tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

It seems to be more and more common (to me, at least) to turn the normal-but-unwanted-and-perhaps-a-bit-unusual into a clinical condition.  People aren’t short tempered any more, they’re suffering from Temper Restraint Disorder Syndrome; okay, I made that one up, but you get the idea.  (See here and see what you think.)

It happens a lot that people bounce around self-help websites etc or email me saying they suffer from Gloss0phobia (the phobia of public speaking) and want to be cured.  Interestingly, they often want to be cured in a half day session.  I have two problems with this.

Firstly, many of these people simple don’t have presentations/public speaking phobia – they have a perfectly normal level of nervousness.  Secondly, if they did have a phobia of presenting and public speaking, a self-help website with half a dozen half-baked and ill-informed responses and a two hour exercise isn’t going to cut the mustard, so to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, I have every sympathy in the world with people who are phobic (been there, done that! ) but I’m not sure I have quite so much patience for people who simply use the idea of a phobia as a way of avoiding the hard work and anxiety that’s associated with making a half-way decent presentation.

My real wroth, however, is reserved for those (so called?!) experts and trainers who keep the idea of Glossophobia at the front of people’s minds by using the idea as a marketing tool.  Put the two together (“Are you suffering from Glossophobia? We’ll cure it in 20 minutes using our secret technique (get-out clauses apply!)” combined with ‘Yes, I’d rather have a phobia than a fear in the same way I’d rather claim to have flu than admit it’s just a common cold!”) and you’ve got a kind of self-perpetuating conspiracy.  One of the effects of which is that the standard of presentations and public speaking in the world doesn’t go up, because no one takes the time and trouble to learn and get past their (normal) fear.

Yes, I know, I know, I’m ranting!

Joe Public isn’t likely to change, so it’s up to us trainers. Let’s try and be grown ups.  Let’s try and stop using cheap, degrading and belittling marketing ploys. Let’s try and make the average presentation a bit better.  And above all, let’s stop lieing to everyone… fear is normal, fear is good – but a phobia is a phobia and we can’t do much with them as easily.

I’ve been doing some reading recently (sorry!) for a course I’m designing.  I came across the idea that emotions on the ’spectrum’ of Anxiety are caused by uncertain goals, that Angry-type emotions are caused by blocked goals and that emotions related to Fear are associated with unattainable goals.

Perhaps it’s an over simplification, but it works for me in many ways.

What struck me in particular was a client who I was talking to recently who didn’t know why he was making the presentation.  I don’t mean that literally, of course he know why he was making it – I mean it more philosophically, in the sense that he didn’t know what the presentation was for…. he didn’t know exactly what he was trying to achieve with his presentation.

That sounds a lot like an uncertain goal to me…. and sure enough, he was nervous about the presentation.  How could he not be, when he didn’t know how he was going to measure whether the presentation was a success or not?!  If you don’t know what it looks like for your presentation to ‘work’, how are you going to know when you’ve done that?

Personally, I’d say he was suffering from Fear-type emotions, too.  He wanted to make a perfect presentation… and of course that’s pretty much an unattainable goal – there’s no such animal!

It’s not hard to sort this out, of course.  Just ask yourself (before you start designing your presentation) what is it you’re trying to do.  What would count as a successful presentation and how will you know?  Then design your presentation to do that – don’t just “give a presentation”.  How can that work?!

Secondly, accept that you’re not going to be perfect. No one is.  Not even my wife. Realise that “Good enough” is exactly that.  If the presentation works it was “good enough” – it doesn’t need to be perfect!  If you define your target and you hit it, then that’s good enough for me!  :)

There’s stuff all over the ‘net about how a good presentation should be like a conversation with your audience.  By that, the authors are (as far as I can tell) generally trying to get away from the “stand and deliver” style of presenting, where the presenter is more of a talking head than anything, simply reciting a rigidly prepared script.  Fair enough.  I can see (and even train people in) the style of making a presentation as though it was a presentation – but that’s a style thing, not a substance thing.

Too many would be experts bash out articles saying that you should ‘just have a conversation from the stage’.  No, no and no again.  That’s inefficient, ineffective and (frankly!) downright rude.  Your audience deserves better.  I can’t figure out if the writers of these blogs are simply over-simplifying or just don’t know what they’re talking about.  Either way, such posts don’t help the readers.

Okay, there’s an upside to the informal style, but there are downsides, too, of having your presentation like a conversation.

For me, conversations are two way things, with dialogue between equal parties.

I don’t buy that, entirely. Sure, a presenter should always treat his or her audience with respect and treat them as intelligent adults but that’s not the same as treating them as equals! If they were equals (in the subject matter to hand) there’d be no need for a presentation in the first place, as everyone would know pretty much everything everyone else knew.  No presentation should be like that – the presenter is making a presentation because they’re the expert; they are the ones with something to say.  (Okay, some presentations are made just because the presenter feels the need to fill the silence with the sound of their own voice and if that’s the case he or she should be presenting to an empty room before the first two or three minutes of the presentation are over, but I’m not talking about that kind of presentation.)

Someone has to be in charge, someone has to know what’s going on and someone has to set the agenda.

For me, conversations are unstructured, going where they will

If I’m chatting to my friends in the pub, I don’t have an agenda.  If someone brings up football, fine.  If they bring up politics, also fine.  Religion, women and cars….. all fine!  :)

Presentations don’t work like that. It behoves the presenter to know what needs to be said, to say it and then to stop saying anything.  Simple as that.  They should have had all the necessary ‘conversations’ before the presentation, in order to know what the audience knows, what they need to know and (therefore) what the presentation should cover.  Making it up on the fly, going with the flow and just talking about whatever comes to mind is a recipe for a really bad, meandering, unfocussed, pre… what was I talking about, again?

For me, conversations stop when people want to stop talking

A presentation, by contrast, should stop when all’s been said that needs to be said.

For me, conversations don’t need to be rehearsed, unlike a presentation.

In fact, you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) rehearse a conversation!  Telling people to just stand there and talk like it’s a conversation is doing the would-be presenter a massive dis-service, because it belies the effort, expertise and experience that goes into a good presentation.  It’s not something you can ‘just do’ without thinking about it. If it was, we’d all be able to make presentations, wouldn’t we? After all, we can all chat and have conversations!

Okay – rant over…. I’ll get off my high horse now, before I get a nose-bleed!  :)

I sat through two bad presentations and a great one the other day.  The great one was designed to simply give people information they could use to help market their businesses.

It was fun, fast and full of useful stuff.

The two presentations that came before it weren’t quite so good.  In fact they were so bad that at one point I had to restrain myself from banging my head against the wall.  The business-man in me, of course, stopped that kind of behaviour from manifesting and instead of seeing two bad presenters, saw two possible clients.  Hey-ho!

At the end of the presentations I had to leave pretty sharp-ish to get home but being a well organised chap (stop laughing) I followed up today by sending emails to the two potential clients.

Or at least I would have done if I could.  As it happens I couldn’t even do that, because I didn’t know how to contact the speakers.  Now, given that their presentations were, essentially, 10 and 15 minute long sales pitches, that’s something of a disaster from their point of view.

Clearly, I wasn’t trying to contact them to buy anything from them (their presentations didn’t inspire that kind of reaction at all!) but it’s a salutary lesson and an indication of exactly by how far these presentations had missed their mark.

Instead of sitting down and thinking “What would my audience need to know?” they’d sat down and thought “What can I tell my audience about my work?”.  That mind-set was the key thing wrong with the presentations and carried over so far that it didn’t occur to the speaker to give their audiences ways of contacting them.

Wouldn’t you think your audience might have wanted to know that??!!?

Oh, good grief!

I have Google Alerts set up for key phrases that interest us – things to do with presentations and presenting etc.  Today I got one which linked to this aid for public speaking.

Can someone explain to me what they mean?  If it’s ultra-sonic then by definition we won’t be able to hear it and so it can’t have any effect, subliminal or not.  If we can hear it, it’s not ultra-sonic and so the title is wrong… in which case would you trust the content?

I stress I’ve not tried the product, it may be great, but don’t you think they’d have got a better title……?  ;)

You might not know I blog somewhere else, as well as here.  No?  Well I’ve not mentioned it before.  Blokesontheblog.co.uk is exactly that – bunch of British Blokes, blogging.  It’s eclectic and entertaining.  It’s not focused and it’s not limited… which is a pretty cool combination.

Recently, I wrote about presenting (what else do I know?!?) here.

2012 log

We all know the adage.  We all know it’s true.  (Okay, there are pictures out there that aren’t worth the price of the crayons they’ve been drawn with – the London 2012 logo, anyone?)  But generally it’s true.

So why do people use bullet points?  Errrr….. pass.

image of debt

I recently came across this graphic recently, which I think nicely illustrates the point (thanks to http://justaddwater.dk/).  It’s a very simple visual of who owes money to whom, in Europe.  It’s from the New York Times, which is why everything is converted to dollars but that doesn’t matter.

Take a look at it, and think for a moment…. if you’d got to provide that amount of information in bullet points, how many slides would you need and (more importantly) how many people in your audience would be listening at the end of your presentation!  (Actually, forget about listening to your presentation, ask yourself how many of them would even be awake at the end of your presentation!)

….that if you can’t explain it to a child (he even gave it an age!) then you don’t really understand it. Sounds like good advice about making presentations, to me.

I’m often struck by the fact that would-be presenters miss the fundamental truth of his point. All too often I find people rushing into explanations of ‘how’ without thinking about the fundamentals of ‘what’. The thing is, audiences don’t know as much as you do (otherwise they would be giving the presentation, not you!) and so it’s not so easy for them to understand the details.

Besides, the details aren’t all that important (nor is a presentation the best way to pass details over!). If you go into too many details too soon your audience won’t follow you…. and you’ll bore them to death.

So how to avoid this?

Listen to Einstein – imagine you’re making a presentation to a smart 12 year old, say. That way you’ll avoid the temptation to rush into details and instead you’ll stay at a more sensible level of detail. Think of it as a more user-friendly version of the old adage: think of your audience as an intelligent lay person.

What’s more, the process of translating what you were going to say into what you’re now allowed to say is only going to help firm up your understanding, too!  :)

Last week, I wrote a short article for insurers and accountants and… well, anyone who has to give technical presentations… presentations which, no matter how important they may be, sometimes fail to set the world in fire.  I suggested that getting into the details at the wrong time, or in the wrong way was counter-productive.

You’d be typical of this group if, as an example, you were making a presentation about the intricacies of some new legislation that affects insurers, accountants or any similar, highly technical and potentially complicated profession.

So how can you insure your presentation works for every type of person in your audience?  (See what I did there?!!? )

Some people like checklists, some don’t.  Some like things to be spelled out, because it gives them a sense of security – they can see where a presentation is going – whereas for other people spelling things out is a sin and should probably be a crime.  Some people take things literally – others work better by using analogies.

None of that is an important problem, of course, until people with one kind of preference make presentations to people with a different kind.  My philosophy as a speaker (and a trainer of speakers) is that the responsibility for making a presentation work successfully lies with the speaker (mainly) rather than the audience – so it’s important to check your presentation to make sure it’s working for both types of people.

By all means, design (don’t write!) your presentation your way in the first instance, but then check, edit and change.

I’d seriously suggest that you don’t try and worry too much about an ‘other type of person’ when you first draft your presentation because at that point you’ll need all your creative skills working to their best and (almost universally) you’ll find that if you try and think like someone else as you write, you’ll inhibit yourself to the point where you can’t create something to appeal to anyone, never mind a person who thinks in a different way to you!

Once you’ve got your presentation half-way decent (not finished!), step back from it… put it aside and do something different for as long as you can – days if possible, rather than minutes.  That way you’ll get some ‘mental distance’ from things.  When you come back to it, ask yourself these questions…

• Have you been literal a great deal of the way through, or have you tended to work by metaphor or analogy?
• Have you begun at the start and explained things in detail as you’ve gone along, or have you alternatively tended to assume that your audience will ‘just get it’?
• Have you followed-through, step by step to an inevitable conclusion, or have you given the big-picture-end-product (only)?
• Have you tended towards text or have you relied a lot upon images?
• Have you run through things in a chronological way – or perhaps a process driven one? Alternatively, have you tended towards exploring things from the point of view of patterns and principles?
• Have you used technical terms more than once per couple of slides (particularly TLAs!)? Alternatively, have you avoided technical jargon like the plague?
• Have you found yourself with full sentences on your slides (quotes excluded, perhaps) or have you been more likely to use something cryptic?  (Remember that’ what’s obvious to you is potentially cryptic to a lot of other people!)

There are probably a dozen or so other, similar questions you can think of for yourself, I’m sure, but the basic point is that you take a long, hard look… then have a cup of tea… and when you come back to it again, make a point of trying to change things towards the other sort of presentation.

For example, if you’ve got lots of text, and few (if any pictures), try and think of an image which encapsulates the the concept of what you’re talking about.  Show that while you talk – that way you’ll appeal to people who don’t think as literally as you do.

And visa versa!

Of course, the very best idea is then to give your presentation to a friend who things differently to you and see how they react…..

I’d love to hear any other suggestions of questions to ask….!

Simon