Archive for 2008

No.

Anyone can be a great presenter. Presenting well is not a rare talent, like playing concert-level violin, or shooting 6 under par on a golf course. Presenting well is a skill that anyone can learn with a little focus; it’s more like making tasty Toll House Chocolate Chip cookies, if you follow the recipe and pay attention, you will create a satisfying final product.

If you have ever had a single interesting conversation with one other person, then you already have all of the technical skills you need to be an excellent presenter. You already know how to talk, engage and be understood. So for most people, when learning how to become a great presenter, they do not have to learn a new skill set such as when learning how to play polo where you have to learn out to ride a horse, swing a mallet, aim a ball through a goal, etc.

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No, chances are you don’t need a deeper voice or a better voice than the one you naturally speak with.

Most people hate the sound of their own voice. If you video record or audio record your voice during a rehearsal and then listen to it, chances are you won’t like yours either. Here’s why: when you listen to your voice coming out of a TV or a speaker, you are hearing your voice in a non-distorted manner; this is how everyone else hears your voice on a daily basis.

But that’s not how we normally hear our own voice. All day long we hear our own voice distorted through the bones in our own skull from both inside and outside. So when we hear our voice coming from just a speaker and not from within our head, we are all of a sudden not hearing the distortion. The result? It sounds so different to us that it is disorienting and we don’t like it. They we think we need to change our voice.
Not so fast!

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Everyone says the occasional “uh” and “um.” Don’t beat yourself up if you do. Bill O’Reilly and Martha Stewart both say “uh” and “um” all of the time and they both make tens of millions of dollars a year by speaking! So let’s put your problem in perspective. Martha and Bill are still successful because they have messages that audiences find interesting. Your biggest problem is always making sure you have something interesting to say, not whether you have too many “uhs” and “ums.”

However, all things considered, the few “ums” and “uhs” you have cluttering your speech, the better. The first thing you have to do is actually determine if you have the problem. In my experience, executives and sales people who think they have a problem with too many uhs and ums rarely do. Those who think they don’t have a problem often do.

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This is one of the most common fears that presenters voice to me. You are likely feeling vulnerable when someone, especially a boss or important client or prospect asks you a question and you can’t answer it. I sympathize with you; really, I do. But it is important to keep your potential problems in perspective.

Every time I speak to a large audience of 100, 500 or more, I ask the following question, “How many of you remember a time when you saw a presenter who couldn’t answer a question and it was embarrassing for the presenter?” Sure enough, 10 or 20% of the hands go up. So yes, this is real and legitimate concern.

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This is a common situation. You’ve been told you have 30 minutes to make your presentation to the board on what your department has been doing for the last quarter and why you deserve to continue to receive funding. But at the last minute, the organizer whispers in your ear, “We’re running behind schedule. You need to speak for no more than 15 minutes.”
“Egads!”

What do you do now? You have 30 minutes worth of material. You’ve rehearsed it, just as you know you should do, and you got the time down to exactly 30 minutes. This is unfair! This can’t be happening! You played by the rules, why can’t everyone else stick to the rules?
Relax. You will get through this.

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Don’t tell anyone!
Don’t show anyone!
It really does come down to following those two principles.

Everyone makes mistakes when they present. We forget a point, go out of order, and talk about a slide that is two slides away instead of the one that is coming up next. Everyone makes mistakes. But not everyone reacts to their mistakes the same way.

The average presenter will literally say “I’m sorry” in front of people and have a look of extreme sheepishness crosses his or her face. But here’s the fundamental insight:

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There really is no such thing as a formal presentation or an informal presentation—from the perspective of our audience. There are really only two kinds of presentations in the entire world:
Good ones.
And bad ones.
Really. That’s it.

Think about when you are in listening to someone speak or present in front of you. Are you thinking, “Wow, I sure am glad this presenter is being formal and grabbing a lectern and standing in front of the room?”
Of course not.

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Don’t do it! It doesn’t work. Imagine you are going on a date if you are single, or try to remember a time when you were single going out on a date. How impressive would it have been at the beginning of the evening if your date said, “I’m sorry but this is going to be a really lousy date because I’m not good at this sort of thing, and I didn’t get enough sleep last night, and my mom picked out this ugly shirt…?”

Would that have made the date go better, or would it have just soured things from the start?

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You will encounter some experts who advise you to stand still with both feet planted firmly, or to grab the lectern with both hands so that you don’t appear shaky. This is terrible advice!

You are normally better off if you can walk around when you are presenting if you are speaking to a group from 5 to 5000. Obviously, if you are presenting to just one or two people and everyone is seated, you can just stay seated. But if you are standing, then I recommend that you move around the room.

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Look at individual audience members, one at a time. This will make you appear to be a comfortable, confident, authoritative and a credible presenter—even if you are scared to death inside.

The following are things you should NOT look at when you are presenting:
•    The tops of people’s heads
•    The clock
•    The floor
•    Your PowerPoint Slides
•    Your fully-written script

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This is one of the most common questions that comes up in every training I conduct. “I don’t know what to do with my hands!” people complain to me every week.

The thing to do with your hands is what you do all day long with your hands when you are talking to one person—you move your hands. Somewhere, long ago, it was written that a professional presenter should not move his or her hands when speaking. This is utter nonsense!
If you attempt to stop moving your hands when you speak in front of one or more people, you set off the following negative chain reaction:
1.    Your body looks literally stiff.
2.    You look uncomfortable.
3.    Your arms stiffen.
4.    Your vocal chords stiffen.
5.    You speak in a lower volume.
6.    You speak more monotone.
7.    You seem more boring.
Don’t do it!

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Some experts advise holding all questions until the end. Others advise answering every single question no matter how irrelevant; even if that means you never get to your main points. Neither approach works.

One of the first things you will have to grasp if you want to be a foolproof presenter is that it is not YOUR presentation. The presentation belongs to your audience. This is a learning experience for them, not for you.

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No.  I plead with you; please do not try to read your presentation.

You may be tempted to think something like this, “This presentation is really important and I want to get it just right. I don’t want to screw up. It is an important audience and I’m going to be nervous and I’m afraid I might forget something. I haven’t had time to rehearse the presentation or memorize it, so if I read it, I won’t forget anything or make any mistakes. Besides, I’ve been reading my whole life, how hard could it be?”

I can sympathize with your thinking, but there are some serious flaws with the reasoning here. Reading a speech is actually an extraordinarily difficult thing to do well—it’s not for amateurs. While it is true that reading is a basic skill mastered by most first graders, reading a speech in front of a roomful of people is extremely difficult and is mastered by very few.

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Yes, you should rehearse. From a presentation coach’s perspective, the following 25 words are the dumbest phrase in the English language:
“I don’t want to rehearse because I don’t want to seem canned. I want to seem spontaneous and fresh so I’ll be better winging it.”
Ugh!!!

It is true that if you try to memorize your speech during rehearsal, you will cause problems and set yourself up for failure (exceptions for any reader who is a trained Broadway actor). But rehearsing your speech should never be about memorizing your words. If you don’t rehearse, you are throwing out your rough draft of your presentation to your audience. And rough drafts of most things are, well, rough.

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This goes right up there with “never move  your hands when speaking” when it comes to bad presentation advice. If you don’t believe me, take this little test:
Quick: How many emergency exit doors are there on a 737 airplane? Any time I ask this to a group of presentation trainees, I get answers ranging from 2 to 12. Everyone has a different answer. My point is that anyone who travels has been told exactly how many exit doors there are dozens or even hundreds of times and yet we still don’t remember (confession: I have no idea how many exit doors there are) We don’t remember how many doors there are on the plane because when we are being presented with this information it is done in such a boring and perfunctory manner, typically right after we are being told how to fasten a seat belt, that we aren’t listening, therefore we don’t remember—no matter how many times we hear it.

And yet, we all have some presentations permanently etched into our memory, even though the presenter said something once, but in a memorable way. I can still remember my 5th Grade teacher, Mrs. Evans, telling me, “young man, you are going to have to hold this door for me, whether you like it or not.”  Yet she only said it once, yet it stuck because it was frightening!
Here is the fundamental insight: it doesn’t matter if you say something 3 times or 300 times. If you say it in a boring and unmemorable manner, no one will ever remember it. If you say something once in a memorable, visual, emotional, specific, relevant way, people will remember what you said minutes, hours, days, even years later.
The goal of telling them what you’re going to tell them, telling them, and then telling them what you told them is to get your audience to remember your messages. This is an excellent goal and I applaud you for focusing on this particular objective. But at the tactical level, this method isn’t very effective. A far more effective technique is to package your messages with interesting and memorable stories, case studies and examples and to deliver them with passion and feeling.
There is one scenario when it does make sense to do the tell them what you are going to say, tell em, tell ‘em what you told’ em technique. This is when you are in a classroom teaching setting and all of your students are writing down detailed notes in preparation for a test on the subject matter later. In this case, your organization will make it easier for the note taker to see the outline and structure when reading the notes later.
But your new business prospect is not going to write down notes on your pitch presentation—and if he/she does, it won’t be studied later. Your boss isn’t going to write down notes of what you say at the Monday morning staff meeting. Sales people listening to you at the annual sales meeting will not write down what you say. You have to realize that most people in the world in non-academic settings are not going to be writing down everything you say and study it later. Therefore there is a lot more pressure on you to present your information in a way that is easily digestible, understandable and memorable for your audience.
So spend less time focusing on telegraphing the outline of your presentation to your audience and spend more time simply being interesting.

Yes. It’s often much better than using overly complicated PowerPoint slides. These low-tech tools are especially effective when you are presenting to groups smaller than 50 where everyone can see you clearly.

The beauty of using a white board or even an old-fashioned chalk board is that you can only draw one line or one arrow or one thing at a time. This slows you down, which is good because your audience can only focus on one thing at a time. If you are drawing a diagram or chart, live, in front of your audience, it forces you to simplify and to focus on just one or two variables at a time. This makes it much easier for your audience to focus and grasp what you are talking about. Your audience can look at the one thing you are drawing at that moment.

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There are 20,465 books on PowerPoint for sale on Amazon, which means that there are more than 4 million pages of content you could read to learn about how to give an effective PowerPoint presentation! You don’t have to read them all. In fact, if you just follow the 10 tips below, you will consistently be the most effective PowerPoint presenter anyone in your audience has ever seen.

1.    Create two separate PowerPoint slides, one for projecting on a screen, one to email audience members in advance and to hand out after your presentation. Your email/print PowerPoint slides can be jammed packed with words, numbers, text, data points—make it 200 pages if you like—the more the merrier.)

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