tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

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!  :)

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!)

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

I remember being told once, long ago, way back in the mists of time, that you can’t make presentations if you’re not fit and that, conversely, presenting is such a high energy activity that you burn calories at a respectable rate.

I’m not sure how accurate either of these claims are, in that I’ve not come across any research (that I trust) about how many calories per hour a presenter will burn, but I do know that after a day’s training (six or seven hours on stage, performing) I’m absolutely shattered.

I guess if you’re not fit you just adapt your presentation style to what you can do – I don’t know – but what I do know is even a ‘trivial’ injury can have a significant effect upon how well I present. I’ve got Bursitis at the moment (an inflammation of the elbow – it’s not at all serious but it is painful) and I noticed this week how I tended to make fewer and more restricted gestures as a result.

Not only did that mean I wasn’t at my physical best, but the fact that I was noticing it meant my head wasn’t 100% in my game, either!

On the other hand, one of the best presenters I’ve ever heard presented from a wheelchair and was fairly limited in how much he could do with his hands, too, so maybe it’s not about not being able to do things so much as it is about not being able to do things that you normally could.

Or maybe it’s about a different sort of energy.

Head energy.

The guy I’m thinking here (let’s call him Ian) had one really big thing going for him – he cared. He never presented unless it was important to him – important enough for him to have done months of research, checking and rechecking – and so every presentation he gave was a labour of love. I never saw Ian with an un-necessary word, let alone an un-necessary slide!

The energy was in his head – and it came out in his voice, in his passion. As an audience member you never saw the wheelchair. It was only on a bad day for Ian, shortly before he died, that you even saw Ian himself.

Instead, you saw his vision – you saw what it was that mattered to him. You saw the problem he was wrestling with and you saw his proposed solution and you saw how he was going to work to implement that solution. In the end, you saw how the world could be just that little bit better.

It helped, of course, that Ian wasn’t ever talking about trivial things like how to make more money or increase your sales or… whatever… Ian presented about deprivation, economic growth, poverty. In that sense he had a head start of some other presenters.

But like I said, he only ever presented when, and if, it mattered.

It wasn’t about physical energy (I can’t wave my arms around at the moment because of my elbow), it was about his head-energy.

If you’ve not got that head-energy, if you’ve not found a way of getting it into your presentation, you’re wasting your physical energy and you may as well shut up.

And for many a high-physical-energy but low-head-energy presenter, frankly, I wish they would.

Citing Shakespeare, in Macbeth, they’re: “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

I recently had a client who wanted to have one-on-one training in making presentations. After a free taster session I decided that this wasn’t the best way forward for him and suggested that he looked at the idea of training as part of a group. We had quite an interesting conversation about the pros and cons of the two approaches…. Let’s start by looking at the obvious stuff first.

Training Cost – training in a group is likely to be cheaper. I charge by my time (like most trainers, I think) and so if my time is shared over half a dozen people, so can the cost be. That’s the obvious advantage of working in a small group.

Training Focus – this is the quid pro quo of the benefits of less cost, I guess, because you’re likely to get get less individual attention from a trainer if he or she is working with six or seven people than with just you. It might mean, for example, that you need more session and that consequently the benefit of a lower cost-per-session is countered by the extra number of sessions you need.

Training Preference – for me this kind of trumps most things… if you feel uncomfortable learning on your own, learn in a group and if you are more comfortable on your own, learn on your own! It’s hardly rocket science…….

So much for the simple stuff.

But there are other things to consider too, such as the fact that too much focus might be counter-productive for your training. Having all the trainer’s attention on you all the time gives you no time to reflect and absorb what you’re learning; sure, you might make spectacularly fast progress during the session but if you’ve not really taking it in, it’ll just leak away when you leave and that progress won’t translate into the ‘real world’. That’s why I make a point, when I’m doing one-on-one training to take time to lighten the load, or perhaps look at different aspects of making presentations. It gives people time to absorb and thereby really learn what we’re working on.

What’s more, my experience is that much of the basics of things like breathing and so on can be learned in general terms at least as well in small groups as individually. People can only learn so fast, so there’s no point in giving them more attention than they need – it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  In short (for the basics at least) you can get the benefit of cheaper training but without the commensurate loss in productivity…

Of course, you can hide a lack of progress in a group more easily than you can on your own, but any half-way decent presentation skills trainer can spot that and stop it easily enough. What’s more, groups mean that you can often feel less inhibited – allowing faster progress than you would on your own.

An example might make things more clear here.

One of the things I work hard on with my clients is often helping them to breathe in a way that makes their voices sound more assure and, because of the way hormones respond to how you breathe, makes them less likely to be overly anxious. Breathing exercises like this are often best done on your back for the first few times. Doing things like this – that feel downright odd if you’re not used to them – can feel intimidating on your own, whereas being part of a group of (say) eight other people help this can be a bit more natural…. although never quite completely natural, I admit!

There’s also the issue of learning from each other.

It’s one thing for an ‘expert’ to tell you something that’ll help your presentation style, perhaps by a considerable amount, but quite another for you to see it demonstrated by watching someone else’s style change for the better in front of you. Seeing it happen makes it more ‘real’ than simply being told it.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again – particularly with sceptics! – that the penny finally drops only when they see it happening for real.

Everything I’ve said so far, of course, has one thing in common – the assumption that you’re training as part of a small group. In my head, small is up to about eight people. After that I find that, even with the best will in the world, I can’t always spot everything I’d want to spot, for all the clients…. I’m constantly surprised and sceptical of trainers who pack out rooms with 150 people and say they’re going to make them great presenters. No they aren’t. What they’re going to make is a lot of money.

A lecture is different from training!

At that point, save your money. Or better yet, use some of it to buy me a beer.

I’ve travelled a lot by train recently. Inevitably on these journeys I end up over-hearing other people on their phones. Sometimes this is because they shout so loudly down them that I’m not convinced the phone is actually necessary at all – for all I can tell the person involved is actually audible back in their office, directly!

Something struck me, however, as I listened to people calling later and later at night: I’m convinced it wasn’t because they were simply getting more and more tired but rather because more and more of them were calling an empty office, staffed only by an ansa-phone machine.

Instantly they realised this, their whole approach to talking changed.

Their voices shifted from interesting, animated, personable and varied to a terrible monotone. Obviously the machine on the far end of the phoneline won’t care – but don’t forget that it’s not a machine that listens to these messages ultimately… it’s a person. (It might be worthwhile thinking about that as you leave messages with prospective employers etc… ).

What this reminded me of, as I sat there, stupified by the effects of three days in London, was that unless people are talking to people, they’re boring – perhaps they become less animated/interesting in the belief that such a voice will be more clear and easy to understand, I don’t know. (If that’s the case, call me, I can help you!) Perhaps it’s just a reflexive thing as we talk to ourselves… again I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that if you don’t establish a relationship with the audience at your presentation you’ll believe yourself to be speaking to no one, or to a machine and if that happens you may well find yourself sounding more and more boring. Certainly it would explain the many, many speakers I’ve heard who were so boring I wanted to die (and the few who were so boring I wanted them to die! ). As they failed to establish any personal relationships for their presentation they fell back on their “ansa-phone voice”.

Please, please, please… as you make your presentations, remember not to talk at me, but talk to me!

It’s good advice about many things, including presentations.

I actually heard it while at the gym, on a cross-trainer with the earphones plugged into some morning TV… and the advice was actually about sex – but so what, it works for presentations, too!

In the context of presentations, I’m taking it like this: your audience shouldn’t be in the same place at the end of your presentation as they are at the start of it. If they are, you’ve wasted your time and theirs. The former is a shame and a waste, the other just rude!

Of course, to make that move happen you need to have decent presentation skills, obviously – but before you get a chance to use any of those you need to have a very clear objective. You need to know what the change is that you’re aspiring to make. After all, if you don’t know what a successful presentation looks like, how are you going to make one?!

So, before you do anything else – before you you sit down to write your presentation, before you turn on your computer, before you even pick up your pen – ask yourself one simple question: by the end of the presentation, what do I need to have changed? (Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I’d add that if it takes more than one short sentence to do this, you’re too vague and you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve in your presentation… )

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve managed to change in your presentations:

One of the recurring responses I get from people who work with me about making better presentations is that they don’t have the necessary time to design their presentations in anything other than the quick-and-dirty approach of a hastily thrown together set of bullet-points. My response is often to look at the trade-off between the time it takes to design and rehearse a good presentation (compared to throwing something together) against the benefits/costs of successful presentations and failed ones.

A successful presentation which takes ten hours to prepare is ten hours invested. Two hours preparation for a failed presentation is two hours wasted….

By way of example, I sat through two hours of bullet-point information presented to me by a firm of accountants this week and, while I’m sure what they were saying was right and potentially useful, they wasted their time, because after slide number three of bullet-points that were droned on about, I lost the will to listen.

By slide 13 I’d lost the will to live.

By slide 42 I’d lost the will to let them live!

The result was that the three presenters wasted the two hours they spent talking (a total of six hours); plus, let’s say another three hours preparation time (running total nine hours); plus the two hours of everyone in the audiences (two hours times 35 attendees = 70 more wasted hours… a running total of 79 hours). That doesn’t include the time of the people who organised the event, or travel time for everyone. Including those figures we might easily be expected to get to over 100 wasted hours.

100 hours – think about it for a moment… 100 hours is a little over four full days, or 11 working days (over two working weeks!). It’s long enough to walk from London to Paris ad back again a couple of times (assuming a steady pace of four miles per hour and that you could walk on water to get over the English Channel! ).

A hundred hours..!… all wasted because no one was listening… because no one can listen to that level of bullet-point hell.

Setting aside the hours wasted, let’s think about the money. Most of the people at the meeting I’m thinking of were reasonable senior managers or self-employed. Even if we only charge time out at £30/hour for these people, that meeting cost £30,000 in lost productivity. That’s not counting the additional real cost of the folders, paper, petrol, room hire and so on!

Can I be absolutely sure the meeting was such a failure? Well no, I can’t be 100% sure because someone might have emailed the presenters after the event, but in the rather embarrassing rush for the door at the end, the presenters were conspicuous by the lack of people wanting to talk to them – from their perspective the meeting was certainly a failure as they got no clients out of it. From the audience’s perspective the meeting was a failure because we didn’t learn anything.

Listen to me folks – no one (NO ONE!) can listen to two hours of bullet point orientated slides. The time you spend getting your presentation sorted out is not ‘wasted’ – it is ‘invested’. The time you don’t spend on getting an effective presentation together is the time we all waste!

Last month was a big month for people giving presentations. Steve Jobs launches the iPad, for example and ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair gives evidence about the war with Iraq. To be honest, Mr Jobs had the easier time of it, for two reasons. Firstly, his audience wanted him to do well (whereas Mr Blair was being interrogated (albeit politely) – but more importantly perhaps, Steve Jobs had time to prepare and practise.

I’m sure Tony Blair practised too – after all one of the most common points made by commentators was that there weren’t any questions that he’d not already been asked, so it’s not as if he went in ‘cold’ – but Steve Jobs had the luxury of setting his own agenda and of rolling it out in front of his audience in his chosen order. Never underestimate how much of an advantage that gives you: it means you can rehearse your presentation coherently, for a start!

Of course, if you don’t rehearse, you’re not taking advantage of that opportunity and you’re deliberately putting yourself in a worse position than Tony Blair – the first time you open your mouth is the first time you hear what you’re saying. (At least Tony had chance to practise in other interviews!). Why would you do that to yourself?

So how much practise time do you need? Well that’s rather like the old question about the length of a piece of string. The answer is “enough but not too much”. Even worse than not knowing what you’re going to say next and being terrified (which the audience may very well not notice) is knowing too well what you’re going to say next and being bored (which the audience will certainly notice and not forgive you for). The trick is to rehearse until you know exactly what you’re going to say, but not necessarily how: in other words, you should always be able to predict your next paragraph, or even sentence but certainly not your next word.