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...
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…..
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.
Equation for Curved Vision
Like a lot of other people, we here at Curved Vision have a Google Alert for our company name. That means if anyone is mentioning us, Google will let us know. It’s simple, effective and convenient… and mindless!
Why mindless? Because it took me, a few days ago to this artwork. Nothing to do do with anything we’re involved in, though. I like it though, so I thought I’d give it a plug!
Interview with a genius
Anyone who knows anything about presenting will know that I (and anyone else who’s ever trained people to do presentations) is a fan of the Presentation Zen blog. See this post, for example.
I came across a nice interview with the man himself recently, which you can find here. My understanding is that the pages are about to be re-vamped (the one you can see is a behind the scenes one to let you at the permalink) so don’t be put off by the look of the place - the ‘real’ home of the blog (here) looks much, much nicer.
It’s well worth 10 or so minutes of anyone’s time. There’s nothing particularly new or earth-shattering there if you’ve read much Presentation Zen stuff before, but it’s a great introduction if you haven’t and a good reminder if you have.
Essentially, the basic idea behind the Zen approach to presentations is that “less is more”. Less words, particularly. So few words, ideally, that you don’t even have bullet points. Personally I use them when they’re appropriate - which is almost never, but I’m doing a presentation tomorrow with two such slides on them…. though one of them is an illustration of “how to do it wrong” so I guess that doesn’t count. Zen indeed!
More stories
A while ago I blogged about story-telling in presentations. Recently I came upon a post on a similar theme in a different blog which is worth five minutes of your time.
I’d also like to draw your attention to the Vital Elders blog, which sometimes contains interesting stories - usually of native American origin. I’d want to substitute different words to make them sound more contemporary and accessible, perhaps, but every now and then there’s a gem. Enjoy.
WIN
No, it’s not an instruction or something screamed from the side-lines to urge you on, i’ts an acronym: Women into the Network.
I did a free lunchtime session for them yesterday and despite the best efforts of the 60 mph winds had a great time. This is just a quick thank you to them for the invitation and a ‘thanks’ on the questions too!
A day in the life…
Kit check….. including socks, by 8:00 and then out of the door. Why are my socks part of my kit check? Simple: lots of the breathing and posture exercises we do are ideally done without shoes on and it’s pretty embarrassing to take my shoes off and have holes by the toes!
By 8:30 I’m at the venue and checking what’s not working. We use projectors, laptops and so on and: inevitably if something’s not working it’s not what you think…. it’s the stuff you don’t think of… Laptop’s fine, projector’s fine… so what’s the….? oh yes! The cables that connect them! We carry our own of everything in case client’s kit isn’t “as advertised”. Come to that, we carry spares of everything (except one of our cables ‘cos that is the spare, the original having gone “walk-about” last week!).
Then it’s time to do what we do… clients are generally very nervous indeed when we start so the first exercises are always the critical ones. We have to make sure everyone’s in the right frame of mind to work (and work hard) but also having fun. Watch out for the quiet, shy ones… work with the exuberant ones….. change the running order of the day if that’s what clients’ need.
It’s all about “doing a swan”. The topside is calm, cool, collected and in control. The stressy, sweaty bits are no-one’s business but our own. We have a mantra about our own performances: if it looks like we’re working hard, we’re not working hard enough!
Lunch: informal chatting to people to find out where they want the afternoon to go and what they want to concentrate on. I’ve got a ‘default’ in mind, of course, after consulting with the manager who hired us, but it’s always good to be flexible. Without people noticing I’m not longer there, leave and prepare for the afternoon session. Another kit-check, another set of exercises to warm up again…. more time with the clients…
This is the part of the day I typically really love: all the stuff we’ve done in the morning has started to seep into people’s minds and they’re able to start applying it. The improvements are often spectacular at this point and it’s great to see people’s self-esteem rocketing, and share their sense of empowerment.
Towards the end of the day we often spend a lot of time integrating the different technical things we’ve done during the day and bringing things all together. It’s a very intense part of the process and we have to manage it carefully as people are tired by now, too. Sometimes though, we laugh so hard it hurts.
Feedback time and good-byes: then questions and dealing with individual issues if people want. Then pack the kit (you should see us trying to carry Djembe drums and cymbols on public transport!) and to the nearest cafe to de-brief (which is almost my favourite part of the day).
Back to the office and sort out what’s needed for tomorrow (good fun) and dealing with the administration (not good fun!).
Oh yes… and then a shower!
Freebie session….
Women Into the Network (WIN) is a networking organisation based in the northeast of England: and we’re doing a free session for them on Feb 26th. We’re starting at noon, at the Sovereign Suit at The Assembly Rooms. Should be good ‘un as it’s pretty near to booked out already, apparently.
Me and a room full of women. Sometimes my job is hell!
