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...
It’s a bit too sychophantic for my liking…
but despite that it’s still worth a few minutes of your time, I’d say.
It’s a brief look at one of Steve Job’s presentations, talking through why it is that his presentations are just so damned cool. Of course, there’s more to it than this, but it’s a nice starting point.
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 airplaines - another point!
As my daughter did her first freefall a couple of weeks ago, someone jumping with her managed to get some stunning photographs of her as she fell. With her permission (obviously), I’m turning one of them into a slide, showing the three things you need to make a decent presentation. As I looked at the pic it dawned on me that doing this kind of thing needs three things.
- the right techniques;
- the right equipment;
- the right attitude.
Miss any one of those and you’ve got a problem. Okay, so you can cover up for a lack in one with an extra dose of another more when you’re presenting than when you’re in freefall but you get my point, I’m sure. (You can’t substitute the skill of flapping your wings for the lack of a parachute but you can substitute good voice projection to cover the lack of a microphone! 
)
So next time you’re sitting there thing “hhheeeeelpp” ask yourself which of the three it is you’re missing. If it’s kit, buy or rent it (we’ll advise you on which is the best), if it’s skills you’re missing, call us for training…. and if it’s attitude, well, we can help a bit there, too but mainly it’s up to you.
It’s not about being un-afraid. Attitude is about being afraid and doing it anyway.
Cheers…. Simon
PS : the slide looks absolutely fab, too!
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.
A picture and a thousand words
A friend of mine runs an art gallery in Liverpool. - she’s called Lydia and she’s lovely. Reading a blog article of hers called “A picture’s worth a thousand words” reminded me that cliches are cliches for a reason - firstly because you need to avoid them when you’re presenting, obviously, but secondly because they’re true.
What’s also true is that we’re visual animals - we take in stuff through our eyes better than most other animals and a huge proportion of our brain is dedicated to handling visual information. So why not combine those two ideas and have a presentation which is (almost) entirely made up of big, bold, visual images?
The tips for picking the images?
- iconic - the image needs to encapsulate the idea you’re talking about in the same way a road sign tells you what you need to know in one glance: you don’t need to spend precious seconds when you’re driving concentrating on it.
- big - it’s far, far easier to scale an image down than up if you want to keep the quality and in terms of display, size is important.
- quality - nothing says that you don’t respect your audience more than crap pictures.
- high contrast and bright colours - your data-projector and computer will between them do a good job of mucking about with the colour balance of your pictures so it’s essential you start off with something big and bold, otherwise it’ll just appear flat, boring and perhaps even hard to make out.
- legal - make sure, obviously, that you’ve got the rights to use the picture. I shouldn’t have to say this, but it appears I do!
- safe - you’d be surprised at what some people can take offence at. What’s natural and reasonable to you won’t be, necessarily, to someone else. (And visa versa, too, so don’t got off thinking they’re prudes!)
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!
The obvious #2
The second in the list of “Stating the obvious“… or “Stuff you’ll kick yourself for if you don’t sort out”
Some times it’s so obvious it shouldn’t need to be a tip… But the obvious isn’t always obvious, so here goes.
Have a checklist.
Seriously: have it all written down.
By ‘it’ I mean all the things you need to sort out before you go on stage. My checklist has two parts to it. The first tells me all the things I need to make sure I take with me from the office (laptop, projector, backups etc.) and the second tells me all the things I need to have got sorted out before I “go on”. This would be things such as
- finding my focus
- straightening my tie
- checking my flies are done up!
The thing is, no matter how much experience you have, one day you’ll slip up and this little piece of paper will be your lifesaver at that point. An in case you’re wondering, yes, this is the voice of experience.
Let’s face it, if it’s good enough for airline pilots before take-off, it’s good enough for us!
By the way, it’s worth thinking about making something special out of your list - make the format and layout attractive; print it on card; even laminate it…. anything you like, so long as it makes it special.
I’m going to be updating my checklists soon - and I’d love to include anyone else’s suggestions of what to check, too - help me out here!
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.
