Category: Presentation tips


Presentation Dos and Don’ts lists

March 3rd, 2010 — 11:57pm

Okay, we’ve all seen lists like this before but we all ignore them. Why? Because we don’t want to believe that the things on them are sensible, in terms of our time; perhaps we don’t think we need to do what is being suggested – or perhaps we think we already do. Maybe we just don’t think we need to do it badly enough to put the effort it.

Think about it for a moment.. then recall the number of times you’ve read a self-help book and not done the exercises. For me, that’s a higher number than I’d want to admit. I’m sure it is for you, too. If I’d done all the exercises in fitness books that I’d ever read, I’d be the fittest man on the face of the planet. As it is, I’m not the fittest man on my street – and my street only has five houses on it!

So – to put it bluntly – there’s limited point in lists of

  • Do this
  • and

  • Don’t do this
  • when it comes to making presentations and doing public speaking.

    Quite apart from the fact that most of the advice in these lists is superficial (yes, I know I shouldn’t say Errrm a lot when I make presentations, please don’t tell me not to… tell me how not to!) the fact is that the advice, even when it’s good advice, all too often doesn’t get taken.

    Why not?

    To be honest, I don’t know; but I suspect it’s something to do with the fact that the motivation to change just isn’t there. People don’t change their behaviour unless the pain of not changing (or the benefit of making the change) is not great enough to justify the move and also great enough to overcome the pain of the actual process of changing. Given that I ask a lot of my clients sometimes, that’s a lot of pain they need to be in. :)

    So what to do about it?

    It seems to me that the answer’s fairly obvious. Instead of just listing the changes that need to be made by potential presenters, we need to think about why those changes need to be made.

    What say you?

    Most lists say I need to learn to breathe properly – sure, but how? Any what motivation would I need to spend time flat on my back doing the necessary diaphragm exercises?

    Most lists say I need to make sure I know what my audience is like – absolutely, but how? And what motivation do I need to overcome my shyness about meeting them first?

    Most lists say I need to make sure I don’t try and say to much – agreed, but how? And what motivation do I need to learn the techniques for designing presentations correctly?

    What say you?!

    2 comments » | Articles, Key posts, Presentation tips

    Trains, planes and automobiles – traveling to presentations

    February 24th, 2010 — 12:16pm

    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
  • being cold
  • being dehydrated.
  • 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…..

    Comment » | Articles, Key posts, Personal & blog-related, Presentation tips

    Someone else’s work used for my presentations…

    February 18th, 2010 — 5:59pm

    I was doing a half day’s training this morning in one of the Local Authorities near us. As I walked into their training room I noticed that the flipchart still had the notes from yesterday’s training hanging over the back… that’s too good an opportunity to miss for someone as nosy as me… and one of the pages really caught my eye.

    Clearly the training had been about developing assertiveness: there was full page statement which read “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the acceptance that something else is more important“.

    To me that really got to grips with something I’d been trying to explain to clients for a while: they’d ask me how to get un-afraid when they did their public speaking or business presentations and I’d explain that everyone gets nervous and that even I was nervous as I stood there in front of them. Some found that hard to believe.

    It’s true though; I was nervous – very nervous indeed. That quote summed up the attitude that I think most public speakers have when they’re doing their presentations. It’s not that they’re not nervous, anxious or even down-right afraid but rather their audience and the message they have to deliver to them is more important.

    So what is it that’s more important to you than your fear? If you’re only doing the presentation because The Boss told you to do it and you don’t believe in whatever it is your saying anyway then you’re fighting a losing battle :) If it’s something you’re passionate about, perhaps your charity work, perhaps the state of the neighbourhood, perhaps something else, then you’ve got a better chance.

    To be honest, there’s a bit of me that wants to suggest to would-be public speakers that if they can’t think of something more important than their fear, they should ask themselves a cold, hard question about whether they should be speaking in public at all!

    In the real world, of course, people have to present because they’ve got no choice. For those people I’d urge you to simple sit down with a cup of tea and a notepad and jot down all the good things that could (should?) come out of your presentation. Find things more important than your fear. If no one thing is more important, what about the cumulative effect of all the little benefits to the world you’ll bring?

    It might be worthwhile chatting it over with a friend, too. They’ll widen your perspective.

    It’s not about not being afraid – it’s about being afraid not mattering to you as much as the presentation!

    What's more important?

    2 comments » | Articles, Key posts, Presentation tips

    Get to the point

    February 15th, 2010 — 1:30pm

    spear point The world’s most simple analogy for a decent presentation… :)

    The presentation is the tip of the spear. Sure, it’s the bit people notice and are frightened of (the spear-tip, not the presentation!) but it’s useless without

  • the shaft – the backup in terms of designing and researching your presentation; getting the audience’s key interests sorted out and so on; and
  • the throw to hit the enemy – the skill with which you actually deliver your presentation.
  • Don’t just concentrate on the tip! Get the other things right first: you can’t attach a spear-tip to a shaft that isn’t their or is bent…

    2 comments » | Presentation tips

    Lectern lesson two for presenting

    February 3rd, 2010 — 2:51pm

    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:

  • drop your shoulders and make a point of relaxing the muscles of your bottom; then
  • shake out your arms just to loosen yourself up; and
  • say to yourself “uh-uh”… the sound you make when you’re telling someone something hasn’t worked etc.
  • 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!

    Comment » | Articles, Personal & blog-related, Presentation tips, Voice tips

    Presentation Lessons From the lectern

    February 1st, 2010 — 10:27pm

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

    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….

    Comment » | Articles, Personal & blog-related, Presentation tips

    Is this thing on?

    January 25th, 2010 — 10:24am

    I used to think it was a (bad) joke when I heard presenters checking the microphone was turned on by asking if it was. If it is, or course, the whole audience can hear you asking and your credibility takes a tumble before you even start. If it isn’t, no one knows you’re asking in the first place. Microphones seem to panic people, but every professional (or anyone wanting to look professional!) will do a few simple checks before the audience arrive…. not while they’re filing in. Doing that has got to list amongst the highest crimes against presentation skills!

  • Check what kind of a mic you’re expected to use. Lectern Mics are probably the most robust but also the most limiting. Radio mics can be hand-held (a nightmare if you’re not used to it) or lavalier (button). The latter is preferable unless you’ve practiced with microphones… and even then it’s probably the better option as a speaker.
  • Check if you need to use a Mic. Some times it’s just not worth the angst. Do that checking before your audience arrive though, and remember that when people come into a room they’ll absorb sound, so what might have been loud enough in rehearsal isn’t loud enough in performance.
  • Check the batteries. Amongst theatre professionals, microphones are notorious for eating up batteries and most places will change batteries between shows – every show. It might be wasteful but at least it’s secure: I mean no disrespect to your venues here to suggest that they might not have the same protocol. If in doubt, take your own batteries with you; if you’re worried about the environmental impact, take re-chargeable ones (remembering they go flat faster, so charge them fully!)
  • Check where the loud-speakers are. Don’t walk in front of them with your microphone or you’ll get that horrible howling sound called ‘feedback’.
  • Check you know how to turn it on and off and that you’ve agreed with whoever is running things who is going to control the on/off – you or the person on the sound desk! You’d be surprised at how much chaos you can create simply by turning a microphone off at the wrong moment!
  • Check if you’re going to be recorded. If you are, you’ll have to wear a microphone, obviously, but that doesn’t automatically mean that you must have your voice fed through the speakers: it’s perfectly possible for your voice to be recorded without being broadcast! If you don’t want to be broadcast over the speakers, make sure you’re not, whether you’re being recorded or not.
  • Okay, so none of that is exactly rocket science…it’s the most basic of presentation skills… but believe me, it’s important. How do I know? Well you’ve no idea how many presentations I’ve cringed through! :)

    Comment » | Presentation tips, Voice tips

    presentation zen

    January 22nd, 2010 — 2:12pm

    Long term readers will know I’m a great fan of the whole style of Presentation Zen. The books cool – but if you want to get a brief overview, this video takes less time to watch than the book takes to read! :)

    Comment » | Key posts, Presentation tips, reviews & case studies

    Index card notes

    January 17th, 2010 — 5:02pm

    Index Cards
    I read a blog recently which suggested that putting the content of your presentation on 3-by-5 Index Cards wasn’t such a good idea. I don’t think I agree with the logic. (I should add, before I go on, that I like the blog in general – and in fact I wouldn’t have read-it-to-disagree-with-it if I didn’t read it fairly often because I like it! :) )

    The main reason for ditching 3-by-5s, it seemed, was that they force you to write small and can’t hold much text, so you’re constantly changing cards. The replacement idea was to use a large, single piece of card on the lectern.

    My take on it is this…..? Who said anything about putting your script on 3-by-5s?!?! They’re for notes and occasional keywords, not a script. No one should use a script. Complaining that you can’t get your script on Index Cards is a bit of an Aunty Sally, isn’t it?

    Besides, putting coloured (good, good idea!) notes onto a large sheet of card ties you to the lectern, which pretty much everyone agrees isn’t a good thing. What’s more, there’s a bit of me that things that if you can reduce your presentation enough to get it onto a single sheet of card in coloured not form, you can get it down to something that will fit on a set of 3-by-5 Index Cards! :)

    Or do they – have I missed something significant in the way presentations should be made?

    Two word of warning. One – if you’re going to use Index Cards to hold your notes, check that they’re small enough to be comfortably held in your hand so you can gesture with them without undue inhibition. Index Cards come in a range of sizes and if your hand suits smaller cards (or bigger!!) then use smaller cards (or bigger!!). Two – when you’ve got your Index Cards set up, number them and connect them via a Treasury Tag in a corner: that way if you drop them you won’t be flustered.

    4 comments » | Presentation tips

    Details, details, details…

    January 9th, 2010 — 1:29am

    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! :)

    Comment » | Personal & blog-related, Presentation tips

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