This blog is about presentations & public speaking - how to make 'em, how not to make 'em and how other people are making 'em. Feel free to read, use and comment on what you find here. And good luck with your presentations...
It’s a bit too sychophantic for my liking…
but despite that it’s still worth a few minutes of your time, I’d say.
It’s a brief look at one of Steve Job’s presentations, talking through why it is that his presentations are just so damned cool. Of course, there’s more to it than this, but it’s a nice starting point.
Don’t ask me!
Recently, I attended a seminar given by a ’sales guru’. Great, I thought, as I went in - this will be exactly what I need. Well, sort of!The guru’s presentation style was engaging and the audience was invited (even encouraged!) to get involved: what’s more, there was applause at the end and the audience went away happy. But those I spoke to afterwards all mentioned that the presentation wasn’t relevant to them personally- though they were sure other people found it useful…
I was not satisfied at all. Why not?
Well, because the presentation started with 20 minutes when we in the audience were asked as share our specific issues. So far so good - but the presenter’s response was simply to throw that page of the flipchart away and make his prepared presentation in any case. So what was the point of the interaction? I don’t know - particularly not as the presenter ran out of time at the end of his session and didn’t quite have time to give us the free, high-value stuff he’d been promising…
…maybe I’m just unduly cynical though!
In old-fashioned management speak, presentations can…
- tell
- ask
- sell
…or sometimes a combination of these. However, ask-&-tell is rarely a good idea. Why? Because it’s a betrayal: it sets your audience up for one thing and gives them another, risking leaving a sour taste in their mouths. If your purpose is simply to tell or sell, then have the courage to do exactly that!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with any of these approaches, so long as you use the appropriate one for the occasion. Like most things in designing presentations it’s not rocket-science, just common sense: the hard part lies not in knowing which style your presentation is but in remembering to ask yourself first.
And if you don’t ask yourself the question, you don’t know. And if you don’t know, you might have the wrong one!
Daughters and airplaines - another point!
As my daughter did her first freefall a couple of weeks ago, someone jumping with her managed to get some stunning photographs of her as she fell. With her permission (obviously), I’m turning one of them into a slide, showing the three things you need to make a decent presentation. As I looked at the pic it dawned on me that doing this kind of thing needs three things.
- the right techniques;
- the right equipment;
- the right attitude.
Miss any one of those and you’ve got a problem. Okay, so you can cover up for a lack in one with an extra dose of another more when you’re presenting than when you’re in freefall but you get my point, I’m sure. (You can’t substitute the skill of flapping your wings for the lack of a parachute but you can substitute good voice projection to cover the lack of a microphone! 
)
So next time you’re sitting there thing “hhheeeeelpp” ask yourself which of the three it is you’re missing. If it’s kit, buy or rent it (we’ll advise you on which is the best), if it’s skills you’re missing, call us for training…. and if it’s attitude, well, we can help a bit there, too but mainly it’s up to you.
It’s not about being un-afraid. Attitude is about being afraid and doing it anyway.
Cheers…. Simon
PS : the slide looks absolutely fab, too!
FSB conference presentations…
I mentioned in my last post that we were heading up to the northern regionsl FSB conference on April 18th. Well, we turned up and it was quite an ‘interesting’ day. Several lessons learned!
We’d opted for a simple stand, avoiding the (potentially gaudy and 
boring-because-they-are-all-the-same) types of pull up stands. Instead we sent for two simultanious slide-shows. One, running on a traditional sized screen was simply a rotating set of testimonials but the main display was specially written for the day and was running on a 42 inch Toshiba flatscreen. (As an aside I can now heartily recommend these as robust, simple and idiot-proof pieces of kit.) You can see a snap of it grabbed during setting up, which shows, rather nicely, the difference in sizes! (By the way, that’s me in the corner, checking something or other.)
YEAH, I know it’s not a great pic, but this is a blog, not anything important! I’ve not even edited out the flare of the flashgun!
Numbers were very dissapointing, with only - at a guess - about forty people who weren’t exhibitors actually coming through the doors of the event (or at least making it as far through the exhibition hall as far as our stand) but we met some lovely people and have started discussions with a couple of other exhibitors about quid-pro-quo stuff…. so watch this space!
Conference time….
This Friday - 18th of April - we’re going to be at the norther regional conference of the Federation of Small Businesses. If anyone wants to pop over and have a chat, see some seriously cool PowerPointing (hey, it’s a stand, not a presentation!), or pick our brains, we’re at stand 40.
You’d be welcome 
Daughters and airplanes
Two miles is a long way under certain circumstances. Okay, it’s a short walk and and even shorter run, but it’s a hell of a long way to jump out of an airplane.
It’s an even longer way to look upwards if you’re the one on the ground and it’s your daughter who’s doing the jumping. God, I felt old. I think I forgave her everything she’d ever done as a teenager at that point.
Still, more money raised for Amnesty, so it might have been worth the ulcers.
More relevant - in terms of this blog - is some of the advice she received and one of the articles written in ‘Skydive Starter’ magazine - some of the techniques advocated for dealing with the fear of jumping are pretty much the same as I use for dealing with the fear of presenting and public speaking.
Let’s face it, if they work when you’re about to freefall for the first time, they’ll probably work when you’re standing in front of an audience. I’ll deal with the breathing another time (I’ve mentioned it before, too!) but let me just spend a moment or two looking at visualisation. It’s a technique where you use your imagination to go through the motions of what you want to be doing, but without do it (which is useful for things such as presenting when you can’t get as much practice-time in front of an audience as you might need). But it’s not just about “imagining it working”.
The key elements to the technique are to be disciplined and structured about it - go through things carefully and in detail. Add just one element of the visualisation at a time… carefully.
Start with imagining exactly what you will/want to see. Be specific, be detailed. Once you’ve got that, add what you can hear. Again, be detailed - but don’t do it until the visual stuff is under control. Then add anything you can smell. Finally add how you feel and what you feel. Things like warmth, a draft from a window you’ve already imagined you can see and the feel of you shoes would be examples of that.
It’s a method that easier to learn face-to-face than when you’re just reading it over a coffee break in your office, but it’s worth having a go - and once you’ve got the basic idea, it’s something you can even try sitting at your computer…..
Don’t practice…
….rehearse instead.
….rehearse instead.
The two things are very different: certainly practicing is part of rehearsing but it’s only a part.
Practicing - doing it over and over and over (and over!) to get the technical bits sorted out. Rehearsing - doing it differently and trying different things and ways of doing things to get the whole thing sorted out.
Think of it as what a concert pianist does with the physically tricky bits of the Chopin Prelude they’re about to perform. But even a pianist doesn’t just mindlessly go over the whole piece…. they find the bits they struggle with and do just those bits.
Not only that, but they don’t just bash away at the tricky few bars: instead they disect them, look at them in even more detail and try them slower (very much slower!); they’ll also try different fingering and so on, experimenting until they know how to make it work. Then they do the simple repetative practicing bit, starting very slowly and getting a little bit faster each time they get it perfectly right.
If they get it wrong, they go back and start slower again.
Or try thinking of how a company of actors prepares a play for performance. They don’t just go through the play again and agian. They don’t even go through individual scenes! Instead they’ll spend hours looking and and ‘playing with’ individual lines. It’s not unknown for a company to spend more of it’s rehearsal time talking through and experimenting with a play than actually practicing it! (Trust me, I’ve been there! 
)
But it’s not wasted time (usually!). It’s time like this, spent looking at what the play is actually about and what the author was trying to say which turns a simply competent performance into a great performance.
How much time to presenters spend in preparation, before they start to draft their presentation? In my experience, not enough, generally. Instead they rush to the stage and start trying to run through their lines. But until they know what their play, their presentation, is about, the lines stay dead. They might be delivered with all the technical competence in the world but if they don’t know what the play’s about, they’re just words.
Practice leads to knowing your material and being able to deliver it better. Just rehearsing leads to being over-familiar with your material (you run the risk of just reciting what you’ve more-or-less memorised) and poor delivery.
Practice leads to knowing your material and being able to deliver it better. Just rehearsing leads to being over-familiar with your material (you run the risk of just reciting what you’ve more-or-less memorised) and poor delivery.
Questions - or not
Someone who recently introduced me at a presentation I was making checked with me - very courteously - whether I wanted to take questions as we went along or at the end. Taking questions is a point that this blog posting handles rather briefly: as does this post: and this one…. and, well never mind - you get the idea. I’ve even blogged about it myself here.
Referring back to my original question (during or after) I’m going to rather over-state my case for the sake of making a point…
I strongly feel that any questions your audience might have should come along afterwards, not during. This is because your presentation should be so clearly and tightly structured that there’s no need (and no chance for) people to ask you any questions as you go along.
Questions in the middle of your presentation come from loose ends. They come from you having started a train of thought running in the head of someone in your audience and then not having dealt with it. If you’ve really, really understood what your audience wants to know, your presentation should be a seamless move from where-they-start to where-they-want-to be.
Questions at the end tend to be along the lines of your audience taking what you’ve given them and then applying it to other circumstances, places and times; typically they’ll be applying them to their own circumstances. If they’re doing that, it’s good in a big way. It shows that you’ve sold your concept to them and they’re trying it on for size. That’s fine - you should be able to deal with that kind of thing - if you can’t you have to ask yourself hard questions about what you’ve just told them!
I told someone recently who was showing me his Powerpoint slides (and asking for feedback with the question “Does it hold together?”) something quite vicious (kind of!):
- firstly - if you have to ask, the answer is probably “no”
- secondly - when you’ve finished talking about a slide (any slide) there should be an obvious “what next” question in your audience’s head. They should be thinking “So….?”. Your next slide should start with that question.
Okay, that’s a bit literal - don’t try to make that happen unreasonably; but it does give you a way to see how well your slides (and more importantly the whole of your presentation) holds together. Use the idea as a tool to look critically at what you’re saying.
America the Brave…
I sat down this morning to do some research on speaking styles with reference to the American Presidential election campaign. I was particulalry interested in the Democratic race for the nomination (because there’s nothing interesting about the Republican non-race).
I found this: pretty much job done, in many ways.
Essentially, the article discusses in a little detail the fact that Obama’s at a bit of an advantage because his style of public speaking is better than Clinton’s. (I’m inclined to agree - Clinton can sound badly like a fish-wife if she’s not careful.) Ironic, isn’t it, that she’s the wife of one of the best public speaker the modern world has seen!
Clinton’s response? Far from trying to improve her style, she’s tried (hard) to move beyond issues of style at all, already accepting, implicitly, that it’s a battle she’s lost. But it won’t do. It’s not working. People aren’t always able to hear the content of her speeches because the style of delivery can rub them up the wrong way.
And closer to home (this blog is written by a presentation skills trainer in the UK) look at the relative popularity of Blair and Brown. One of them was a natural orator, one of them not so. You may or may not like or approve of either of them (or what they say) but the statistics are on my side!
So scared it hurts
I recently did a session for an organisation whose brief was to help the voluntary sector in our part of the country become more professional and organised. The day was, obviously, about making a presentation to potential funders and had a “Dragon’s Den” format for the afternoon.
Take-up wasn’t good, sadly. They’d organised the day on the grounds that this was what people wanted and needed, because they were anxious about it - because pitching for funding is a critical part of any project. It turned out that people were so anxious about being bad at public speaking they were too anxious to even try it in a training environment. What’s more, people tended to come alone, rather than in pairs - the benefit of moral support being out-weighed by the shame of being seen to be a bad public speaker by a colleague!
So, so sad!
How did it come to this?
Well let’s not get too despondent. The people we’re talking about care very much about what they do - otherwise they’d not be doing it. That’s great: I’d rather work with people who cared than people who wanted to talk for the sake of it. And - at risk of sounding patronising, please forgive me - we’re not talking about professionally trained speakers or high-powered business men or women. We’re talking about real people, with real jobs. Working really hard.
…and if public speaking, making a presentation, isn’t part of their everyday working life they’re not going to have found the time to get a series of successful presentations under their belts. Each and every presentation is going to feel like the first time. And I don’t know about you, but my first time wasn’t good.
So what’s to be done? Well, I’d welcome your ideas! All I can think of is to continue to offer great training that’s not intimidating, that’s not stressful and that is a load of fun.
