tellingpeople

So then, today, David Cameron delivered a speech to his party conference without notes. Isn’t it sad that this fact it ranked pretty highly on the list of ‘important things to report’ about this speech?

Opinions about how effective the speech will be appear to be divided (pretty much along the lines you’d expect), but the one thing that every report I’ve read (so far!) mentions is that he went without notes. That should have been a good thing. Sadly it wasn’t.

Why not?

Because although he didn’t have notes, that didn’t mean he didn’t have a script. Watching the video, I’m struck by how limited the range of gestures is – by how formulaic and contrived it all looks…. and by how it’s obviously been practiced within an inch of it’s life.

There’s no joy, no improvisation and no imagination in the delivery. In short, it’s sterile. He’s just reciting a script that’s running in his head rather than by a teleprompter. Is that any better? Really?

Judging by the fact that the ovation afterwards – from the Tory Party Faithful was well under two minutes, it looks like I’m not alone at being under-awed.

Normally I like to create something new in these posts – after all, any fool can cut, paste and hack at other people’s work.

This time, however, I’m going to break my own ‘rule’. Take a look at this talk from TED on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrkrvAUbU9Y. It’s a guy called Daniel Pink talking about motivation.

Notice how natural he is – how he resists the temptation to glance at the screen behind him. Notice how he uses the screens on the floor in front of him to show him what the audience sees but also what’s coming up next. Towards the end, check how for just half a second his eyes skit sideways to look at the person coming to the edge of the stage to follow him on – that’s attention to detail. This man is very much in charge of what he’s doing. Notice also the simple message – he doesn’t try and do too much…. “There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business is doing”. Check out the clean, simple slides and…..

….. stop! If I go on any more it’s going to sound like a proposal of marriage! Thank heaven’s he’s an expert – if everyone was this good we’d be out of jobs.

I’ve trained a lot of speakers and I know a lot of people who speak as part of their work (or for fun!). I barely know any who don’t have to travel to get to their presentations – certainly it’s not unknown for me to be up at the crack of dawn (or even before the sun) and not see my house until the sun’s well down again.

Everyone knows that traveling is tiring – why else would you need a day after your holiday to recover from it!? But does it hold special issues for a presenter (or trainer)? I think so, based upon my experiences recently. For me the three big issues are

Being tired isn’t just about not having had enough sleep. Not just. Obviously that’s not going to help but it’s also about when you sleep, not how much you get. I can go to bed early the day before a big presentation and get the ‘recommended’ seven or eight hours of sleep, but if I have to get up at, say, five in the morning, it doesn’t feel like it. Essentially, my body-clock is messed up and it’s not until the time I would normally be up and about (an hour and a half later) that I find myself able to wake up fully… no matter how many cups of tea I drink to get me going!

I find I need to watch that – tea’s a diuretic (like coffee, the other common stimulant drink) and drinking a lot to get you going (or to keep you going at the other end of the day) will dry your throat out, making it harder for you to sound like a confident expert when you get on stage to make your presentation. My advice would be to drink it if you need to but to make sure you take on board as much water. You don’t need to drink the five litres a day that was claimed a few years ago (research failed to substantiate that assertion) but you do need to have plenty on board.

Drink it in advance of your presentation, not during, because by then it’s too late. Water can’t lubricate your vocal folds; it shouldn’t go down that way… and if it does, you’re drowning (not recommended, even for the most demonstrative of presentations!). What water does, is give you what you need to produce the lubricants for your throat and vocal folds during your presentation – and it can’t do that directly or instantly. Getting the water in in plenty of time for your presentation means drinking as you travel, not as you start presenting.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the fact that the water shouldn’t be chilled, either, particularly if you do drink it close to when your presentation starts.

Don’t under-estimate the effects of dehydration when you travel! Planes, trains and cars all suck the moisture out of you!

Being cold is a tricky one – particularly in the depths of winter. Don’t forget that even just a chilly room for your presentations can tighten your shoulders and throat up so that your voice sounds strained… making your presentation sound less credible. Tricks I use are a simple Buff for when I’m traveling (very flexible and well worth the money!) and although I personally don’t wear vests, I’d know speakers who find them useful. When you’re presenting, you’re performing – and you can’t do that to your best when you’re inhibited by even a slight chill.

Consider a warm up – not a full marathon, but just a simple something to warm your muscles up before your presentation. If you’re nervous it’ll help with that too, by using up some of your adrenalin, perhaps, and certainly using up some of your time… taking your mind off things.

It’s particularly important to keep your lips and neck relaxed and warm, so when you warm up, consider making a point of spending a minute or two to get your lips working properly – there’s nothing worse for an audience than a speaker who mumbles… and if you’re coming in from the cold, that’s what you’ll do. Of course, you might find it a little bit on the embarrassing side to do your lip warm-up exercises on public transport but hey… it’s your job. Better to look silly on a bus than on stage!

Going back for a moment, to look at the issue of being tired, I remember an athletics coach telling me that performance on the day was less to do with the amount of sleep an individual athlete got the day before the big event but rather more to do with the amount of sleep in the previous four or five nights. Sadly, I can’t reference this at the moment (so if you can’, please drop me a line!) but it seems reasonable to me – and if so, it’s important to take it into account as you do you public speaking gigs. A business presentation on Monday might be spoiled by a night on the town on Friday and Saturday. Now there’s a sobering thought…..

I was doing a half day’s training this morning in one of the Local Authorities near us. As I walked into their training room I noticed that the flipchart still had the notes from yesterday’s training hanging over the back… that’s too good an opportunity to miss for someone as nosy as me… and one of the pages really caught my eye.

Clearly the training had been about developing assertiveness: there was full page statement which read “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the acceptance that something else is more important“.

To me that really got to grips with something I’d been trying to explain to clients for a while: they’d ask me how to get un-afraid when they did their public speaking or business presentations and I’d explain that everyone gets nervous and that even I was nervous as I stood there in front of them. Some found that hard to believe.

It’s true though; I was nervous – very nervous indeed. That quote summed up the attitude that I think most public speakers have when they’re doing their presentations. It’s not that they’re not nervous, anxious or even down-right afraid but rather their audience and the message they have to deliver to them is more important.

So what is it that’s more important to you than your fear? If you’re only doing the presentation because The Boss told you to do it and you don’t believe in whatever it is your saying anyway then you’re fighting a losing battle If it’s something you’re passionate about, perhaps your charity work, perhaps the state of the neighbourhood, perhaps something else, then you’ve got a better chance.

To be honest, there’s a bit of me that wants to suggest to would-be public speakers that if they can’t think of something more important than their fear, they should ask themselves a cold, hard question about whether they should be speaking in public at all!

In the real world, of course, people have to present because they’ve got no choice. For those people I’d urge you to simple sit down with a cup of tea and a notepad and jot down all the good things that could (should?) come out of your presentation. Find things more important than your fear. If no one thing is more important, what about the cumulative effect of all the little benefits to the world you’ll bring?

It might be worthwhile chatting it over with a friend, too. They’ll widen your perspective.

It’s not about not being afraid – it’s about being afraid not mattering to you as much as the presentation!

The world’s most simple analogy for a decent presentation…

The presentation is the tip of the spear. Sure, it’s the bit people notice and are frightened of (the spear-tip, not the presentation!) but it’s useless without

Don’t just concentrate on the tip! Get the other things right first: you can’t attach a spear-tip to a shaft that isn’t their or is bent…

I recently blogged briefly about a presentation skill I picked up from a crying baby in church and this (even more brief!) blog follows on from that….

Now to talk about presentation pitch….

I listened to the singing in the service. Over 200 people should make quite a decent amount of noise, especially as the hymn in question was easy and popular. But they didn’t. It wasn’t that people weren’t singing, it’s just that they weren’t making much noise…. and the reason is pitch. Voices have a natural pitch and the hymn wasn’t at that pitch for many people.

There are some parts of the service which are sung while other bits are spoken in unison… and these bits were very loud indeed. The difference is that the spoken bits were spoken at the natural pitch of the congregation, not at the pitch determined by the music.

And so it is with presentations: if you’re trying to speak at the wrong pitch (such as during a presentation) you’ll find your voice weaker and less potent. That’s stating the obvious, I know, but think about it – when you’re nervous, what happens to your voice? It goes up as you tighten things up.

Now obviously it would be nice if you didn’t get too nervous when you made your presentation, but it’s worth mastering a relatively basic skill. Before you go on stage take a moment to check where your voice is, pitch-wise. If there’s any sense of you having raised your pitch try a couple of these presentation tips:

The odds are good that when you do this, you’ll say the first sound at the pitch you’re currently at (the nervous pitch that your voice has reached) and then the second sound will be lower. This is likely to be closer to your normal voice and should be the one you make your presentation using. It takes a little practise and skill, but it’s not as hard as you might think and it’ll make your presentation sound much more relaxed and authoritative.

The skill likes not so much in the trick itself, but in remembering to use it!

… and on this occasion I mean the lectern in my local church, last Sunday morning.

Maybe it makes me a bad person who’s going to go to hell, but there were a couple of things I picked up from the service on Sunday which had less to do with God and more to do with my work as a presentation skills trainer. The first was to do with pitch and the other was to do with volume.

Volume first.

Long term readers will know that I attend St Bart’s Church in my hometown of Newcastle. (Please forgive the website!) and this Sunday was a Baptism. Great. Lovely. One baby who – I noted early on – had an excellent ability to project his voice down the full length of the church. As the water was poured over his forehead for the first time he gave fair warning of his intension and by the third pouring he was in full flow. No surprises there.

What was more of a surprise was that he continued to protest about the way he’d been treated for quite a while. Still, that was fine, wasn’t it, because we could all hear the rest of the service because we’ve got microphones and so on?

Wrong.

The score, for a few minutes at least, until the magic effect of a loving mother smoothed things over, was
Child without mic but who instinctively knew how to make a loud noise – 1 : Priest who thought the microphones were magic – 0.

I don’t know how else to say this except to bash it out again and again and again – most microphone systems in churches (and other places!) aren’t intended to be used to replace voices, just to augment them. There’s a world of difference! (Actually, even for systems which are intended to replace the natural voice, it does no harm to speak into them as though they’re just giving your voice a bit of a boost.)

Even if you successfully make yourself heard from a loudspeaker, the sound of your voice comes from the ‘wrong place’ (that is, not your mouth) and this can make it harder for an audience to get to grips with what you’re saying to them. Every ounce of effort they put into hearing what you’re saying is gained at the cost of understanding what you’re saying. Make it easy for them.

I’ll cover the pitch stuff next time….