Presentation skills ~ tellingpeople : hints, tips and articles ~ to help the impact you make

Daughters and airplanes

Two miles is a long way under certain circumstances. Okay, it’s a short walk and and even shorter run, but it’s a hell of a long way to jump out of an airplane.

It’s an even longer way to look upwards if you’re the one on the ground and it’s your daughter who’s doing the jumping. God, I felt old. I think I forgave her everything she’d ever done as a teenager at that point.

Still, more money raised for Amnesty, so it might have been worth the ulcers.

More relevant - in terms of this blog - is some of the advice she received and one of the articles written in ‘Skydive Starter’ magazine - some of the techniques advocated for dealing with the fear of jumping are pretty much the same as I use for dealing with the fear of presenting and public speaking.

Let’s face it, if they work when you’re about to freefall for the first time, they’ll probably work when you’re standing in front of an audience. I’ll deal with the breathing another time (I’ve mentioned it before, too!) but let me just spend a moment or two looking at visualisation. It’s a technique where you use your imagination to go through the motions of what you want to be doing, but without do it (which is useful for things such as presenting when you can’t get as much practice-time in front of an audience as you might need). But it’s not just about “imagining it working”.

The key elements to the technique are to be disciplined and structured about it - go through things carefully and in detail. Add just one element of the visualisation at a time… carefully.

Start with imagining exactly what you will/want to see. Be specific, be detailed. Once you’ve got that, add what you can hear. Again, be detailed - but don’t do it until the visual stuff is under control. Then add anything you can smell. Finally add how you feel and what you feel. Things like warmth, a draft from a window you’ve already imagined you can see and the feel of you shoes would be examples of that.

It’s a method that easier to learn face-to-face than when you’re just reading it over a coffee break in your office, but it’s worth having a go - and once you’ve got the basic idea, it’s something you can even try sitting at your computer…..

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Don’t practice…

….rehearse instead.

The two things are very different: certainly practicing is part of rehearsing but it’s only a part.

Practicing - doing it over and over and over (and over!) to get the technical bits sorted out. Rehearsing - doing it differently and trying different things and ways of doing things to get the whole thing sorted out.

Think of it as what a concert pianist does with the physically tricky bits of the Chopin Prelude they’re about to perform. But even a pianist doesn’t just mindlessly go over the whole piece…. they find the bits they struggle with and do just those bits.

Not only that, but they don’t just bash away at the tricky few bars: instead they disect them, look at them in even more detail and try them slower (very much slower!); they’ll also try different fingering and so on, experimenting until they know how to make it work. Then they do the simple repetative practicing bit, starting very slowly and getting a little bit faster each time they get it perfectly right.

If they get it wrong, they go back and start slower again.

Or try thinking of how a company of actors prepares a play for performance. They don’t just go through the play again and agian. They don’t even go through individual scenes! Instead they’ll spend hours looking and and ‘playing with’ individual lines. It’s not unknown for a company to spend more of it’s rehearsal time talking through and experimenting with a play than actually practicing it! (Trust me, I’ve been there! )

But it’s not wasted time (usually!). It’s time like this, spent looking at what the play is actually about and what the author was trying to say which turns a simply competent performance into a great performance.

How much time to presenters spend in preparation, before they start to draft their presentation? In my experience, not enough, generally. Instead they rush to the stage and start trying to run through their lines. But until they know what their play, their presentation, is about, the lines stay dead. They might be delivered with all the technical competence in the world but if they don’t know what the play’s about, they’re just words.

Practice leads to knowing your material and being able to deliver it better. Just rehearsing leads to being over-familiar with your material (you run the risk of just reciting what you’ve more-or-less memorised) and poor delivery.

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2008 04 02 simon Articles
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Questions - or not

Someone who recently introduced me at a presentation I was making checked with me - very courteously - whether I wanted to take questions as we went along or at the end. Taking questions is a point that this blog posting handles rather briefly: as does this post: and this one…. and, well never mind - you get the idea. I’ve even blogged about it myself here.

Referring back to my original question (during or after) I’m going to rather over-state my case for the sake of making a point…

I strongly feel that any questions your audience might have should come along afterwards, not during. This is because your presentation should be so clearly and tightly structured that there’s no need (and no chance for) people to ask you any questions as you go along.

Questions in the middle of your presentation come from loose ends. They come from you having started a train of thought running in the head of someone in your audience and then not having dealt with it. If you’ve really, really understood what your audience wants to know, your presentation should be a seamless move from where-they-start to where-they-want-to be.

Questions at the end tend to be along the lines of your audience taking what you’ve given them and then applying it to other circumstances, places and times; typically they’ll be applying them to their own circumstances. If they’re doing that, it’s good in a big way. It shows that you’ve sold your concept to them and they’re trying it on for size. That’s fine - you should be able to deal with that kind of thing - if you can’t you have to ask yourself hard questions about what you’ve just told them!

I told someone recently who was showing me his Powerpoint slides (and asking for feedback with the question “Does it hold together?”) something quite vicious (kind of!):

firstly - if you have to ask, the answer is probably “no”
secondly - when you’ve finished talking about a slide (any slide) there should be an obvious “what next” question in your audience’s head. They should be thinking “So….?”. Your next slide should start with that question.

Okay, that’s a bit literal - don’t try to make that happen unreasonably; but it does give you a way to see how well your slides (and more importantly the whole of your presentation) holds together. Use the idea as a tool to look critically at what you’re saying.

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2008 03 29 simon Articles
Key posts
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America the Brave…

I sat down this morning to do some research on speaking styles with reference to the American Presidential election campaign. I was particulalry interested in the Democratic race for the nomination (because there’s nothing interesting about the Republican non-race).

I found this: pretty much job done, in many ways.

Essentially, the article discusses in a little detail the fact that Obama’s at a bit of an advantage because his style of public speaking is better than Clinton’s. (I’m inclined to agree - Clinton can sound badly like a fish-wife if she’s not careful.) Ironic, isn’t it, that she’s the wife of one of the best public speaker the modern world has seen!

Clinton’s response? Far from trying to improve her style, she’s tried (hard) to move beyond issues of style at all, already accepting, implicitly, that it’s a battle she’s lost. But it won’t do. It’s not working. People aren’t always able to hear the content of her speeches because the style of delivery can rub them up the wrong way.

And closer to home (this blog is written by a presentation skills trainer in the UK) look at the relative popularity of Blair and Brown. One of them was a natural orator, one of them not so. You may or may not like or approve of either of them (or what they say) but the statistics are on my side!

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2008 03 26 simon Articles
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So scared it hurts

I recently did a session for an organisation whose brief was to help the voluntary sector in our part of the country become more professional and organised. The day was, obviously, about making a presentation to potential funders and had a “Dragon’s Den” format for the afternoon.

Take-up wasn’t good, sadly. They’d organised the day on the grounds that this was what people wanted and needed, because they were anxious about it - because pitching for funding is a critical part of any project. It turned out that people were so anxious about being bad at public speaking they were too anxious to even try it in a training environment. What’s more, people tended to come alone, rather than in pairs - the benefit of moral support being out-weighed by the shame of being seen to be a bad public speaker by a colleague!

So, so sad!

How did it come to this?

Well let’s not get too despondent. The people we’re talking about care very much about what they do - otherwise they’d not be doing it. That’s great: I’d rather work with people who cared than people who wanted to talk for the sake of it. And - at risk of sounding patronising, please forgive me - we’re not talking about professionally trained speakers or high-powered business men or women. We’re talking about real people, with real jobs. Working really hard.

…and if public speaking, making a presentation, isn’t part of their everyday working life they’re not going to have found the time to get a series of successful presentations under their belts. Each and every presentation is going to feel like the first time. And I don’t know about you, but my first time wasn’t good.

So what’s to be done? Well, I’d welcome your ideas! All I can think of is to continue to offer great training that’s not intimidating, that’s not stressful and that is a load of fun.

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2008 03 22 simon Articles
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A picture and a thousand words

A friend of mine runs an art gallery in Liverpool. - she’s called Lydia and she’s lovely. Reading a blog article of hers called “A picture’s worth a thousand words” reminded me that cliches are cliches for a reason - firstly because you need to avoid them when you’re presenting, obviously, but secondly because they’re true.

What’s also true is that we’re visual animals - we take in stuff through our eyes better than most other animals and a huge proportion of our brain is dedicated to handling visual information. So why not combine those two ideas and have a presentation which is (almost) entirely made up of big, bold, visual images?

The tips for picking the images?

iconic - the image needs to encapsulate the idea you’re talking about in the same way a road sign tells you what you need to know in one glance: you don’t need to spend precious seconds when you’re driving concentrating on it.
big - it’s far, far easier to scale an image down than up if you want to keep the quality and in terms of display, size is important.
quality - nothing says that you don’t respect your audience more than crap pictures.
high contrast and bright colours - your data-projector and computer will between them do a good job of mucking about with the colour balance of your pictures so it’s essential you start off with something big and bold, otherwise it’ll just appear flat, boring and perhaps even hard to make out.
legal - make sure, obviously, that you’ve got the rights to use the picture. I shouldn’t have to say this, but it appears I do!
safe - you’d be surprised at what some people can take offence at. What’s natural and reasonable to you won’t be, necessarily, to someone else. (And visa versa, too, so don’t got off thinking they’re prudes!)

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2008 03 17 simon Presentation tips Comments (0) Permalink

Presentation skills ~ tellingpeople

Don’t practice…

Questions - or not

America the Brave…

A picture and a thousand words

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