tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

Like most people, I’ve been accused of exhibiting ‘manflu’ – at some point we all will be (except women!), and it’s just not fair. Sometimes you really are that ill. For the rest of the time however, there are some pretty simple tips which will help you make a better presentation than feel… colds, coughs, sore throats, chest infections can all put paid to your otherwise wonderful presentation skills, so here are some basics…

One: don’t do it. If you possibly can, postpone.

Two: arrive early. Of course you should always arrive early to check things over, but what I mean here is that you should arrive very early. If you’ve got a throat problem you might find that changes in air make things worse and you’ll need time to recover.

Three: wear a scarf. Protect your throat by wearing it around your neck rather than draped as a fashion-item A sneaky trick of mine is to wear a Buff. You probably shouldn’t wear it as you present, but it’s a great tool for keeping it together during the day, or while you’re traveling to the venue.

Four: drugs are the answer – except when they aren’t. It’s possible to smother the symptoms with drugs but symptoms are there for a reason. Smothering them is a short-term, ‘emergency’ solution only…

Five: food and drink – make sure you’ve had plenty of both over the day before you make your presentation. The day you’re making a big presentation is not the day to step up your diet: if you need a Mars Bar, eat a Mars Bar. (Use your common sense here, please – don’t go stuffing yourself if it’s going to muck up your control of your diabetes! )

Not exactly rocket science, is it…??!!

I’m a fan of doing things by hand – pen/pencil on paper – before you start to use your computer. The very second you fire up your computer you start to think in the way the software things… or rather how it forces you to think. I can’t prove it but it seems to me that the designer(s) had a specific way of thinking in mind when they write software and that this puts implicit assumptions into the software: the designers and therefore the software itself assumes that you’ll be doing things in a particular way… their way.

If you happen to think the same way the software does, you’ll find the software easy to use and if you don’t, you won’t.

Of course, if you do think the ‘right’ way for the software, you’ll have the advantage of finding things easy/intuitive, but you’ll also have the downside of being much less likely to produce something original (or even interesting!) as millions of other people will have done things just like it before you.

If you think differently you might find it easier to produce something original/interesting/effective but only at the cost of it being harder to produce anything at all in the first place. For me, there are some software packages that, when I use, I feel like I’m pushing an elephant up a hill.

That’s why I suggest to my clients that they don’t use electronic toys until well, well after they know what they want to say and how they want to say it – pencil and paper are about as easy to master as it gets; the advantage is that you can concentrate on what you want to capture, not on remembering how to capture it.

Let me give you an example, picking on Microsoft’s Word. Suppose I want to change the layout of the page from portrait to landscape. Where are the tools for doing this? They’re under the Files Menu as page setup. If you’ve been brought up on Word that probably makes sense to you out of sheer habit. But under the OpenOffice package you’d change the layout of a page under the Format Menu – in the same way as you’d change the format of a paragraph or a line, you’d just reformat a page. To me that’s more instinctively sensible.

No doubt there are other people who won’t think like me, of course!

I have the same preference for Apple’s Keynote software over Microsoft’s Powerpoint; it’s just more intuitive. Things are where I expect them to be and I don’t have to think about where a command might be; I just go where I’d put it if I was writing the software and there it is…

What are the advantages of this?

Picking on PowerPoint for an example: to insert a picture I have to INSERT/PICTURE/FROM FILE and then navigate to where I keep my pictures. To do the same in Keynote is a simple click/drag. Not only is it quicker in its own right but crucially it doesn’t interrupt my thought processes. The result is higher productivity. In all seriousness, I bought my first Mac laptop on something of a whim, despite it costing about £200 more than the equivalent Windows-based machine. I did some hard number-crunching with a spreadsheet a bit later and even if I charged my time stupidly cheaply, I figured that I’d got my £200 back in terms of extra productivity in a matter of weeks. Now that I know the Mac OS, or course, it would take even less…

Incidentally, this article started off life as me wanting to right something nice about Xmind – it’s free, open source and effective – a great way to draw MindMaps and so on to develop the structure of your presentation. (There is a paid-for ‘pro’ version but I’ve not needed it yet.

Not a single catch, Honest!

As it’s nearly Christmas, I thought I’d give away a copy of our two Ebooks. In keeping with what we do it’s a presentation skills ebook and comes with a second book of simple presentation tips.

All you have to do is let me know, before the 31st of December, why you need it. Simple as that – I’ll let whoever needs it most, have it. Can’t be any more straightforward.

Of course, I don’t have any objective way of deciding who needs it most, so it might end up being a silly idea, but we’ll see.

Have fun everyone!

Simon

I’ve finished it – just… I must admit I was surprised (and flattered) to receive a freebie copy but never the less, I leapt at it when it arrived: Scott Bergun’s “Confessions of a Public Speaker“. Looking at the list of people who’ve already reviewed the book favourably though (including some presentation heros of mine such as Garr Reynolds), I can’t see why I got a copy, but never look a gift horse in the mouth. Of course, as all the listed comments are breath-takingly positive, I’d be a minority of one if I didn’t like it… and a very brave (or foolish) minority at that.

Let’s deal with the downsides first: quickly getting them out of the way…

The images are pretty shoddy – over dark and with not enough contrast; they’re not very well constructed either, in that there’s an awful lot of distracting background ‘fluff’ in some of them. In short, they’re not of the quality Scott would put on his slides.

after that, it’s all various shades of ‘good points’. Actually, I say that advisedly as you might not find the book to be what you’re looking for. If you’re looking for a simple ‘how to’ book, this isn’t it – it’s not a book about presentation skills: there’s plenty of good, sensible advice here but it’s not a simple ‘recipe book’ of getting your presentations right (or even just getting them better). Instead, Scott assumes you’re his readers are intelligent and are prepared to read/work/think. If you are, great, because there’s lots you can use.

And there’s the issue – this is a book that you have to work at to use if you want to be a better speaker, with better presentation skills.

Why?

Because as I said above, it’s not a “how to” book. It’s a conversational, entertaining (but informative) book: it’s more coffee-table than office bookshelf (though the latter is where I’m going to keep my copy). There are little wry smiles of ‘ah yes, I recognise that!’ all the way through and if the footnotes and other humour are anything to go by, I think Scott and I would get on very well indeed if we ever met up. His humour is slightly more dry and subtle than I’ve come to expect of Americans, almost British in it’s levels of irony: as I’m British I lapped it up, of course!

On the downside, I shouldn’t like him, because he’s what I fear most when I have to train people – someone who speaks to speak. He’s a professional public speaker and my experience of ‘professional public speakers’ is that most of them are far too fond of their own voices and not fond enough of their audience. I prefer to work with people who don’t necessarily want to speak but who feel passion-bound to do so.

Despite that personal bigotry on my part, I loved the impression I got of the man.

Sure, there’s some padding: the chapter on confessions is drivel, full of mistakes that only a rookie presenter would make, such as getting surprised by porn on your computer – but somehow even that, coming as it does towards the end, takes on a gentle, wry humour that keeps you smiling to yourself.

On the upside there’s some great reference material to balance the fluff: the bibliography alone more than cancels out any hints of negativity I might have had after ploughing through self-agrandising confessions. (You know the type – people confess a mistake only to brag about how they managed to create a work of art out of the ruins of the presentation.)

So that’s it.

In short, well worth the read. Not a how-to but more of a how-I type of book; more reading for leisure than reading for training but if that’s what you want, very definitely worth your £££ or $$$

I’m travelling a lot at the moment and, as company policy (and it’s my company so I’d better stick to it) it’s by train. What to do with the hours? Well I could sleep or blog or… instead I’m reading.  Jurgen Wolff’s “Marketing for Entrepteneurs”.

Why? Because it was the best option at WHSmiths at the time!  :)

As usual with this kind of book there’s an awful lot of hot air and otherwise good stuff but so generalised for general consumption it applies to no one, I suspect. Tucked away in a box in this book though is a little gem.

Local radio phone-ins.

You don’t have to give more than your first name (and I suppose you could even lie about that, just in case) so if you make a hash of things the first time, no one will know. Instant, relatively safe, practice!

What’s more, if you record it or use the Listen Again functions you can get to hear how you sounded… If you want to, that is – it’s not always a good idea.

It’s been a long while since I’ve blogged (sorry!) because I’ve been training people every day (we do presentation skills training after all! ) and I’ve not had the chance to write anything (or the energy for that matter). Thanks to my sexy new iPhone however, I’ve been able to read stuff while on busses, trains and waiting in queues so I’ve kept up with what other people are writing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading ‘on the move’ that this has struck me; maybe there’s genuinely a surge of this type of suggestion; or maybe it’s just (bad) luck; but time and time again I’ve been clobbered with the hint from various so called presentation skills training websites (and books) to start strongly in my presentation.

Certainly.

But please, please, please can you come up with a more sophisticated example than things like “60% of the people in this room are failing at X” or “In the next five years almost everyone here will have Y”?

Why?

Because it’s crass and unsubtle and – frankly – I believe it actually turns people off, not engages them. It’s such a crude and blatant attempt to capture their interest, so blatantly ‘a technique’, that it actually has the opposite effect.

Speaking personally, it makes me grown inwardly. Occasionally I even mutter out loud under my breath. I see people around me positively, actually, visibly flinch with embarrassment. Frankly, if that’s the best you can do by way of an opening, you’re in trouble.

Maybe it was a useful technique a few years ago. Maybe it still works in parts of the world where they are more tolerant of ‘razzamatazz’ (or even expect and need it!) but I work in the UK. Here, its a death knell to any presenter who wants to be taken seriously.

By the way, even if you audience tolerates something this crude and doesn’t see it as a rather stale device, you run the risk of alienating some of your audience in your first ten seconds. You know the ones, they ones who think

Not me, sucker! Shows how much you know
or the ones who think
OMG he’s right! I’d better spend the rest of his 20 minutes thinking about it

If there’s anyone left paying attention, do you really want to be presenting to people who don’t react to such a brazen gambit? They’re probably not listening anyway.