tellingpeople

A while ago, I did an online chat about making presentations for a new(ish) networking site in the UK called Better Networking. They’ve very kindly cleaned up the transcript and it’s available here.

Because it was a Q&A sort of thing, there’s not much structure, and I offer it purely “as is” – but it might be helpful for someone!

Enjoy

We’re going to be running another of our public training days in Newcastle – on November 6th (a Friday). You can see feedback, pics and details online here.

Normally, these days sell out pretty quickly, so if you’re in or around Newcastle, you could do worse than get in touch….

This brief article was originally run in an online “newspaper” based in my part of the UK – hence the rather choppy style – and I’ve posted it here because it’s good advice, even though it reads badly….

Check for a moment, how you breathe and see if there’s a pattern. A pattern other than the obvious one of in, then out, and then in again! I’m talking about a pattern to how quickly you breathe or if you occasionally take a breath of a different length or depth.

Most of us are conditioned to think-and-speak almost as one and that’s related to the question of how you breathe – the pattern of how you speak is very largely built into the pattern of how you breathe. Without meaning to – or even realising it – you’ll convert your sentences or phrases to the length of time you can talk for without taking a breath.

That’s just common sense.

Over the length of a presentation, however, that can become the kind of pattern which begins to irritate your audience – particularly if it means you have to sometimes (or even often!) break up something that-should-be-kept-together into smaller parts. Because that’s how you breathe. And you find yourself. Always having sentences of. About the same length which. Can become very annoying. For anyone listening.

A bit of variety is crucial to being interesting – and the key to being able to have that variety lies in making sure you’re breathing with your diaphragm, not your chest.

That’s easier said than done, but it’s possible with practice!

Responding to my last post, Jim suggested counting to five before moving on. (I presume you mean between sentences or something Jim – a fivebeat between each word is pretty slow! )

That got me thinking about an old hobby-horse of mine – the speed at which you should speak (including, of course, the length of your breaks!). Typically, of course, you’ll find a zillion bits of advice online that tells you to make sure you’re speaking slowly enough.

Good enough.

Except when it isn’t. What actually matters is how clear you are. Slow isn’t good. Slow enough is. Too slow boring.

The trick, of course, is to slow down enough to make what you say clear to your audience – and you can’t measure that in absolute terms. You simple can’t say “X words per minutes”. A lot of things come down to your clarity and the acoustics of the room.

The more clear your diction is, the faster you can talk: the more full of echoes the venue is the slower you need to be.

As a simple tip, to get a feel for the venue, try this… stand where you are going to be speaking (before the audience arrive) then clap and whistle. And importantly, listen to the echoes.

The clap should tell you how slow you need to be if you’re using a lower register and the whistle will tell you the same about your top end.

Yes, yes, I know, it feels odd – but you’ll soon get used to it – believe me, I’ve walked onto so many stages and done that I’ve lost count. It’s the most simple of tricks, but it’s uncannily useful.

Breaks between words are what tells us when a word has finished: there’s bound to be an ancient proverb somewhere about it. Speaking without the slight gaps between words can make you harder for your audience to understand, in exactly the same ways as takingoutthespaces makes your written stuff harder to read.

More important than simply being harder to understand, not speaking with breaks runs the risk of being actively misunderstood. Let me give you an example.

I recently went to the U2 performance in Glasgow and on the train back home I over-heard a member of staff on the platform telling another passenger that this wasn’t the train they wanted. They wanted the Virgin train on the adjacent platform. What they meant to say was “No; Virgin’s on the other platform” but unfortunately what everyone heard, because there was no silent space for the comma, was “No virgins on the other platform“.

It might have been true, I suppose, but…

When you practice your presentation, always (but always!) make a point of making sure you get your spaces between words sorted out: it really is the most basic presentation skill in the world!