tellingpeople

It’s Formula One season once more (and what a season!) and as always I’m stunned by the way the drivers stay calm under pressure. Make a mistake there and it’s all over – perhaps permanently.

One of the ways they do it, of course, is by keeping their sense of perspective. Just like other athletes under pressure they concentrate on what they’re doing… not on the consequences. It’s no good obsessing about the race as a whole; instead, drivers concentrate on the corner in front of them, the car to be passed or the shortest line to be taken.

What does this to do with presenting and public speaking? We often have people to our training courses who say: “I’ve got a big presentation to come up and I can’t afford to get it wrong.”

The problem is that just thinking like that makes it more likely you will get it wrong! The right approach is to concentrate on the presentation itself – not the effects of failure – just like the tennis player who’s a Match Point up (or down!) or the F1 driver who’s got a notoriously difficult corner coming up.

Concentrate on what you’re doing and let the consequences work themselves out afterwards! Of course that’s easier said than done but the effort is worth it.

….. and nothing to do with presenting or public speaking, but a friend of mine is involved in a fund-raiser by crossing the Solent on a duck-shaped pedalo.

See here: http://www.thegreatsolentpedal.com/

If you can possibly bring yourself to give them some support, go ahead.

And if you don’t like the work on the sound-track of the website – tough!

The opposite of being afraid isn’t being un-afraid.

I train hundreds of people each year in designing and delivering presentations and in public speaking … and the most common question I get asked is “How do I stop myself being afraid”? To me that’s missing the point.

The opposite of being fearful is being brave; and being brave is about having the fear and doing the damn thing anyway. I’m not suggesting that potential public speakers should be quaking in their boots and not sleeping for weeks before the big day, but there are a couple of points I’d like to make.

Firstly, fear is a good thing – at least when you’ve got it under control; more specifically, anxiety (on the fear spectrum!) is a good thing because it gives your performance an edge. Without it I’ll lay good odds that your presentations will be dull, uninteresting, possibly smug, and certainly less effective.

Secondly, there’s a lot of rubbish talked about ’stage fright’. Stage fright is a genuine phobia – it’s horrid and it’s debilitating. All too often when we talk about SF, we’re refering to perfectly normal levels of anxiety – after all, standing up in front of strangers and telling them what you’re thinking is frightening.

So where do these two ideas get me? Well, personally I’d argue that between the two of them they suggest that the important thing isn’t to remove the fear altogether but rather to mitigate it – to reduce it so that it’s not debilitating but useful instead.

There are dozens of techniques for dealing with fear and I’d like to (re-)draw attention to a recording of a teleseminar I recorded a couple of years ago. It was a bit of an experiment but despite the sound quality being only okay (rather than great) the content is hopefully helpful. Enjoy.

The MP3 is here and the slides to go with it are here.

I’ve spent a long time being self-indulgent recently, so I thought it might be useful to run through how one of my favorite slides evolved by way of redressing the balance ; it’s still not fixed in stone and may well change as/when/if I get the urge….

First things first – figure out what you want to say. In this instance I wanted the slide to capture the very basic things you need to make a decent presentation. I worked this out in the way I tend to do a lot… by using a simple spidergram to get all my ideas down onto the page in any old way. It’s more important tot get everything down than it is to get it right in the first instance – you can always impose formality later but trying to be too formal too soon inhibits the creative/cathartic process. I used a white-board in my office to do it but a large sheet of paper would do nicely – just remember to start somewhere near the centre of the page and don’t use too big a pen. (Otherwise there’s no point in using a bigger sheet of paper! )

I’d go so far as to say you shouldn’t ever turst a mind-map that looks too neat! That means someone, somewhere, has cleaned it up!

This one, on Olivia Mitchell’s excellent “Speaking About Presenting” website looks ‘real’. I can’t show you mine because I didn’t think to photograph the whiteboard when I’d finished….

Okay, so once I’d got everything down I walked away. In fact I went off for a cup of tea (hey, I’m British, don’t you know! It’s what we do!) to forget about it for a while. When I came back it was with fresh eyes. The next step is easy – just change the colour of your pen and link things together that ‘go together’. The idea is to find three (or four at a push) of the big ideas/concepts that lie behind everything in front of you.

In an ideal world, you’d spot three concepts and you’d be able to categorise every word before you to one of those three ideas. For example, on our public training days I run through this exercise with people, using the subject of ‘Making a perfect cup of tea’. Often groups come up with the concepts of

• consumables – milk, tea, electricity etc.
• tools – kettle, teapot, mug etc.
• process – the things you do such as boiling the water, pouring the tea, letting it brew

There are other ways of categorising things of course – don’t let that list stop you doing your own. So, back to my slide: it turns out that I came up with a classification of only three items:

• you need all the necessary skills of presenting – the kind of things I train people in
• kit – things like your slides if you use them, projector, props, microphone if you need to use one
• something to say – and the urge to say it…. the right attitude, you could say.

When you put that onto a slide, using PowerPoint’s (shocking bad) defaults, you get something a bit like this, perhaps, after a little thought…

…. hideous isn’t it!

And instantly forgetable.

To make it a little more “audience-friendly” I did some basic housekeeping: replace the title with a ‘headline’ if you can – something that captures the whole idea in just one catchy phrase and tidy up the bullet-points a little. The result is the kind of thing thats both still ugly as hell but also (sadly) what I see most of when I’m watching presentations…
… and that’s where most people leave it.

Now for those of you who are new to designing slides, take a deep breath and do two things. Firstly, replace your headline with an image that captures the whole concept in the same way the headline does. Secondly, cut your bullet-points down to single words.

Image-wise, I went for something that was just as scary as making presentations: something that required the same three attributes – which by now I’d abbreviated to simply, skills, equipment, attitude. I looked around my hard-drive and found a picture of my daughter doing her first sky-dive. From two miles up you’ve got to have the right combination of skills, equipment and attitude, I’m sure you’ll agree. If any one of them is wrong, things are not going to end well, not well at all. After much fussing around to get the image contrast right I ended up with this slide:

Much more attractive and much more memorable… in idea at least. Sadly the image doesn’t cut the mustard, so despite me being wedded to it because it’s person to me, and the time I’d spent trying to get the colours and brightness right (and so on!), the graphic had to go!

To be honest, that looks better on my screen than I expected, because when it’s projected it doesn’t look good at all – the contrast in the imagage isn’t up to the mark. I tried it out in front of a “tame” audience and didn’t get a good response – people were spending time figuring out what the image was, and what it was supposed to show: clearly it was mind-boggling-ly obvious but only mind-boggling-ly obvous to me. Maybe it’s because I’d been there when my daughter jumped out of the airplane!

A bit later, poking around google-images (and, I confess, a chat with my wife who made the suggestion of what to look for!) I came up with the idea of a space-walk. This is my current version of the slide: now doubt it will evolve more in the weeks ahead….. what do you think?

Holding eye contact is a bit of a strain for many of us. For many people, there are only a couple of reasons for looking someone straight in the eye for more than a second or so – sex or violence! Keeping eye contact makes us feel anxious and we avoid it out of ‘shyness’.

Unfortunately, not looking at your audience makes them feel you’re not interested in them, so they’re less likely to be interested in you… and in what you’ve got to say.

Today’s tip is pretty simple, really – but it takes a little time to get it right so don’t be put off if you don’t manage it straight away. The trick is this – simply soften your focus as you look at your audience: that way you don’t look at any one person in your audience necessarily, but you look at your audience as a whole. That can be a lot more comfortable for people who are anxious about their performance…..

It also has the added advantage of meaning that you’re more likely to notice if something unusual is going on in another part of the auditorium – such as someone not paying attention!

It sounds too simple to be true, but it’s remarkably effective. One note of caution, however… it’s important not to let yourself look simply ‘dopey’ when you soften your focus. That means you need to make sure there’s plenty of animation in your facial expressions and gestures as you do it.

Give it a go.

You never know, it might be useful to someone! My last self-indulgent post created a couple of emails that really made me smile, so here’s hoping!

We run public training days in voice & presentation skills. They’re always a lot of fun, as well as being effective, intense and very hard work. We’ve got two more planned before the summer break and it would be great to get the administration for them all wrapped up in the next week or so; June 5th or July 17th anyone?

We’d love to see you there – drop us a line if you’ve got any questions about them (simon@curved-vision.co.uk); I promise you…. no hard sell and if you come along to a training day and don’t think it’s been worthwhile, just don’t pay. Dead simple.

S

Almost total self-indulgence, this post. The only thing I can say in my defence is that someone asked me what I did….

This is a bit of an odd day for us. We specialise in training people (in voice and presentations) in medium sized groups but today was a series of one-to-ones.

First up was a museum manager who wanted to develop her ‘presence’. She’s lovely, good at her job, but finding she’s not being taken seriously by other museum managers when they meet at national conferences and so on. She’d attended a training day we’d done on something other than presentations and liked our style, so once the beaurocracy of who was going to pay for things was sorted out, we started working together to give her more emotional weight (that’s an awful phrase in many ways but we used it as a short-hand between us and knew what we meant).

Today’s session was in the atrium of a modern office building, with an indoor fountain playing in the background – as working environments go it was pretty cool! We spent time looking at when she melted into the background (and why!) and she left with ‘homework’ – a series of exercises to start her thinking in a different way. Next time we’ll concentrate on the physical elements – voice, posture and body language.

A working lunch in the bar of one of the local theatres was spent exploring how to give conference papers for an old friend of mine who works at one of the local Universities. Academics have a particular
challenge when it comes to presenting because – to put it crudely – the more you know about a particular topic, the harder it is to figure out what to tell people: experts often can’ see the wood for the trees.

Lunch over-ran, so I ended up running myself, getting to my next appointment only just in time… a charity worker making presentations finds that she hates being the centre of attention. Unfortunately, as her
job is about raising awareness of the charity and her work, that’s not tenable, so we spend an hour looking at ways of making presentations where the presenter isn’t the focus and agreeing a plan of action for next time,
when we’ll go back to looking at how to handle being the focus after all!

Coffee next – where they make the best cappuccinos in the city – before I’m joined by a performance poet who can’t perform! His work is great, but the performances aren’t working for him and he wants some help. This is a first-contact meeting to see how well we could work together, so we spend a long time looking at the problem and sorting out the logistics of how to work together.

By now it’s long after I should have headed home so I arrive with barely enough time to cook before my family arrive like the Biblical plague of locusts, eating bowls clean before I’ve finished serving everything!

I check emails, replying to the urgent ones (clients can follow-up on training days for free by email for ages afterwards) and updating my diary and so on. I check the timetable for tomorrow and remember that it’s
going to be one of our public training days in making business presentations, so it’s time to hit the ‘print’ button on the hand-outs and pack my bag of equipment for the day… projector, laptop, candles, books,
penny whistle, feedback forms, folders, lego and finally the handouts.

By now all I’m fit for is a shower and bed but it seems like I’ve been asleep for only five minutes before the alarm tells me it time to be up and moving again.

I stare at it with a look to curdle milk before I remember how much fun these days can be and roll out of bed, grinning…