tellingpeople

I’ve trained a lot of speakers and I know a lot of people who speak as part of their work (or for fun!). I barely know any who don’t have to travel to get to their presentations – certainly it’s not unknown for me to be up at the crack of dawn (or even before the sun) and not see my house until the sun’s well down again.

Everyone knows that traveling is tiring – why else would you need a day after your holiday to recover from it!? But does it hold special issues for a presenter (or trainer)? I think so, based upon my experiences recently. For me the three big issues are

Being tired isn’t just about not having had enough sleep. Not just. Obviously that’s not going to help but it’s also about when you sleep, not how much you get. I can go to bed early the day before a big presentation and get the ‘recommended’ seven or eight hours of sleep, but if I have to get up at, say, five in the morning, it doesn’t feel like it. Essentially, my body-clock is messed up and it’s not until the time I would normally be up and about (an hour and a half later) that I find myself able to wake up fully… no matter how many cups of tea I drink to get me going!

I find I need to watch that – tea’s a diuretic (like coffee, the other common stimulant drink) and drinking a lot to get you going (or to keep you going at the other end of the day) will dry your throat out, making it harder for you to sound like a confident expert when you get on stage to make your presentation. My advice would be to drink it if you need to but to make sure you take on board as much water. You don’t need to drink the five litres a day that was claimed a few years ago (research failed to substantiate that assertion) but you do need to have plenty on board.

Drink it in advance of your presentation, not during, because by then it’s too late. Water can’t lubricate your vocal folds; it shouldn’t go down that way… and if it does, you’re drowning (not recommended, even for the most demonstrative of presentations!). What water does, is give you what you need to produce the lubricants for your throat and vocal folds during your presentation – and it can’t do that directly or instantly. Getting the water in in plenty of time for your presentation means drinking as you travel, not as you start presenting.

I’ve blogged elsewhere about the fact that the water shouldn’t be chilled, either, particularly if you do drink it close to when your presentation starts.

Don’t under-estimate the effects of dehydration when you travel! Planes, trains and cars all suck the moisture out of you!

Being cold is a tricky one – particularly in the depths of winter. Don’t forget that even just a chilly room for your presentations can tighten your shoulders and throat up so that your voice sounds strained… making your presentation sound less credible. Tricks I use are a simple Buff for when I’m traveling (very flexible and well worth the money!) and although I personally don’t wear vests, I’d know speakers who find them useful. When you’re presenting, you’re performing – and you can’t do that to your best when you’re inhibited by even a slight chill.

Consider a warm up – not a full marathon, but just a simple something to warm your muscles up before your presentation. If you’re nervous it’ll help with that too, by using up some of your adrenalin, perhaps, and certainly using up some of your time… taking your mind off things.

It’s particularly important to keep your lips and neck relaxed and warm, so when you warm up, consider making a point of spending a minute or two to get your lips working properly – there’s nothing worse for an audience than a speaker who mumbles… and if you’re coming in from the cold, that’s what you’ll do. Of course, you might find it a little bit on the embarrassing side to do your lip warm-up exercises on public transport but hey… it’s your job. Better to look silly on a bus than on stage!

Going back for a moment, to look at the issue of being tired, I remember an athletics coach telling me that performance on the day was less to do with the amount of sleep an individual athlete got the day before the big event but rather more to do with the amount of sleep in the previous four or five nights. Sadly, I can’t reference this at the moment (so if you can’, please drop me a line!) but it seems reasonable to me – and if so, it’s important to take it into account as you do you public speaking gigs. A business presentation on Monday might be spoiled by a night on the town on Friday and Saturday. Now there’s a sobering thought…..

I recently blogged briefly about a presentation skill I picked up from a crying baby in church and this (even more brief!) blog follows on from that….

Now to talk about presentation pitch….

I listened to the singing in the service. Over 200 people should make quite a decent amount of noise, especially as the hymn in question was easy and popular. But they didn’t. It wasn’t that people weren’t singing, it’s just that they weren’t making much noise…. and the reason is pitch. Voices have a natural pitch and the hymn wasn’t at that pitch for many people.

There are some parts of the service which are sung while other bits are spoken in unison… and these bits were very loud indeed. The difference is that the spoken bits were spoken at the natural pitch of the congregation, not at the pitch determined by the music.

And so it is with presentations: if you’re trying to speak at the wrong pitch (such as during a presentation) you’ll find your voice weaker and less potent. That’s stating the obvious, I know, but think about it – when you’re nervous, what happens to your voice? It goes up as you tighten things up.

Now obviously it would be nice if you didn’t get too nervous when you made your presentation, but it’s worth mastering a relatively basic skill. Before you go on stage take a moment to check where your voice is, pitch-wise. If there’s any sense of you having raised your pitch try a couple of these presentation tips:

The odds are good that when you do this, you’ll say the first sound at the pitch you’re currently at (the nervous pitch that your voice has reached) and then the second sound will be lower. This is likely to be closer to your normal voice and should be the one you make your presentation using. It takes a little practise and skill, but it’s not as hard as you might think and it’ll make your presentation sound much more relaxed and authoritative.

The skill likes not so much in the trick itself, but in remembering to use it!

… and on this occasion I mean the lectern in my local church, last Sunday morning.

Maybe it makes me a bad person who’s going to go to hell, but there were a couple of things I picked up from the service on Sunday which had less to do with God and more to do with my work as a presentation skills trainer. The first was to do with pitch and the other was to do with volume.

Volume first.

Long term readers will know that I attend St Bart’s Church in my hometown of Newcastle. (Please forgive the website!) and this Sunday was a Baptism. Great. Lovely. One baby who – I noted early on – had an excellent ability to project his voice down the full length of the church. As the water was poured over his forehead for the first time he gave fair warning of his intension and by the third pouring he was in full flow. No surprises there.

What was more of a surprise was that he continued to protest about the way he’d been treated for quite a while. Still, that was fine, wasn’t it, because we could all hear the rest of the service because we’ve got microphones and so on?

Wrong.

The score, for a few minutes at least, until the magic effect of a loving mother smoothed things over, was
Child without mic but who instinctively knew how to make a loud noise – 1 : Priest who thought the microphones were magic – 0.

I don’t know how else to say this except to bash it out again and again and again – most microphone systems in churches (and other places!) aren’t intended to be used to replace voices, just to augment them. There’s a world of difference! (Actually, even for systems which are intended to replace the natural voice, it does no harm to speak into them as though they’re just giving your voice a bit of a boost.)

Even if you successfully make yourself heard from a loudspeaker, the sound of your voice comes from the ‘wrong place’ (that is, not your mouth) and this can make it harder for an audience to get to grips with what you’re saying to them. Every ounce of effort they put into hearing what you’re saying is gained at the cost of understanding what you’re saying. Make it easy for them.

I’ll cover the pitch stuff next time….

Mostly, presentations are about something specific and to a specific audience. Mostly they want you to do well. Mostly they’ll forgive you a glitch here and there.

Mostly.

But not if you get something significant wrong. Something important to your audience as people. Things you really (and I mean really) need to get right are things like who the group is you’re speaking to, where they are and so on… Geographers have a term for loving places; it’s topophilia… and topophilia tends to be particularly strong in relation to the place you come from.

Get it wrong and you’re in trouble (unless you can joke your way out of it like a pro.

Even the great Guy Kawasaki can get it wrong. Imagine dropping a clanger like that live in a presentation! You’d have a hard job recovering.

It’s worth just doing a quick check, before you go on – particularly if you’re doing a presentation you’ve done before. Business or sales presentations would be prime examples of this. Personally, I’d suggest that if you’re using notes for your presentation your first paragraph should be the basics…. name, date, place, title! I know it seems patronizing but believe me, in the heat of the nervous moment you might be grateful that you covered the basics!

Believe me, this is the voice of bitter, bitter experience!

Get those wrong and you’re in more trouble than if you got your wife’s name wrong…. allegedly!

This is turning into a bit of a series, isn’t it, although I didn’t mean it to when I started, with my first post on this topic. I’ve carried out the ‘experiment’ with the sweets from this post a couple of times now and it seems to work, for me at least.

So here are a few more semi-random tips.

Tea (and coffee) will dry your throat out. If you’ve got a dry cough or anything similar, try and avoid them. On the other hand, there are drinks which will encourage your body to produce more fluids – milk, if you can drink it (I take mine in hot chocolate, which makes it so so so much easier to drink! ). If you’ve got a flemmy cough, avoid these. A little bit of common sense and self-medication can go a long, long way!

I hope those help. Don’t forget though, that my very first bit of advice is the best: if you can avoid making presentations when you’re ill, do so!

I’ll state right up front that I have science behind this… I only have one shop seller’s claims and one personal experiment!

I took my nephew here today (rubbish website, fantastic sweet shop!) and I over-heard the conversation before me: the lovely lady behind the counter (sorry I never got your name!) told the guy she was serving to suck on one particular kind of sweet to handle changes in temperature. Knowing that this was a problem for people with bugs (see this post) my ears pricked up.

I asked and I bought 50 pence worth and I tried it…. and based on one simple walk in the chilly air with the tail end of a chest infection, I can say that it works….. The scientist in me is squirming as I right, but what the hell, it’s the New Year Holiday!

To add to the hints I gave before (more to come) I’m delighted to add something else to the armoury: hardboiled, clove flavoured sweets.

I’m told (and I’ve not been able to verify this) that the ‘magic ingredient’ is the same as in the basic dentist anaesthetic.

Like I say, I’ve no science behind this but on the basis of one trial, it appears to work…… besides, it’s always fun to try

…. 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’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! )

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.

Well, here goes!

We’re going to take up the challenge – over at BT Tradespace there’s a blogging competition and we’re up for it. One blog per day for the whole of November… hopefully by the end of the week, you’ll have a strong idea of what it takes to bash out a great presentation; if not, well at least you’ll have something to read in the bath!

As it’s the start of the month, it seems important to think about the start of presentations. I don’t mean the first few words – that’s not the start of when you’re working on a presentation. The very first thing you do (well, the first thing you should be doing!) is figure out what your presentation is for.

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase “start with the end in mind”. This is what it’s all about. Figure out what you want your presentation to do, what it’s for, what it is about the world that you want (need?) to change by the end of it. That’s your target and everything should work towards that.

Sometimes it won’t work, even if you know what you’re trying to do – but I can promise you this: if you don’t know what you’re trying to change, you won’t change it.

If you don’t know what you’re trying to do in your presentation, how will you know when you’ve achieved it? How do you measure success? You have to have a criteria against which you judge your presentation. To cite Alice’s adventures in Wonderland – if you don’t have a finish line, you’re involved in a Caucus Race… and there’s no point, none at all.