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...
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.
Garr makes a point
Whenever I do freebie sessions (such as this one and the stuff I do for UNN, Newcastle and so on) I finish with a “Where to get more help” slide. Naturally I include this blog but I also point them towards the best one around - Presentation Zen.
On this particular blog entry, he makes a good point.
Actually he makes a series of good points. The point I wanted to pick on, however, was that Sir Ken seems to be speaking to people in a personal and relaxed way.
… and that, ladies and gentlemen, is down in large part to the way he uses his voice. Sir Ken, whether by training or instinct, breathes low in his body, using his diaphragm rather than his chest. It’s that relaxed (correct) way of breathing which releases the chill-out hormones and allows for a more emotionally rich way of projecting his voice. Breathing the other way - with intercostal muscles - releases adrenaline and the other stress hormones.
With breathing sorted out like this it’s very much easier to be (and sound) relaxed and authoritative. Anything else, breathing with intercostal muscles, sounds like you’re shouting (even if you’re quiet - and trust me, parents will all any about shouting quietly: “If you don’t tidy your room right this minute there will be trouble!”)
Get the breathing right and almost everything else will follow….. (sort of)
Simon
Gordon Brown’s party speech
Hhhhmmm…… I’m writing this as I watch (on the TV) Gordon Brown PM as he addresses the Labour Party, here in the UK.
I’ve seen him live and been impressed - despite his reputation for being somewhat dour, he did a fine job (even quoting Ronald Reagan and getting away with it!). One of the reasons he managed this, of course, is that he understood his audience and he took the necessary time to build to the climax of the piece. It started with “where we are” and built on it nicely to a climax and a strong ovation from a thoughtful and convinced audience. This, needless to say, was not a televised speech.
Conversely, in this essentially tele-visual event, the current speech isn’t built like that at all. Instead it’s a series of sound-bites. Each - short - paragraph, structured to work when taken out of context. As a speech it’s awful: no flow, no structure and no pattern… just a series of short, self-contained (largely read) paragraphs. Essentially, Mr Brown is just reading a series bullet points to his listeners: their order is pretty well irrelevant.
But it works - sort of.
Not for his audience. For them it’s a getting a series of brief spurts of applause at the end of each paragraph - but they’re getting shorter and shorter each time, rather like the applause at a School Prize giving, when the list of children to be awarded prizes goes on and on and on, with each parent applauding their own child enthusiastically but only politely clapping twice for everyone else’s children.
But I’ll put money, good money, on the fact that when it’s cut up and edited for regurgitation on short news clips it works very nicely indeed.
Given that Mr Brown is obviously working for a TV audience, how could he have made it better? Well, for starters Mr Brown, if you’re listening, get away from the podium. Have the courage to get out from behind your autocue and connect better with your audience. I promise you the effects will be staggering.
You could, of course, just get a better speech-writer who can put in at least the semblance of linking between the paragraphs!
And you could combine these ideas, so that, for example, when you change topic you change place on the stage. That way, your audience will know when you’re doing so. Again, I promise you that’ll be more effective than you can imagine - simply moving to a different position on the stage as you change topic is fantastically effective… especially when your tone of voice and other presentation skills aren’t all that good. Already I’ve noticed a couple of times when you’ve not flagged up that you’re ‘moving on’ to something new, leaving your audience confused and struggling to keep up.
It’s simple oral grammar. By not flagging up when you move on, you’re doing the presentational equivalent of removing the full stops from a written document.
Finally, you might want to practice a little more. Yes, yes, I know you’re busy running the country, but this is part of running the country - it’s not something you do in your spare time. Three times (so far) I’ve seen you “obviously not know what’s coming” and get the inflection completely wrong… Once more confusing your audience for a few seconds.
It’s not rocket science. You can make a ‘good’ speech a ‘really good’ speech. That way, the good last 30 seconds (when you actually got excited about things!) would have been the standard, not the exception. That way, the standing ovation you’ve just got would have been genuine and deserved - not just because it’s expected (once again, for the cameras)!
Judges…
…are to receive some training in dealing with the media. I know it’s not directly presentation skills as such, but it’s pretty close. The BBC report it here. It could be interesting to see how they handle themselves and I for one am going to keep an eye/ear open for their first presentations.
The bad news, from our point of view, is that it’s not use who are doing the training! 
Party season is over…
That’s the political party’s annual conferences, of course.
Inevitably, the media has been looking closely at the speeches made by the various party leaders. Accoring to The Telegraph, Cameron’s much touted “without notes” speech for the Conservatives was only a last minute descision. It’s been referred to as “unscripted” in various places too - which is patently rubbish! Just watch the video and tell me if, for one moment, you think that was a genuinely impromptu speech! Just because the script’s not on an autocue, doesn’t mean it isn’t there!
I do this kind of thing for a living and I doubt I could have given that speech without some serious (and I mean serious) preparation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not critisising him for what he did, far from it, just pointing out it’s not (quite) as advertised!
It’s worth taking a look at the audience reactions too. For my money, the outbreaks of applause at various ‘claptraps’ were too slow off the mark to be genuine and organic; it looks to me as though there was a sense, amongst the audience, of “We’re supposed to clap now, so we’d better”. I’m not the only one who was underwhealmed, either!
Mind you, towards the end (which isn’t the best place for it, perhaps), he finally got some personal stories going.
I’ve not had time to look back at Gordon Brown’s speech yet, but I will….
Critical Congruence
First things first – what is congruence? In short, it’s where things all line up in the same direction to support each other. (I’m not using the maths definitions here, obviously!) They don’t have to be the same, just all ‘singing from the same hymn sheet’, to coin a phrase.
Why is it important in your presentations? That’s easy. Without congruence you’ll have no credibility. Let me give you two examples.
The first example is from the daily safety briefings of a construction company I worked with. I’m sure you’ll applaud the idea of such briefings as much as I did. However, even though the project was nearing completion, the safety-briefing slides still said that the name of the project’s Health & Safety Manager was “TBC”. How, people thought, can the company really be serious about health and safety issues if the person responsible for this area is still “To Be Confirmed”?
The upshot was that no one took the briefings seriously.
The second example was at a presentation I went to this week: an accountant was trying to convince us that we wanted to let him be our accountant. Like all accountants he was “reliable, accurate, fast” etc…. and then he went on to talk about what made him special.
So far so good, except that as soon as you looked at his PowerPoint slides he wasn’t reliable, accurate etc…. (God knows he must have been fast though, because those slides can’t have taken more than 10 minutes to knock up!).
Accurate isn’t changing font every couple of slides. Accurate isn’t having your titles mis-aligned. Accurate isn’t having things mis-quoted on your slides and worse still having typos in them! Accurate isn’t having your text in a similar colour to your background. Accurate isn’t having a couple of your bullet points slipping off the right hand side of the screen… You get the picture, I’m sure.
I spoke to him at the end of the eveining. He didn’t feel he needed any presentation skills training, thanks all the same, but he was surprised that his conversion rate for the evening was, accurately, zero.
Anyone got any ideas why that might be, gentle reader?
Let’s call her H….
…….because that’s her initial.
I’ve been working with H for a couple of months now, seeing her once every couple of weeks for a reasonable length session and she’s very happy with the progress we’ve made together. To be fair though, any ‘problem’ was solved (at least in my head) within the first hour.
H had a very ‘girly’ sounding voice and she was having difficulty keeping people disciplined because of that - and her job required her to do just that. We noticed together that, because she was from Germany, her English, although very good, was slightly accented. She and her managers had put the lack of discipline down to that - obvious but wrong, I’m afraid.
The real problem lay not in her German accent but in her German thinking. Despite living and working in the UK for a few years (and I take my hat off to her for that because my languages will barely allow me to order in a bar or a restaurant when I go overseas) she still ‘thought’ in German. That meant her vocalisation was a very ‘intellectual’ process.
Consequently, she was breathing by using her inter-costal muscles, as most people do when they’re thinking hard and/or stressed.
… and it was this inappropriate way of breathing that was leading to her sounding immature and people thinking they could ignore her….
The story has a happy ending, I should add, because I worked with H to shift the focus of her breathing do her diaphragm. She quickly got the hang of it and was surprised by how confident and authoritative that made her sound.
Patsy’s Presence
Patsy Rodenburg knows a thing or two about having ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is. She’s the Director of Voice at London’s Royal National Theatre and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. In short, she knows her stuff.
So, when she brings out a new book about ‘Presence’, I pay attention. You can read my review of Patsy Rodenburg’s book “Presence” online.
Apprentice Ghazal dries
Ghazal dried in mid-presentation in the second week: freezing mid-presentation isn’t common but it’s not unknown either, sadly.
Usually people keep going and make a hash of it because of nerves, so it might be that having to actually stop altogether was the lesser of two evils. Of course, it would have been better for her not have not gone to pieces in the first place! I can’t see her making it all the way if she can’t handle the pressure of business presentations – they’re as unavoidable as taxes when you’re in business.
I’m guessing Ghazal’s problem was one of two common mistakes. It’s hard to tell from a TV programme but it looks at first sight as though Ghazal’s mind wasn’t on the right place. She may have prepared the presentation but she hadn’t prepared herself – you need to do both, obviously. Alternatively, it may be that she was thinking too much about the outcome of the presentation and what was riding on it: that means she got herself nervous in proportion to the possible gains/loss of the presentation, not in proportion to the task itself.
In short, she just wasn’t ready for it!
It’s not just about knowing the skills - you’ve got to have got them so far under your skin that you don’t think about them any more.
It’s like learning to walk – when you’re a toddler you’re consciously working on walking. Once you get older and better at it you forget about how to walk and think about where you’re walking. For poor Ghazal it all got too much because she was trying to do too much at once!
