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...
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 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.
Gordon Brown’s party speech
Hhhhmmm…… I’m writing this as I watch (on the TV) Gordon Brown PM as he addresses the Labour Party, here in the UK.
I’ve seen him live and been impressed - despite his reputation for being somewhat dour, he did a fine job (even quoting Ronald Reagan and getting away with it!). One of the reasons he managed this, of course, is that he understood his audience and he took the necessary time to build to the climax of the piece. It started with “where we are” and built on it nicely to a climax and a strong ovation from a thoughtful and convinced audience. This, needless to say, was not a televised speech.
Conversely, in this essentially tele-visual event, the current speech isn’t built like that at all. Instead it’s a series of sound-bites. Each - short - paragraph, structured to work when taken out of context. As a speech it’s awful: no flow, no structure and no pattern… just a series of short, self-contained (largely read) paragraphs. Essentially, Mr Brown is just reading a series bullet points to his listeners: their order is pretty well irrelevant.
But it works - sort of.
Not for his audience. For them it’s a getting a series of brief spurts of applause at the end of each paragraph - but they’re getting shorter and shorter each time, rather like the applause at a School Prize giving, when the list of children to be awarded prizes goes on and on and on, with each parent applauding their own child enthusiastically but only politely clapping twice for everyone else’s children.
But I’ll put money, good money, on the fact that when it’s cut up and edited for regurgitation on short news clips it works very nicely indeed.
Given that Mr Brown is obviously working for a TV audience, how could he have made it better? Well, for starters Mr Brown, if you’re listening, get away from the podium. Have the courage to get out from behind your autocue and connect better with your audience. I promise you the effects will be staggering.
You could, of course, just get a better speech-writer who can put in at least the semblance of linking between the paragraphs!
And you could combine these ideas, so that, for example, when you change topic you change place on the stage. That way, your audience will know when you’re doing so. Again, I promise you that’ll be more effective than you can imagine - simply moving to a different position on the stage as you change topic is fantastically effective… especially when your tone of voice and other presentation skills aren’t all that good. Already I’ve noticed a couple of times when you’ve not flagged up that you’re ‘moving on’ to something new, leaving your audience confused and struggling to keep up.
It’s simple oral grammar. By not flagging up when you move on, you’re doing the presentational equivalent of removing the full stops from a written document.
Finally, you might want to practice a little more. Yes, yes, I know you’re busy running the country, but this is part of running the country - it’s not something you do in your spare time. Three times (so far) I’ve seen you “obviously not know what’s coming” and get the inflection completely wrong… Once more confusing your audience for a few seconds.
It’s not rocket science. You can make a ‘good’ speech a ‘really good’ speech. That way, the good last 30 seconds (when you actually got excited about things!) would have been the standard, not the exception. That way, the standing ovation you’ve just got would have been genuine and deserved - not just because it’s expected (once again, for the cameras)!
A Buddist meditation observation…
I’ve been reading up and studying a little on the art/science/craft of meditation, for reasons of my own. (Here, for example.) One of the things that struck me - as mentioned in that very blog! - is how often people who take up the practice seem to comment and/or complain to their instructor that they are more confused/chaotic and stressed out after they’ve been working at things for a while than they were before they started!
That, naturally, puts them off.
It certainly did me, for a bit, which was why I was researching it in the first place!
The instructors’ responses are often that this is not so - it just seems to be so. What is actually happening, they say, is that the sensitivity to the clutter in the mind has improved. The mind of the newly practicing meditator might have been getting better, might not have been changing much in either direction (or might genuinely have been getting worse!) but that the most likely cause of the ‘problem’ is that the person involved is now conciously aware of how chaotic their mind is.
Stick with it, their instructor says, and the improvements will come.
And what’s this got to do with making presentations? This: I encourage people to practice their presentations before they deliver them - and many times I’m told that doing that just makes them worse. After a few (10? 5? ) minutes of practice they give up in disgust, intent up on ‘winging it’ because that’s the best way of doing it for them.
Well, it’s possible, I suppose. But is more likely - much more likely in my experience - that the process of practicing has simply made them aware of the things that could be improved. They see things they wouldn’t have noticed were wrong with their presentation otherwise because they are conciously examining it.
Get’s worse with practice? Nope, it is just that you’re noticing what needs to be changed - whereas you didn’t notice these things before-hand! In short, they’re seeing things in a way more like the way the audience sees things.
And, as in meditation, that’s the first step to enlightenment… or in this case, giving a better presentation.
Can’t be heard ?
How often have you struggled to hear a presenter? More than you care to? The good news is that you’re not along - even professional actors are having problems making their voices carry to the back of the room.
It’s ironic, isn’t it, that people are worried about not being “real” when they perform - forgetting that the very act of performing means that something isn’t real….? Presentations are no more real than Shakespeare (especially sales presentations! ) but there’s a really significant difference between something being ‘real’ and something being ‘realistic’. Using your voice as a performance tool when you make a presentation isn’t ‘real’ - it’s not how you normally speak, for example - but that doesn’t mean it’s not a realistic presentation of you, your beliefs and what you want to say.
When you present, you perform: you have to stop being ‘you’ and start being a special version of ‘you’. That doesn’t mean you have to be fake, or false (heaven save me from people pretending to be what they’re not!) but nor do you have to be ‘just the same old you’ that I’d meet down the pub!
The ‘performer you’ is an interesting concept to play with. The PY might be a bit bigger: might make bigger gesticulations; might have a bigger voice…
There’s an advantage to thinking of the PY - you can ‘put this persona on’ - and it’s a great way to deal with nerves when you do that… but that’s a post for another time.
Judges…
…are to receive some training in dealing with the media. I know it’s not directly presentation skills as such, but it’s pretty close. The BBC report it here. It could be interesting to see how they handle themselves and I for one am going to keep an eye/ear open for their first presentations.
The bad news, from our point of view, is that it’s not use who are doing the training!
