tellingpeople

With thanks to Andy Smith, I’d like to draw your attention to this post in The Guardian newspaper.

It’s aimed at high-performance sports but the same ideas apply to presentations (or any other kind of performance for that matter).

The long and the short of it is that that when you’re a beginner you need to concentrate on the details of your technique but once you become competent in them, concentrating too hard/in too much detail can actually hinder your performance. I watched a dance piece recently called “Don’t sweat the technique”

Actually, the idea is something I’ve been using for a long time: the techniques I train people in for making presentations are, essentially, like walking. When you’re a toddler you spend so much effort trying to walk you don’t have much spare space in your head to look at where you’re going and I’ve often seen toddlers end up in a different part of the room to the one they intended. As an adult however, you’ve mastered how to walk, so you let your sub-conscious deal with that, leaving you free to concentrate on where to walk.

The idea is to become so proficient in your technique that you don’t have to concentrate on it consciously, leaving you free to think about what you say, not how you’re saying it. Once you’ve got your presentation skills sorted out you can forget about them, concentrating on your presentation’s content.

There’s a great quote from Charlie Parker that I love in this context: “Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that *!xy!@ and just play.”

I’m a fan of visual slides if you’re going to use PowerPoint (or Keynote or any of the other alternative slide-ware packages). There are times when bullet-points are the way to go, of course, but not many. And not as many as people seem to think!

The idea of avoiding the boring bullet-point-riddled slide seems to be catching on a bit, but there are a few mistakes that I’ve noticed people making in the presentations I’ve sat through recently. The most common mistake seems to be the idea that adding a gratuitous picture to the side of the bullet points somehow stops it being a bullet-point slide.

It doesn’t – it just makes it a bullet-point slide with a picture.

To add insult to injury, of course, you could make the picture nasty and common clip-art. That just makes it look even more like a token gesture. Or perhaps you find a semi-relevant picture, but the background is the wrong colour for the slide – just putting it onto the slide does nothing more than make the picture stand out like a sore thumb even more, showing up that you’ve not taken the five minutes you needed to take the background out or change your slide.

Please – you know who you are! If you’ve got a graphic on your slide, make it a graphic slide, not a bullet-point slide with a graphic.

Or I may just have to shoot you with one of your own bullet-points.

for the loss of this blog for a week. My ISP were all the help they could be without actually doing anything about it – such as replying to questions in less than three days at a time.

That said, I’m not a big fan of apologies in presentations. Consider this: when you say to an audience “I’m sorry this slide isn’t too clear – I hope you can read it at the back” what you mean is, no doubt, to be respectful of your audience and assure them that you’ve got their interests at heart. What they hear you say however is totally different.

What an audience hears you say at this point is: “I’m sorry the fact that I was too lazy or dis-organized to get this slide right for you instead of going out for a drink with my friends is actually showing“. You’re actually saying that something else (and I don’t care what – it could be anything!) is more important to you than your audience and getting your presentation’s slides sorted out.

There are few honorable excuses – such as when your wife unexpectedly goes into labour three weeks early – but by and large, if you’ve got to apologise for your presentation skills, you’re just plain rude!

I’ve mentioned the need to practise your presentation out loud more times than I care to remember and I’ve always cited the same few reasons – and this week I had an great example of what can happen if you don’t. For me, it was the highlight of a very long day (but sadly for all the wrong reasons!).

Essentially, the issue is two-fold. Firstly, you’ll get no sense of timing if you rehearse things in your head and secondly, you’ll not get any idea of which combinations of words or phrases are going to be tricky when you stand up and do it for real. Can I give you an example?

The phrase “public sector spends” was part of a presentation I was at recently – and the next bit of the sentence was pretty useful as it gave an idea of how many millions of pounds per years the pubic sector spends of X, Y and Z. Sadly, I wasn’t listening to that bit because I was too busy trying not to laugh at how the phrase “public sector spends” actually came out…. Like me, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to know that the “public spectre sends about 15 million pounds”! Where it sends it, I’m not quite sure….

A simple run-though in advance, out loud, would have avoided that problem and meant that everyone in the audience staying rapt instead of gently laughing. To make matters worse, the presenter had no idea what he’d done to generate such mirth!