tellingpeople

As my daughter did her first freefall a couple of weeks ago, someone jumping with her managed to get some stunning photographs of her as she fell.  With her permission (obviously), I’m turning one of them into a slide, showing the three things you need to make a decent presentation.  As I looked at the pic it dawned on me that doing this kind of thing needs three things.

• the right techniques;
• the right equipment;
• the right attitude.

Miss any one of those and you’ve got a problem.  Okay, so you can cover up for a lack in one with an extra dose of another more when you’re presenting than when you’re in freefall but you get my point, I’m sure.  (You can’t substitute the skill of flapping your wings for the lack of a parachute but you can substitute good voice projection to cover the lack of a microphone!    )

So next time you’re sitting there thing “hhheeeeelpp” ask yourself which of the three it is you’re missing.  If it’s kit, buy or rent it (we’ll advise you on which is the best), if it’s skills you’re missing, call us for training…. and if it’s attitude, well, we can help a bit there, too but mainly it’s up to you.

It’s not about being un-afraid. Attitude is about being afraid and doing it anyway.

Cheers….  Simon

PS : the slide looks absolutely fab, too! 

I mentioned in my last post that we were heading up to the northern regionsl FSB conference on April 18th. Well, we turned up and it was quite an ‘interesting’ day. Several lessons learned!

We’d opted for a simple stand, avoiding the (potentially gaudy and boring-because-they-are-all-the-same) types of pull up stands. Instead we sent for two simultanious slide-shows. One, running on a traditional sized screen was simply a rotating set of testimonials but the main display was specially written for the day and was running on a 42 inch Toshiba flatscreen. (As an aside I can now heartily recommend these as robust, simple and idiot-proof pieces of kit.) You can see a snap of it grabbed during setting up, which shows, rather nicely, the difference in sizes! (By the way, that’s me in the corner, checking something or other.)

YEAH, I know it’s not a great pic, but this is a blog, not anything important! I’ve not even edited out the flare of the flashgun!

Numbers were very dissapointing, with only – at a guess – about forty people who weren’t exhibitors actually coming through the doors of the event (or at least making it as far through the exhibition hall as far as our stand) but we met some lovely people and have started discussions with a couple of other exhibitors about quid-pro-quo stuff…. so watch this space!

This Friday – 18th of April – we’re going to be at the norther regional conference of the Federation of Small Businesses. If anyone wants to pop over and have a chat, see some seriously cool PowerPointing (hey, it’s a stand, not a presentation!), or pick our brains, we’re at stand 40.

You’d be welcome

Two miles is a long way under certain circumstances. Okay, it’s a short walk and and even shorter run, but it’s a hell of a long way to jump out of an airplane.

It’s an even longer way to look upwards if you’re the one on the ground and it’s your daughter who’s doing the jumping. God, I felt old. I think I forgave her everything she’d ever done as a teenager at that point.

Still, more money raised for Amnesty, so it might have been worth the ulcers.

More relevant – in terms of this blog – is some of the advice she received and one of the articles written in ‘Skydive Starter’ magazine – some of the techniques advocated for dealing with the fear of jumping are pretty much the same as I use for dealing with the fear of presenting and public speaking.

Let’s face it, if they work when you’re about to freefall for the first time, they’ll probably work when you’re standing in front of an audience. I’ll deal with the breathing another time (I’ve mentioned it before, too!) but let me just spend a moment or two looking at visualisation. It’s a technique where you use your imagination to go through the motions of what you want to be doing, but without do it (which is useful for things such as presenting when you can’t get as much practice-time in front of an audience as you might need). But it’s not just about “imagining it working”.

The key elements to the technique are to be disciplined and structured about it – go through things carefully and in detail. Add just one element of the visualisation at a time… carefully.

Start with imagining exactly what you will/want to see. Be specific, be detailed. Once you’ve got that, add what you can hear.  Again, be detailed – but don’t do it until the visual stuff is under control. Then add anything you can smell.  Finally add how you feel and what you feel. Things like warmth, a draft from a window you’ve already imagined you can see and the feel of you shoes would be examples of that.

It’s a method that easier to learn face-to-face than when you’re just reading it over a coffee break in your office, but it’s worth having a go – and once you’ve got the basic idea, it’s something you can even try sitting at your computer…..

….rehearse instead.

….rehearse instead.

The two things are very different: certainly practicing is part of rehearsing but it’s only a part.

Practicing – doing it over and over and over (and over!) to get the technical bits sorted out. Rehearsing – doing it differently and trying different things and ways of doing things to get the whole thing sorted out.

Think of it as what a concert pianist does with the physically tricky bits of the Chopin Prelude they’re about to perform. But even a pianist doesn’t just mindlessly go over the whole piece…. they find the bits they struggle with and do just those bits.

Not only that, but they don’t just bash away at the tricky few bars: instead they disect them, look at them in even more detail and try them slower (very much slower!); they’ll also try different fingering and so on, experimenting until they know how to make it work. Then they do the simple repetative practicing bit, starting very slowly and getting a little bit faster each time they get it perfectly right.

If they get it wrong, they go back and start slower again.

Or try thinking of how a company of actors prepares a play for performance. They don’t just go through the play again and agian. They don’t even go through individual scenes! Instead they’ll spend hours looking and and ‘playing with’ individual lines. It’s not unknown for a company to spend more of it’s rehearsal time talking through and experimenting with a play than actually practicing it! (Trust me, I’ve been there! )

But it’s not wasted time (usually!). It’s time like this, spent looking at what the play is actually about and what the author was trying to say which turns a simply competent performance into a great performance.

How much time to presenters spend in preparation, before they start to draft their presentation? In my experience, not enough, generally. Instead they rush to the stage and start trying to run through their lines. But until they know what their play, their presentation, is about, the lines stay dead. They might be delivered with all the technical competence in the world but if they don’t know what the play’s about, they’re just words.

Practice leads to knowing your material and being able to deliver it better. Just rehearsing leads to being over-familiar with your material (you run the risk of just reciting what you’ve more-or-less memorised) and poor delivery.

Practice leads to knowing your material and being able to deliver it better. Just rehearsing leads to being over-familiar with your material (you run the risk of just reciting what you’ve more-or-less memorised) and poor delivery.