Presentation skills ~ tellingpeople

I’m doing five hours of lectures today. That’s a long, long bash in one day and I’m anxious about the three hours in the afternoon, particularly, because the room is stepped (very steeply indeed, if my memory of it is accurate). That means that (if I’m not careful about my posture) to look people in the eyes I have to tip my head back for those who decide to sit at the back of the room….

…and sit at the back they will, Murphy’s Law being what it is.

Tipping your head back like that, of course, stretches your neck and tightens muscles around your vocal folds unless you’re very careful. That, in turn, will make your voice somewhat more harsh - you’ll sound more aggressive and your voice will tire (even possibly damage over a three hour session) much more quickly.

So, given that presentation skills trainers like me are always telling everyone to keep face-to-face contact how do you square the circle? Essentially there are three approaches you can take

use your back: literally bend over backwards for your audience to protect the position of your neck - but that brings with it its own problems and so isn’t a good idea;
raise your eyes: keep your head and neck as they should be and make a point of lifting your eyes - it works but you’ve got to have a degree of faith to pull it off;
ask your audience to move: typically, if your audience in large auditoria are like mine, they will tend to fill in from the middle to the back, leaving the front few rows completely empty - plenty of room to bring ‘em forwards.

There is, of course, an added extra advantage to bringing your audience to you and it’s all to do with something called “proxemics”. Scientists have identified a range of distances that people can be apart with such names as “Intimate Distance”, “Social Distance” and “Formal Public Distance” which tells you pretty much the whole of what you need to know. Crudely speaking (all other things being equal, of course) the closer people are to you, the less formal they’ll be and the less formal they’ll expect you to be.

Of course, if you enjoy working really hard to deliver formal lectures and presentations, then your audience can be as far away as you like but if you’ve prepared an informal, intimate presentation then you need to get your audience to sit the appropriate distance away. If they sit to far off, they’ll subconsciously expect you to be formal and will be un-impressed at you when you’re not…

…even if you weren’t ever supposed to be formal in the first place!

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!