What is the one big secret most people never learn about presenting?
Thursday, August 28th, 2008Here it is: You can present to an audience and have perfect eye contact, wear a beautifully tailored suit, have perfect gestures, speak with perfect volume and pitch, never say a single “uh” or “um” and still…never communicate a thing! The sad reality is that it’s very hard to get people listening to you to remember anything you say. The following is one of very few ironclad axioms you need to learn about presenting: people will not remember anything you say if it is said in a straight forward, abstract or listing manner.
If you want somebody to remember an important message you have for them, you need to give an example, tell a story, reveal a case study, and perhaps draw a picture or show a photo. Then and only then do you have even a good chance of an audience member remembering something you have said.
This concept is massively misunderstood by most presenters in the world. Why? Because our role models for presenters are teachers and professors. And most teachers and presenters teach by presenting lots and lots of facts, bullet points, and numbers. But here is the rub; teachers have a very different relationship with their audience than you do with a typical business or adult non-academic audience.
If I am your freshman college biology teacher, I have great power over your life. I can be a boring, data-dumping, droning professor, and guess what, you have to take it. You are a highly motivated audience member. Why? Because I have power over your life. I have the authority to test you in two weeks based on what I am saying in class today. If you fail the test then you flunk the class. Now you can’t go to medical school or graduate school. You lose your financial aid. Your parents stop supporting you. No more parties to go to. Instead, now you have to go flip hamburgers for minimum wage and live in a beat-up trailer on the wrong side of town. Your life is over and I have ruined it.
So you see how I, as your college professor, can motivate you. You listen to every word I say. You write detailed notes. You study the notes. You do additional reading. I might be the most boring professor on campus, but you will still learn a lot of biology. But in this case, you are learning not because of how I presented but in spite of how I presented.
So if you are going to make a presentation, it’s great to have the command position of authority that professors have. But there’s a problem. Back in the real world, we don’t have this authority over our audiences. We can’t fire our sales prospects if they don’t write down everything we say. We can’t kick a business partner out of our classroom for not paying attention because we don’t have a classroom. In theory, if you are the CEO of a company you have the power to fire any employee who doesn’t listen to you, write everything down and memorize what you’ve said. But I’ve asked hundreds of CEOS if they have every fired an employee for this and no one has ever said yes.
So it turns out that the biggest role model most of us have as presenters, our teachers, are usually the worst role models we could possibly have, because of the different power relationships we have with our audience members versus the teacher-student relationship. Although, I’d be willing to bet that if you had to name your favorite teacher from high school or college, you would likely pick someone who spoke with passion, gave real world examples and occasionally told stories.
So how do I know that most adult audiences don’t remember facts and message points when delivered to them in a straight forward manner? I test audiences around the world several times a week. When I am conducting a typical 8-hour presentation training session with a group, I will, early in the day, tell them 6 industries I work in, 6 types of clients I work with, and 6 TV networks I’ve appeared on. An hour or two later in the day, I will call on one of the trainees to name all 18 points. This usually results in a nervous chuckle followed by a feeble attempt to name 2 or 3, with one or two usually being wrong. No one ever gets more than 5 right. Clearly, I have not communicated. In my case, it was by design, to make a point. But I remind my audience that I had perfect speaking conditions—everyone had a front row seat, I made sure they had fresh coffee, I was even miked for louder volume—and I’m a professional keynote speaker! And yet I still failed.
And yet, every trainee remembers in vivid detail my story about being fired by a member of congress for getting bad newspaper quotes, that I had packed my swim trunks to
This is a huge breakthrough moment for a lot of presenters. Audiences remember stories and they remember the messages behind stories. Audiences do not remember facts and data delivered in isolation. And no, it doesn’t help if you list the facts on a PowerPoint slide so that they can see the facts while you are reading them. (However, it is fine to give handouts with lists of fact that people can take with them)
I hope you are skeptical about what I am saying here. In fact I don’t want you to blindly take my word for it. I want you to challenge me. But I also want you to challenge the assumptions you have been going by for years when you make a presentation. Most of us start a presentation by saying “good morning” and then going into a long laundry list of facts or staring at bullet points on a PowerPoint, not because we have a single shred of evidence that this is an effective way to communicate. Instead, we do this out of habit because that’s the way we’ve always done it and that’s the way we’ve seen other people do it. But we don’t really have evidence that it “works.”
So don’t take my word for it. Deliver your presentation the old fashion way of dumping lots of data and then test your audiences. I might be lying to you, but your audience doesn’t have that ability. If they didn’t remember your facts and messages, that means you failed and your system doesn’t work.
If you follow this principle, it means that most of the things teachers do in a classroom setting don’t work for adults in the real world either. For example, starting your presentation to a business audience by listing the top 12 points you plan on covering over the next 30 minutes is a waste of time, because your audience isn’t writing down your outline. All you are doing is giving them a chance to daydream because they know you will cover these points later.
Instead, you need to cover one point at a time because your audience is only listening to you one point at a time. Make your point, give evidence, give, facts, give numbers, and give stories, all to buttress that one point. Then and only then should you try to go to the next point.
Once you realize that delivering information in a straightforward, concise, linear fashion doesn’t really work in presentations (even though a lot of people claim that is what they want in a speaker) it will change everything about how you prepare and deliver presentations for the rest of your life.