tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

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!

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!

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

I know it’s not quite technically correct all the time, but one of the ways children are taught about where to put commas into sentences is to think about where they’d breathe if they were saying it out loud. It doesn’t work all the time but it’s a pretty handy rule of thumb.

It also works in reverse – when you breathe, people infer a comma. That can have a significant effect upon the meaning of your words.

There are dozens of jokes floating around the web based upon mis-understandings of this kind but it’s worth remembering that it can have a significant effect in serious situations as well. For example, while I happily chewed on my Cornflakes this morning for breakfast I heard a newsreader insert a comma (okay, she took a breath!) which changed the meaning of her sentence from explaining why someone was on trial to explaining why they’d been found innocent.

As a speaker it’s important you don’t leave breath-silences in your presentation – they’re all too easy to mis-interpret. The common alternative – the trick of filling silences with an ‘err’ or an ‘ah’ – is also not helpful as it’s going to annoy large numbers of your audience. So what to do?

Learn to breathe correctly and get from one end of your sentence to the other without having to stop for air. Simple!

I can’t stress often enough on these pages how important it is to get your breathing down into your diaphragm, rather than relying on your chest muscles (your inter-costals). You’ll be so, so, so, so much easier to understand, hear and believe! Trust me on this!

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.

Yesterday I commented on lighter, higher voices having an advantage because they traveled further. This morning is a ‘brain off’ morning and I’m sitting, vegged out, in front of the TV. Which is fine, ‘cos it’s showing “BATMAN; the brave and the bold”. (Cultured? Me?)

Batman, of course, is calm, powerful and brooding. Well, as much as a cartoon can be, and one of the main ways they do this by doing using an appropriate voice. Diedrich Bader has just the right amount of ‘weight’ behind it to give Batman the credibility he needs (do you think I’m taking a kids’ cartoon too seriously?).

So, to go with the tips for helping get a lower voice to carry further yesterday, here are a couple of tips for people with higher pitched voices to get more ‘emotional weight’ to what they say….

• Drop your shoulders, relax the muscles of your bottom and waggle your jaw before you start to speak; sigh; stand still for a few seconds
• Hum for a second (at whatever pitch your voice naturally starts at) and then let your voice drop ever so slightly (not too much!); continue to hum at the lower pitch for as long as you comfortably can on one breath
• visualise your voice coming not out of you mouth but out of your navel
• swing your arms a little to loosen up your chest and allow resonance to develop there

Okay, so on their own these things aren’t going to change your voice over-night (they’re only tips, not training! ) but they’ll certainly help.

This brief article was originally run in an online “newspaper” based in my part of the UK – hence the rather choppy style – and I’ve posted it here because it’s good advice, even though it reads badly….

Check for a moment, how you breathe and see if there’s a pattern. A pattern other than the obvious one of in, then out, and then in again! I’m talking about a pattern to how quickly you breathe or if you occasionally take a breath of a different length or depth.

Most of us are conditioned to think-and-speak almost as one and that’s related to the question of how you breathe – the pattern of how you speak is very largely built into the pattern of how you breathe. Without meaning to – or even realising it – you’ll convert your sentences or phrases to the length of time you can talk for without taking a breath.

That’s just common sense.

Over the length of a presentation, however, that can become the kind of pattern which begins to irritate your audience – particularly if it means you have to sometimes (or even often!) break up something that-should-be-kept-together into smaller parts. Because that’s how you breathe. And you find yourself. Always having sentences of. About the same length which. Can become very annoying. For anyone listening.

A bit of variety is crucial to being interesting – and the key to being able to have that variety lies in making sure you’re breathing with your diaphragm, not your chest.

That’s easier said than done, but it’s possible with practice!

Breaks between words are what tells us when a word has finished: there’s bound to be an ancient proverb somewhere about it. Speaking without the slight gaps between words can make you harder for your audience to understand, in exactly the same ways as takingoutthespaces makes your written stuff harder to read.

More important than simply being harder to understand, not speaking with breaks runs the risk of being actively misunderstood. Let me give you an example.

I recently went to the U2 performance in Glasgow and on the train back home I over-heard a member of staff on the platform telling another passenger that this wasn’t the train they wanted. They wanted the Virgin train on the adjacent platform. What they meant to say was “No; Virgin’s on the other platform” but unfortunately what everyone heard, because there was no silent space for the comma, was “No virgins on the other platform“.

It might have been true, I suppose, but…

When you practice your presentation, always (but always!) make a point of making sure you get your spaces between words sorted out: it really is the most basic presentation skill in the world!

I’ve posted (and perhaps even ranted!) about the 7% myth in the past. Now, at last, the man who did the original (mis-)quoted research speaks out. He did an interview for BBC Radio 4 recently. I don’t know how long the recording will stay live, so get it while you can. You can listen to it here.

In short – your presentation isn’t 93% the way you say things with only 7% what you say.

I’ve mentioned the need to practise your presentation out loud more times than I care to remember and I’ve always cited the same few reasons – and this week I had an great example of what can happen if you don’t. For me, it was the highlight of a very long day (but sadly for all the wrong reasons!).

Essentially, the issue is two-fold. Firstly, you’ll get no sense of timing if you rehearse things in your head and secondly, you’ll not get any idea of which combinations of words or phrases are going to be tricky when you stand up and do it for real. Can I give you an example?

The phrase “public sector spends” was part of a presentation I was at recently – and the next bit of the sentence was pretty useful as it gave an idea of how many millions of pounds per years the pubic sector spends of X, Y and Z. Sadly, I wasn’t listening to that bit because I was too busy trying not to laugh at how the phrase “public sector spends” actually came out…. Like me, I’m sure you’ll be surprised to know that the “public spectre sends about 15 million pounds”! Where it sends it, I’m not quite sure….

A simple run-though in advance, out loud, would have avoided that problem and meant that everyone in the audience staying rapt instead of gently laughing. To make matters worse, the presenter had no idea what he’d done to generate such mirth!