tellingpeople

Not a single catch, Honest!

As it’s nearly Christmas, I thought I’d give away a copy of our two Ebooks. In keeping with what we do it’s a presentation skills ebook and comes with a second book of simple presentation tips.

All you have to do is let me know, before the 31st of December, why you need it. Simple as that – I’ll let whoever needs it most, have it. Can’t be any more straightforward.

Of course, I don’t have any objective way of deciding who needs it most, so it might end up being a silly idea, but we’ll see.

Have fun everyone!

Simon

…. and me!

I’ve just finished an interview, (live and completely un-rehearsed!), on-air with Chris. This link won’t last forever because only the last few days-worth of shows are held online, but for what it’s worth, the recording is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nww67/Chris_Evans_17_11_2009/.

My three and a half minutes of glory start at one hour and fifteen minutes in. Enjoy!

On a more useful note, it’s worth adding that the prospect of live and unrehearsed in front of a little over 5 million people tends to focus your mind somewhat. May I take this opportunity to assure you that the methods I’ve outlined on this very blog to control presentation nerves really, really, do work!

I know it’s not quite technically correct all the time, but one of the ways children are taught about where to put commas into sentences is to think about where they’d breathe if they were saying it out loud. It doesn’t work all the time but it’s a pretty handy rule of thumb.

It also works in reverse – when you breathe, people infer a comma. That can have a significant effect upon the meaning of your words.

There are dozens of jokes floating around the web based upon mis-understandings of this kind but it’s worth remembering that it can have a significant effect in serious situations as well. For example, while I happily chewed on my Cornflakes this morning for breakfast I heard a newsreader insert a comma (okay, she took a breath!) which changed the meaning of her sentence from explaining why someone was on trial to explaining why they’d been found innocent.

As a speaker it’s important you don’t leave breath-silences in your presentation – they’re all too easy to mis-interpret. The common alternative – the trick of filling silences with an ‘err’ or an ‘ah’ – is also not helpful as it’s going to annoy large numbers of your audience. So what to do?

Learn to breathe correctly and get from one end of your sentence to the other without having to stop for air. Simple!

I can’t stress often enough on these pages how important it is to get your breathing down into your diaphragm, rather than relying on your chest muscles (your inter-costals). You’ll be so, so, so, so much easier to understand, hear and believe! Trust me on this!

Yesterday I mentioned that when you’re working somewhere other than your office it’s a really good idea to have one person in charge of logistics. Today I’d like to make a quick comment about some of the things that your venue might not provide (despite saying they will). The obvious solution, of course, is to take your own….

Power. Of course there’ll be a 13A socket somewhere, but will it be near to you or will you have to run an extension cable to it, creating a trip-hazard and and ugly un-professional image?
Projector. They often cost extra. Even if they are included, they’re often pathetically under-powered for the venue. Remember to make your images so saturated (colour-wise) that they work even when the projector washes them out. Have your own in your car, just in case…
Screen. Check the quality! Sometimes it’s better to project onto a wall than an old, dirty or twisted screen.
Liaison. Saying they’ll have someone on the reception is one thing. Putting someone on reception who is intelligent, articulate and clued up is another.
Table. You’d think this one would be easy, wouldn’t you. I’m sure it is… if you check it out first.
Clear time. When’s the weekly fire alarm test? Just a thought…..?!
Control. You shouldn’t need to turn the lights down but just in case, you want to know where the switches are, particularly if they shine onto the screen……. and they will.
Laptop. I’d always say you should take your own. No one else’s works the same but if you must use theirs, check the remote, the screen etc.
Powerpoint. Just check – which version!?!!?
Flipchart. And (working) pens, please. And paper.

That’s it for now; no doubt half a dozen more will occur to me as soon as I walk away from the keyboard – feel free to add your own!

I’m working here today: Matfen Hall

Dammit, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it! By coincidence this was where my wife and I celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary recently.

Actually, you’d be amazed at how much difference a venue makes. Here, you can be assured that everything will just work. It means that as a presenter I can concentrate purely on the content, not on the need run the venue.

Actually, truth to tell, I never run the venue. At the risk of sounding smug, I have someone to do that for me. If we can afford it, we take two presenters (as a back up as well as running the venue). If we can’t, we make a point of finding and talking to one person from the venue.

Why one person?

Because bitter experience has taught us that if there are several people who are responsible for making sure everything runs correctly, they’ll both leave something to the other and it won’t get done. The’ll both sneak off for a cuppa for five minutes, thinking you’re covered by their partner… Everyone needs a tea-break, sure, but if one person feels responsible for looking after you, they’ll certainly come and tell you that they won’t be around for 10 minutes, so at least you know.

And they’ll be back after 10 minutes too, not the 15 or 20 minutes people take if they think they’re being covered by a ‘partner’.

Bitter experience here… find one person to host you and make sure they know you’re working with them, personally. (Be nice, obviously! )

I was talking yesterday about how important it is to work hard in your preparation, not just the presentation itself. A sports coach I heard of recently summed that all up with the phrase “Train hard – play easy“.

I like that.

My old piano teacher was a concert pianist and I once asked him what he thought about during recitals – did he concentrate just on the interpretation, or was he still thinking a little about the technicalities? I can still remember his answer: “Neither – I count the audience”. He didn’t mean it literally, of course, just that as a performer he should be so well prepared he couldn’t get it wrong, technically… if needed, he could count the audience.

So how does one prepare?

It’s not about doing it over and over, fortunately.

Go over the presentation and find what works – then forget about working on those bits because they don’t need to be worked on! Obviously.

The bits you need to look at (and look at hard) are those bits that don’t work. Far, far too often we find clients who come to use saying things like “I’ve been over it a dozen times and I still get it right!”; our response is, basically, that there’s no wonder it doesn’t work if that’s all you’ve done… you need to find the bits that are more difficult and go over those hundreds of times, not dozens.

Fortunately you don’t need to do it all over a hundred times!

…. that I learned from a fried of mine who’s a choreographer: I overheard her talking to some dancers. “If it looks like you’re working hard when you perform,” she said, “you’ve not worked hard enough during rehearsals”.

How true.

Public speaking and presenting should look easy – it should look like you’re not ‘breaking sweat’. Let your audience get to the content, and letting them see your effort isn’t doing that. It’s ego. Sure it’s nice to be appreciated but that shouldn’t be at the expense of the audience’s experience.

I’d go so far as to suggest that showing how hard work it is to present is amateurish. A real pro doesn’t show the strain. Do the swan thing – it looks like it’s gliding smooooooothly on the surface but under the water it’s paddling furiously!

How do you apply this in presentations and public speaking? Preparation. Design well then practice. Re-design and then practice a bit more….

… and if you think you can wing it, you’re either wrong or unreasonably lucky!
Then do a bit more

For the Fallen, by Laurence Binyon is just about the hardest piece of public reading I’m going to have to work on for quite some time. I’m working on it to be read later today at a Poppy Service; and it’s important to me to get it absolutely right. Absolutely.

Normally I forgive myself if I make a mistake – the more you stress about a mistake, the more likely you are to make another… and another… and another… but this one needs to be perfect.

So how am I practicing?

Out loud.

Ignore those people who tell you practice in front of a mirror – it’ll just make you self-conscious; ignore those who say use a video (unless you’ve got professional input and feedback); but don’t, don’t, don’t just read things over. Public speaking is a physical act and you can’t practice something physical just inside your head. (Actually, there’s some research to suggest that practicing inside your head is better than nothing, but in general you know what I mean.)

Inside your head you never make a mistake that you have to recover from. Inside your head you never have problems with difficult combinations of sounds. Inside your head you don’t have to worry about timing. Inside your head you don’t get too caught up in the emotion to concentrate. Inside your head you don’t get trapped too far into the cadence, ending up sounding trite….

All of that kind of thing becomes very real when you do it for real, out loud. And given how important it is to me to get the Poppy Service reading absolutely right (people have died – the least I can do is make sure they are remembered as best I can) you can bet that I’m looking very carefully at not being ambushed by the list above.

Absolutely.

I’m guessing it’ll take me an hour and a half to get it as I want it – for about 40 seconds reading.

Yesterday I commented on lighter, higher voices having an advantage because they traveled further. This morning is a ‘brain off’ morning and I’m sitting, vegged out, in front of the TV. Which is fine, ‘cos it’s showing “BATMAN; the brave and the bold”. (Cultured? Me?)

Batman, of course, is calm, powerful and brooding. Well, as much as a cartoon can be, and one of the main ways they do this by doing using an appropriate voice. Diedrich Bader has just the right amount of ‘weight’ behind it to give Batman the credibility he needs (do you think I’m taking a kids’ cartoon too seriously?).

So, to go with the tips for helping get a lower voice to carry further yesterday, here are a couple of tips for people with higher pitched voices to get more ‘emotional weight’ to what they say….

• Drop your shoulders, relax the muscles of your bottom and waggle your jaw before you start to speak; sigh; stand still for a few seconds
• Hum for a second (at whatever pitch your voice naturally starts at) and then let your voice drop ever so slightly (not too much!); continue to hum at the lower pitch for as long as you comfortably can on one breath
• visualise your voice coming not out of you mouth but out of your navel
• swing your arms a little to loosen up your chest and allow resonance to develop there

Okay, so on their own these things aren’t going to change your voice over-night (they’re only tips, not training! ) but they’ll certainly help.

We’ve just run one of our public voice & presentation skills training days. I love these days but they do leave me absolutely wiped out. So there I am on the Metro (think like London’s tube but clean and friendly! ) coming home, and getting annoyed at the tish-ta-t-tish-ta-t-tish of some oik’s headphones, with the cymbals leaking out and into the carriage when I had to fight the urge to strangle said oik with the wire to his headphones….

But it did remind me of something important about how you sound when you’re presenting. You see, the reason I could hear the cymbals only (not the vocal line, the drums or the bass etc) is that lower sound tend to lose focus and disappait faster – which means that they don’t carry as far.

In short, when you’re presenting, the lower your voice, the harder it is to get your voice to carry to the back of the room. I’m not suggesting that you raise the pitch of our voice as that will put undo strain on it, making it more likely that you’ll develop a sore throat (not to mention sounding horrid!) but it might be worthwhile considering some simple tricks and skills that will help your next presentation…

• Go for the shortest ‘throw’ you can. You might be able to stand in amongst the audience, so you don’t have to get your voice to go so far, or you may be able to turn the room around to wide and shallow rather than thin and long.
• Check for any background noises – particularly those which are similar in pitch to your voice; typical examples might be a air conditioning or fan etc.
• Learn to breathe with your diaphragm (easier said than done but not hard) so that your voice carries further and is ‘projected’ not shouted.
• Don’t shout – no matter how hard it is to make yourself heard. If you do, you’ll damage your voice; you’ll sound harsh and un-credible; and you’ll have to be so loud at the front (to be heard at the back) that the front rows will hate you even more than the back rows would have if they couldn’t hear you!

Some of those are easier presentation skills to master than other, I know, but whatever you do will help!