tellingpeople ~ the presentation skills blog

I recently had a client who wanted to have one-on-one training in making presentations. After a free taster session I decided that this wasn’t the best way forward for him and suggested that he looked at the idea of training as part of a group. We had quite an interesting conversation about the pros and cons of the two approaches…. Let’s start by looking at the obvious stuff first.

Training Cost – training in a group is likely to be cheaper. I charge by my time (like most trainers, I think) and so if my time is shared over half a dozen people, so can the cost be. That’s the obvious advantage of working in a small group.

Training Focus – this is the quid pro quo of the benefits of less cost, I guess, because you’re likely to get get less individual attention from a trainer if he or she is working with six or seven people than with just you. It might mean, for example, that you need more session and that consequently the benefit of a lower cost-per-session is countered by the extra number of sessions you need.

Training Preference – for me this kind of trumps most things… if you feel uncomfortable learning on your own, learn in a group and if you are more comfortable on your own, learn on your own! It’s hardly rocket science…….

So much for the simple stuff.

But there are other things to consider too, such as the fact that too much focus might be counter-productive for your training. Having all the trainer’s attention on you all the time gives you no time to reflect and absorb what you’re learning; sure, you might make spectacularly fast progress during the session but if you’ve not really taking it in, it’ll just leak away when you leave and that progress won’t translate into the ‘real world’. That’s why I make a point, when I’m doing one-on-one training to take time to lighten the load, or perhaps look at different aspects of making presentations. It gives people time to absorb and thereby really learn what we’re working on.

What’s more, my experience is that much of the basics of things like breathing and so on can be learned in general terms at least as well in small groups as individually. People can only learn so fast, so there’s no point in giving them more attention than they need – it’s a sledgehammer to crack a nut.  In short (for the basics at least) you can get the benefit of cheaper training but without the commensurate loss in productivity…

Of course, you can hide a lack of progress in a group more easily than you can on your own, but any half-way decent presentation skills trainer can spot that and stop it easily enough. What’s more, groups mean that you can often feel less inhibited – allowing faster progress than you would on your own.

An example might make things more clear here.

One of the things I work hard on with my clients is often helping them to breathe in a way that makes their voices sound more assure and, because of the way hormones respond to how you breathe, makes them less likely to be overly anxious. Breathing exercises like this are often best done on your back for the first few times. Doing things like this – that feel downright odd if you’re not used to them – can feel intimidating on your own, whereas being part of a group of (say) eight other people help this can be a bit more natural…. although never quite completely natural, I admit!

There’s also the issue of learning from each other.

It’s one thing for an ‘expert’ to tell you something that’ll help your presentation style, perhaps by a considerable amount, but quite another for you to see it demonstrated by watching someone else’s style change for the better in front of you. Seeing it happen makes it more ‘real’ than simply being told it.

I’ve seen it happen time and time again – particularly with sceptics! – that the penny finally drops only when they see it happening for real.

Everything I’ve said so far, of course, has one thing in common – the assumption that you’re training as part of a small group. In my head, small is up to about eight people. After that I find that, even with the best will in the world, I can’t always spot everything I’d want to spot, for all the clients…. I’m constantly surprised and sceptical of trainers who pack out rooms with 150 people and say they’re going to make them great presenters. No they aren’t. What they’re going to make is a lot of money.

A lecture is different from training!

At that point, save your money. Or better yet, use some of it to buy me a beer.

Not a tip, not a comment… just an urging to any of you who read this, to watch this (online) presentation on The Girl Effect.

If it works for you, act on it.

Well, it’s big news at the moment: as we head into elections in the UK, Gordon Brown PM, was caught saying what he ‘really thought’ about someone he’d just been speaking to – thinking he was amongst friends, but forgetting that his radio mic was not only on, but live (and attached to a recording device).

Nice one, Gordon? Errmm… No.

Rule number one for using mics during presentations: if it’s plugged in, it’s dangerous.

By co-incidence I’d been attending a presentation this morning by a professional sales trainer who was also using a radio mic. As she got excited by her presentation, she became more animated and started to move towards and amongst the audience. That might have been fine, except for the fact that to do this she (repeatedly!) walked in front of a speaker. The feedback was unpleasant.

The sound guys were good, but there wasn’t much they could do, especially as she just stood there.

Rule number two of using a mic in a presentation: if it’s plugged in it’s dangerous.

Later in the same session, one of the presenters rushed to get back into place, a little panicked after leaving the stage, and the wire connecting the microphone to the battery- pack caught on something, yanking the plug out and stopping her being heard until she was re-connected…

Rule number three of using a mic in a presentation: if it’s unplugged it’s dangerous!

C’mon folks – it’s not rocket science. You wouldn’t go skiing without making sure you knew how to fasten your ski boots, would you? So why start to make a presentation without knowing how your microphone works?

You wouldn’t go rock climbing without checking your ropes, would you? No? So why do people go onstage without checking their microphones?

You wouldn’t …. You get the idea!

If a venue’s big enough to need a microphone (and just because you’re offered one doesn’t mean you need to use it!) it’s big enough to have someone there who knows how to use it. Talk to them. They’re there for a reason – and the reason is that they’re experts in what they do.

Just as you’re an expert in whatever it is you’re talking about, so they’re experts in using the equipment.

They should be your new best friends.

Gordon – with friends like yours, who needs enemies?

Let’s take a quote from the children’s classic Alice In Wonderland….

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …so long as I get somewhere.
The Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.

Let’s translate that…

Would be presenter: Would you tell me, please, what I should put in to my presentation here?
Would be adviser: That depends a good deal on what you want your presentation to achieve
Would be presenter: I don’t much care what the presentation achieves.
Would be adviser: Then it doesn’t much matter what you put into your presentation.
Would be presenter: …so long as it achieves something
Would be advisor: Oh, you’re sure to achieve something, so long as you keep talking long enough.

Sadly tat last bit isn’t true. And even if it was, it wouldn’t work because the audience would stop listening long before then!

I can’t remember howwwww many times I’ve said this: if you don’t know exactly what your presentation is trying to achieve, how will you know if you’ve achieved it?!? How will you even know how you should achieve it?

Scattered around the web are lots of places suggesting you can/should use the b or w keys to turn you screen black or white when you’re presenting, at times when you want your audience to focus on you. Being slightly tongue in cheek, I’m amazed that there’s anyone left who doesn’t know this tip!

To be honest though, the sudden cutting in and out of black that this gives you is a bit shocking – far better to fade in. Besides, using the b/w keys means you have to be standing right next to your laptop and that’s very limiting… To avoid the problem you need simply to slip a black screen into your slides every now and again – at appropriate moments. My ‘darkest’ slide deck contains fully almost a quarter dark slides!

I know that’s unusual, but it’s the best way (I think!) to work on that particular topic. Certainly there are topics I’ve made presentations about when I’ve never wanted a blank slide, but they’re few and far between. It’s a matter of style and taste, obviously, but if nothing else, having the courage to go to a blank slide does wonders for how cool your audience will think you are!

So far so good, though it doesn’t allow you to go to black on a whim, or when someone asks a question. Your solutions at that point seem to me (I’m sure I’m going to miss things here, so chip in!) either to use a remote control to get a black effect from the projector or do something more subtle with your slide deck.

I’m not particularly in favour of the former idea, basically as it involves carrying two remote controls around – one for the projector and one for your laptop. In the heat of the moment I know what would happen to me! Besides, having the second remote in your pocket is going to look bad!

The subtle approach is simple to have a black slide at the end of your slide deck and to know its number. If you need to go to a black slide, simply use your remote to skip to that slide. For goodness’ sake though, check what slide your presentation is currently showing, so that you can come back to it when you need.

Rant mode on….

What is it about the (free) powerpoint templates that makes them so bad? Do (probably otherwise good) designers sit there and think to themselves “I’m going to give this one away, so I’ll deliberately make it suck!”?

Okay, maybe I’m over-reacting, but time and time again I find that people come to us with presentations they’ve “written” using a free template they downloaded and we pretty much have to start over from the beginning. To be honest, if we were getting paid to design the slides that wouldn’t be so bad, but we’re supposed to be helping people learn how to to use the slides in their presentation.

I’ve written (ranted?) elsewhere about the vagaries of templates and the fact that they seem to be written to show off the technical abilities of the designer rather than show of the content of the presentation, but one I’ve seen recently takes the biscuit. Not only does it have a ‘busy’ background, in the same colour as the foreground, but it takes that one stage further and has a moooooooooving background.

Fascinating.

Actually, to be honest, it’s quite clever and I had to get hold of it to look at how they’d done it… but that’s the point – I was interested in the background, not the content.

Our homepage has our take on this. We try and think of the presentation as the container, not the content. Think of a whisky glass if you like – it can be a thing of beauty in its own right, sure, but the real reason for the glass is to get the whisky to your mouth. (If you don’t like whisky, think wine-glass or coke-tin for all I care! )

Too many templates have the equivalent of a very pretty lid on the whisky glass – it looks fantastic but it gets in the way of the pleasure of drinking the whisky.

Besides, why would you want a template that looked like everyone else…?

As a hobby, I write short stories for children. My kids love them, and so do my friends and relatives kids. I’m not suggesting that makes me the next JKRowling but it’s a nice thing to be thought of as a “Story Teller” You’d not believe the adventures of Sophie’s Dragon… or the sound effects of dragon wings!

A while ago I put one of my favourite stories onto a site for critique and got the standard response of “Don’t tell; show!“. I soon learned that this was pretty much the only advice given on the site and my suspicion is that it was once given to someone by a ‘real’ or professional writer/critic and has become part of the mythos of the site, if you see what I mean….

It struck me, however, that for presentations as well as stories, this is a fine bit of advice!

Don’t tell me what you think… or what will happen if… or what you found when you… or what it’s like in the country of…. show me. Forget the words, forget the bullet-points; abandon the lists; throw out the dry stuff.

If you want to connect with me, to change me, to have an effect, to make me remember, show me something.

Don’t tell me the Namib desert is dry – show me a picture of the sands.
Don’t tell me the cash-flow forcast is bad – show me a graph
Don’t tell me various ways you got funding – show me a pie chart
Don’t tell me how fast the new computer is – show me a comparison (live if you can!)

By all means have the necessary data available to back up your claims (in a written document to leave behind, perhaps) but please, please please, don’t force me to listen to it verbatim (or worse yet, read it from slides as you read it to me!).

May I give you a personal example?

My younger daughter is off to Namibia for three weeks in the summer and one of the ways she’s raising funding is by giving talks to groups like Round Table and Rotary Clubs. One of the things she wanted to explain was where Namibia is. It’s on the south-west coast of Africa, adjacent to South African. Big deal. However, a satallite image of the continent, slowly re-orientating and zooming in to show the location of the country is more exciting, more interesting and provides not only a strong feel for the location but also it’s world-wide context.

Another example… she wants to talk about the roles in the team while they’re there

In most circles, that would be a bullet-point list. For my daughter it’s a series of carefully edited images, building into a clever montage showing a fork, sergeant stripes, a compass, a pile of coins and a walking boot. (I’m not showing the result here because it won’t work without the subtle build animation for the slide, sorry!)

Imagine the difference!

Perhaps these aren’t the bet example in the world to use (but they’re important in our household right now, so tough! ) but remember the advice of authors: don’t tell, show!

I’ve travelled a lot by train recently. Inevitably on these journeys I end up over-hearing other people on their phones. Sometimes this is because they shout so loudly down them that I’m not convinced the phone is actually necessary at all – for all I can tell the person involved is actually audible back in their office, directly!

Something struck me, however, as I listened to people calling later and later at night: I’m convinced it wasn’t because they were simply getting more and more tired but rather because more and more of them were calling an empty office, staffed only by an ansa-phone machine.

Instantly they realised this, their whole approach to talking changed.

Their voices shifted from interesting, animated, personable and varied to a terrible monotone. Obviously the machine on the far end of the phoneline won’t care – but don’t forget that it’s not a machine that listens to these messages ultimately… it’s a person. (It might be worthwhile thinking about that as you leave messages with prospective employers etc… ).

What this reminded me of, as I sat there, stupified by the effects of three days in London, was that unless people are talking to people, they’re boring – perhaps they become less animated/interesting in the belief that such a voice will be more clear and easy to understand, I don’t know. (If that’s the case, call me, I can help you!) Perhaps it’s just a reflexive thing as we talk to ourselves… again I don’t know.

What I do know, however, is that if you don’t establish a relationship with the audience at your presentation you’ll believe yourself to be speaking to no one, or to a machine and if that happens you may well find yourself sounding more and more boring. Certainly it would explain the many, many speakers I’ve heard who were so boring I wanted to die (and the few who were so boring I wanted them to die! ). As they failed to establish any personal relationships for their presentation they fell back on their “ansa-phone voice”.

Please, please, please… as you make your presentations, remember not to talk at me, but talk to me!

It’s good advice about many things, including presentations.

I actually heard it while at the gym, on a cross-trainer with the earphones plugged into some morning TV… and the advice was actually about sex – but so what, it works for presentations, too!

In the context of presentations, I’m taking it like this: your audience shouldn’t be in the same place at the end of your presentation as they are at the start of it. If they are, you’ve wasted your time and theirs. The former is a shame and a waste, the other just rude!

Of course, to make that move happen you need to have decent presentation skills, obviously – but before you get a chance to use any of those you need to have a very clear objective. You need to know what the change is that you’re aspiring to make. After all, if you don’t know what a successful presentation looks like, how are you going to make one?!

So, before you do anything else – before you you sit down to write your presentation, before you turn on your computer, before you even pick up your pen – ask yourself one simple question: by the end of the presentation, what do I need to have changed? (Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I’d add that if it takes more than one short sentence to do this, you’re too vague and you don’t really know what you’re trying to achieve in your presentation… )

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’ve managed to change in your presentations: