to talk for the sake of it. And - at risk of sounding patronising, please forgive me - we’re not talking about professionally trained speakers or high-powered business men or women. We’re talking about real people, with real jobs. Working really hard.
…and if public speaking, making a presentation, isn’t part of their everyday working life they’re not going to have found the time to get a series of successful presentations under their belts. Each and every presentation is going to feel like the first time. And I don’t know about you, but my first time wasn’t good.
So what’s to be done? Well, I’d welcome your ideas! All I can think of is to continue to offer great training that’s not intimidating, that’s not stressful and that is a load of fun.
Equation for Curved Vision
Like a lot of other people, we here at Curved Vision have a Google Alert for our company name. That means if anyone is mentioning us, Google will let us know. It’s simple, effective and convenient… and mindless!
Why mindless? Because it took me, a few days ago to this artwork. Nothing to do do with anything we’re involved in, though. I like it though, so I thought I’d give it a plug!
A picture and a thousand words
A friend of mine runs an art gallery in Liverpool. - she’s called Lydia and she’s lovely. Reading a blog article of hers called “A picture’s worth a thousand words” reminded me that cliches are cliches for a reason - firstly because you need to avoid them when you’re presenting, obviously, but secondly because they’re true.
What’s also true is that we’re visual animals - we take in stuff through our eyes better than most other animals and a huge proportion of our brain is dedicated to handling visual information. So why not combine those two ideas and have a presentation which is (almost) entirely made up of big, bold, visual images?
The tips for picking the images?
- iconic - the image needs to encapsulate the idea you’re talking about in the same way a road sign tells you what you need to know in one glance: you don’t need to spend precious seconds when you’re driving concentrating on it.
- big - it’s far, far easier to scale an image down than up if you want to keep the quality and in terms of display, size is important.
- quality - nothing says that you don’t respect your audience more than crap pictures.
- high contrast and bright colours - your data-projector and computer will between them do a good job of mucking about with the colour balance of your pictures so it’s essential you start off with something big and bold, otherwise it’ll just appear flat, boring and perhaps even hard to make out.
- legal - make sure, obviously, that you’ve got the rights to use the picture. I shouldn’t have to say this, but it appears I do!
- safe - you’d be surprised at what some people can take offence at. What’s natural and reasonable to you won’t be, necessarily, to someone else. (And visa versa, too, so don’t got off thinking they’re prudes!)
Interview with a genius
Anyone who knows anything about presenting will know that I (and anyone else who’s ever trained people to do presentations) is a fan of the Presentation Zen blog. See this post, for example.
I came across a nice interview with the man himself recently, which you can find here. My understanding is that the pages are about to be re-vamped (the one you can see is a behind the scenes one to let you at the permalink) so don’t be put off by the look of the place - the ‘real’ home of the blog (here) looks much, much nicer.
It’s well worth 10 or so minutes of anyone’s time. There’s nothing particularly new or earth-shattering there if you’ve read much Presentation Zen stuff before, but it’s a great introduction if you haven’t and a good reminder if you have.
Essentially, the basic idea behind the Zen approach to presentations is that “less is more”. Less words, particularly. So few words, ideally, that you don’t even have bullet points. Personally I use them when they’re appropriate - which is almost never, but I’m doing a presentation tomorrow with two such slides on them…. though one of them is an illustration of “how to do it wrong” so I guess that doesn’t count. Zen indeed!
The obvious #2
The second in the list of “Stating the obvious“… or “Stuff you’ll kick yourself for if you don’t sort out”
Some times it’s so obvious it shouldn’t need to be a tip… But the obvious isn’t always obvious, so here goes.
Have a checklist.
Seriously: have it all written down.
By ‘it’ I mean all the things you need to sort out before you go on stage. My checklist has two parts to it. The first tells me all the things I need to make sure I take with me from the office (laptop, projector, backups etc.) and the second tells me all the things I need to have got sorted out before I “go on”. This would be things such as
- finding my focus
- straightening my tie
- checking my flies are done up!
The thing is, no matter how much experience you have, one day you’ll slip up and this little piece of paper will be your lifesaver at that point. An in case you’re wondering, yes, this is the voice of experience.
Let’s face it, if it’s good enough for airline pilots before take-off, it’s good enough for us!
By the way, it’s worth thinking about making something special out of your list - make the format and layout attractive; print it on card; even laminate it…. anything you like, so long as it makes it special.
I’m going to be updating my checklists soon - and I’d love to include anyone else’s suggestions of what to check, too - help me out here!
More stories
A while ago I blogged about story-telling in presentations. Recently I came upon a post on a similar theme in a different blog which is worth five minutes of your time.
I’d also like to draw your attention to the Vital Elders blog, which sometimes contains interesting stories - usually of native American origin. I’d want to substitute different words to make them sound more contemporary and accessible, perhaps, but every now and then there’s a gem. Enjoy.
Garr makes a point
Whenever I do freebie sessions (such as this one and the stuff I do for UNN, Newcastle and so on) I finish with a “Where to get more help” slide. Naturally I include this blog but I also point them towards the best one around - Presentation Zen.
On this particular blog entry, he makes a good point.
Actually he makes a series of good points. The point I wanted to pick on, however, was that Sir Ken seems to be speaking to people in a personal and relaxed way.
… and that, ladies and gentlemen, is down in large part to the way he uses his voice. Sir Ken, whether by training or instinct, breathes low in his body, using his diaphragm rather than his chest. It’s that relaxed (correct) way of breathing which releases the chill-out hormones and allows for a more emotionally rich way of projecting his voice. Breathing the other way - with intercostal muscles - releases adrenaline and the other stress hormones.
With breathing sorted out like this it’s very much easier to be (and sound) relaxed and authoritative. Anything else, breathing with intercostal muscles, sounds like you’re shouting (even if you’re quiet - and trust me, parents will all any about shouting quietly: “If you don’t tidy your room right this minute there will be trouble!”)
Get the breathing right and almost everything else will follow….. (sort of)
Simon
Gordon Brown’s party speech
Hhhhmmm…… I’m writing this as I watch (on the TV) Gordon Brown PM as he addresses the Labour Party, here in the UK.
I’ve seen him live and been impressed - despite his reputation for being somewhat dour, he did a fine job (even quoting Ronald Reagan and getting away with it!). One of the reasons he managed this, of course, is that he understood his audience and he took the necessary time to build to the climax of the piece. It started with “where we are” and built on it nicely to a climax and a strong ovation from a thoughtful and convinced audience. This, needless to say, was not a televised speech.
Conversely, in this essentially tele-visual event, the current speech isn’t built like that at all. Instead it’s a series of sound-bites. Each - short - paragraph, structured to work when taken out of context. As a speech it’s awful: no flow, no structure and no pattern… just a series of short, self-contained (largely read) paragraphs. Essentially, Mr Brown is just reading a series bullet points to his listeners: their order is pretty well irrelevant.
But it works - sort of.
Not for his audience. For them it’s a getting a series of brief spurts of applause at the end of each paragraph - but they’re getting shorter and shorter each time, rather like the applause at a School Prize giving, when the list of children to be awarded prizes goes on and on and on, with each parent applauding their own child enthusiastically but only politely clapping twice for everyone else’s children.
But I’ll put money, good money, on the fact that when it’s cut up and edited for regurgitation on short news clips it works very nicely indeed.
Given that Mr Brown is obviously working for a TV audience, how could he have made it better? Well, for starters Mr Brown, if you’re listening, get away from the podium. Have the courage to get out from behind your autocue and connect better with your audience. I promise you the effects will be staggering.
You could, of course, just get a better speech-writer who can put in at least the semblance of linking between the paragraphs!
And you could combine these ideas, so that, for example, when you change topic you change place on the stage. That way, your audience will know when you’re doing so. Again, I promise you that’ll be more effective than you can imagine - simply moving to a different position on the stage as you change topic is fantastically effective… especially when your tone of voice and other presentation skills aren’t all that good. Already I’ve noticed a couple of times when you’ve not flagged up that you’re ‘moving on’ to something new, leaving your audience confused and struggling to keep up.
It’s simple oral grammar. By not flagging up when you move on, you’re doing the presentational equivalent of removing the full stops from a written document.
Finally, you might want to practice a little more. Yes, yes, I know you’re busy running the country, but this is part of running the country - it’s not something you do in your spare time. Three times (so far) I’ve seen you “obviously not know what’s coming” and get the inflection completely wrong… Once more confusing your audience for a few seconds.
It’s not rocket science. You can make a ‘good’ speech a ‘really good’ speech. That way, the good last 30 seconds (when you actually got excited about things!) would have been the standard, not the exception. That way, the standing ovation you’ve just got would have been genuine and deserved - not just because it’s expected (once again, for the cameras)!
