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:

No one noticed the mistake of the presenter. But everyone noticed the react in the speaker had to the mistake.
When you combine this blunder with the probability that the average speaker is unemotional, bland and boring through the rest of the speech, then you end of with the situation where the only emotional moment in the whole presentation is when the presenter looked and sounded embarrassed. This “moment” now stands out as the most interesting moment of the whole presentation and therefore the most memorable. Disaster!

The foolproof presenter, being human, doesn’t aspire to flawless perfection when delivering presentations. But he/she does have one trick up the sleeve that other presenters don’t have, and that is the knowledge that if you don’t tell audiences you made a mistake, they will likely never figure it out.

Let’s say you go out of order when it comes to delivering points from your presentation. Well “order” is a concept in your brain or on your notes; the audience doesn’t have an order. They don’t have your notes or speech text in front of them. They are just listening to you and trying to understand what you are talking about. So if you realize you’ve gone out of order, just go back to the points you missed without telling anyone.

Let’s say you are in the middle of making a point and suddenly your brain freezes and you can’t remember what to say next. The average presenter will have a look of horror shoot across his face, turn bright red, grimace, apologize to the audience, and then mutter something about having a senior moment. But here is what you do once you are a foolproof presenter in these situations where your mind has gone blank:

Stop. Look at one person in the audience like you just said something so brilliant, he or she needs a moment to think about it. Next, perhaps ask a question of one person or the whole audience to see if they are with you so far. Or, just quietly walk across the room as if to signify a planned, natural transition. Inwardly, you are thinking “crap, I forgot what I was supposed to say. What comes next?” But outwardly, you are projecting serenity, calm, purposefulness, and a focus on your audience.

Trust me; this technique will work for you the vast majority of the time when you blunder. Obviously, if you say something that is glaringly, factually wrong that everyone will notice, I.e., “the moon is only 93 thousand miles away from the Earth” then you should instantly and immediately correct yourself, but without unnecessary self-flagellation.

Every so often, I will start talking about a concept and a story that is supported by a video clip or image that is 2 slides away in my PowerPoint. So when I advance the slide, the wrong slide will come up. But I never panic and I never comment on it. I just calmly advance the PowerPoint to the next slide that I need. Then, I go in reverse when I am ready to go back to the missed point. Then, I have to advance twice to get back to the right place. Guess what, no one ever notices this blunder when I quiz them on it immediately after the presentation. This is because my face never shows distress. My words never utter apologies. My tone never shows concern. I just keep going and the whole mistake becomes so unmemorable that it is forgotten moments later.

So if you make a mistake, don’t panic. You now have the skills to minimize the damage in the eyes of your audience. And if you master the skill of ignoring your weak moments, you will condition your audience to do the same.

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.

There are typically only two things going through your head when you are listening to someone else present to you. It’s either
1.    “Wow, this person is saying something interesting and useful. I’m going to pay attention and tell other people about this.”
Or
2.    “Uh oh, this presenter is really boring. I think I will pretend to pay attention and take notes on my Blackberry which will give me an excuse to check our stock price. Oh, let’s see how the Jet’s did last night. That reminds me, I’ve got to add skim milk to my grocery list, and then there’s…”

Those are the two reactions you as a presenter are likely to get from your audience. Your job is to figure out how to get the first reaction and to stay away from the second reaction.

The challenge for most presenters is they get caught up in these notions of the “formal presentation.” You must realize that the audience doesn’t ever think in these terms, so you should not either. You focus must always be on how you can present your ideas in as interesting and memorable and as conversational manner as possible.

I get very nervous when one of my clients tells me he or she has to give a formal presentation. Typically, what that means is the person takes all of the interesting stories, anecdotes, case studies, humor, pauses, and conversational style that work so well for them when they present one on one and throw it out the window. Then, they replace it by listing or worse, reading, a whole bunch of bullet points from a slide or a piece of paper. To make matters worse, the person projects his or her voice louder to sound more official and monotone—ugh! This is not a “formal” presentation; it is simply a “bad” presentation.

Most presenters confuse setting, length of presentation and audience size for formality. For you the presenter it may feel scarier and therefore, more formal, to speak to a much larger group of people than you are used to. But from any one audience member’s perspective, it’s still the same—they are listening to one person trying to figure out if you are worth listening to or not.

Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are or were very different speakers with different philosophies, but they all belong in the category of great speaker. Why? One reason is that they never let their formal surroundings make themselves sound “formal.” All three are masters of speaking in an informal, conversational manner. They didn’t change their styles just because the venue changed. Whether they were talking to 2 people or 2 million, they still had an informal tone of voice that sounded real, fresh, conversational and interesting—the opposite of the typical business speaker giving a formal speech listing bullet points off of a slide.

So please remember that it doesn’t matter if you are given a strict time limitation, or if you are using PowerPoint or you are speaking to a much larger group of people than normal. Don’t tell yourself you are giving a “formal” presentation. Instead, just focus on how you can speak in a conversational tone of voice and convey your ideas in an interesting and memorable manner. Then, from your audiences perspective, you will be delivering a “good” presentation.

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?

I routinely see entrepreneurs, business people and political candidates start off their presentations by saying things like this:
“Sorry, but I know my presentation is really boring!”
“I’d like to apologize for some of my slides being out of order.”
“Let me get through this tedious stuff and then we can have fun with your questions.”
“I know you won’t be able to see my slides but…”
“Gosh, I’m really scared to be in front of you today.”
“I missed my plane and flew all night so I am really tired….”

These are awful ways to start a presentation. What you are really telling your audience is that you hold them in such low regard you didn’t adequately prepare for them. You are disrespecting them so they should respond in kind, by ignoring you. Is this any way to start a new relationship?

The reality is that you aren’t going to help yourself by making excuses or trying to minimize audience expectations. But here is the more important reality: your audience already has very low expectations for you and every other speaker. Why? Because most presenters are really boring and tedious. Most presenters waste the time of the people they are presenting to. A fairly high percentage of presenters start by making lame excuses or trying to minimize expectations.

You, on the other hand, can really distinguish yourself by being interesting and great from the moment you start presenting. As a presenter, you need to look at things from the standpoint of the audience. As an audience member, chances are you are rooting for the presenter. You want the presenter to do well. You and the presenter have a mutual interest in the presentation going well because if it is awful, you the audience member will suffer. Most audiences in the world are rooting for you the presenter. They want you to do well otherwise they would have figured out some way to avoid being in the room with you when you are talking.

The one big exception is for comedians who have to present in front of a paying audience that is expecting a huge belly laugh every ten seconds or they will be disappointed. That is the hardest audience to please. But most business audiences are pleased if you just don’t bore them to death. So take this reality and accept it. Then use it to your advantage to give you confidence and to set you straight from the very beginning of your presentation. Although you don’t want to openly articulate this, everything you communicate with your words, energy, enthusiasm, and body language should convey “this presentation is going to be freakin’ fantastic, for you and for me!”

You can beat the expectations of your audience very time you speak, not by lowering the expectations, but by exceeding the already low expectations that other presenters have created before you.

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.

Of course, you don’t have to move. You can stand in one spot for your whole presentation and still be a competent presenter, but you run the risk of making yourself seem ordinary and boring if you do stay in one place.

First, let’s address the issue of the lectern. In my view, a lectern should be seen like a set of training wheels, which is not something to be used by anyone over 5 years old.
Why?

Because the second you get behind a lectern it creates a barrier between you and your audience. It obscures 2/3 of your body. Once you are behind the lectern, you will be tempted to lean on it, hold it or hold your notes. This means you have shut down all of your natural hand movements. The result is you tend to be seen as a frozen and stiff machine that doesn’t move, except for the lips.

When you stand behind a lectern, you run the risk of making your audience feel you are insecure. When you get behind a lectern, it’s as if you were hiding behind a wall because you fear an audience is going to turn on you and start throwing rotten vegetables at you!

Why do we get behind lecterns in the first place? Because the person speaking before us did and the person presenting after us did, so it must be the right thing to do, right? Wrong.

As a foolproof presenter, your goal is to distinguish yourself as better, more confident, more comfortable, more conversational, more interesting and more memorable than all other presenters around you. You can’t do that if you follow the pack. I’m not suggesting that you do anything showy or theatrical, like getting down on bended knee during your presentation. But I have found that audiences respond much better to presenters who don’t stay behind a lectern and, instead, move around the room.

Professional public speakers never use lecterns for this vary reason. Even though you might not aspire to become a full-time professional public speaker, there is no reason why you can’t borrow some of the easy techniques they use. It constantly amazes me, but audiences around the world seem genuinely impressed when a speaker can walk around a room or stage and speak at the same time. All it is is walking and talking at the same time, something most of us master at 4 years old!

But here’s why it works for you as a presenter. Most people have a huge fear of presenting and public speaking; they are afraid they will forget what they are going to say and look like a fool. Therefore when they see you walking around the room talking to them without staring at notes or holding on to a lectern, there is a part of them that says “wow, that presenter is brave, I could never do that!”

When you are moving around the room, there are a few guidelines to keep in mind:
1.    Don’t walk consistently from side to side or back to front. If your movement is consistent, you will appear to be pacing and that will make you seem nervous.
2.    Move naturally, which means inconsistently.
3.    Feel free to stop moving at any time.
4.    Move to show you have finished a thought and need a moment to signify a transition.
5.    Move closer to someone when that person asks a question.
6.    Move to different parts of the room to give different people attention.
7.    Occasionally, move close to people, but don’t stand too close for too long.
8.    When you want to make a really important point, stop moving.
9.    Your movement should not include foot tapping or any other nervous, jerky movement.
10.    Mix it up.

Part of the value of movement is that you are gently but forcefully coercing your audience into moving their head and eyes to follow you. If they are moving their heads, they are less likely to fall asleep. Additionally, you are putting your audience on notice, politely, that you might be close to them at any time. This means they had better think twice about checking out their email in front of you. Conversely, if you stay behind the lectern, audience members feel it is safe for them to read email, doddle, or even chat with people next to them and you won’t even notice.
By walking around the room and getting closer to people, you make yourself a much biggerr presence in the room and therefore harder to ignore.

Why else do people get behind lecterns? That’s often where they store notes. As mentioned in (note to editor, let’s reference the chapter where we talk about notes here), you can still place notes on a lectern in a sideways manner, so that you can look at them without standing directly behind the lectern.

Other times people stand behind the lectern because the microphone is attached to it. Make sure you truly need the microphone. I’ve seen presenters talk to a room with ten people in it for ten minutes and they stood behind a lectern with a mic that was 20 feet away from the audience. In this case, you should just walk right up to the ten people and speak; you won’t need a microphone in that setting.

If you are in front of a large audience and you need the microphone, you can normally bend the mic stand to the side so that you can stand next to the lectern rather than directly behind it. Now, your whole body will be visible.

If you are giving a presentation to a large annual sales conference you should always ask for a wireless microphone so that you won’t have to be stuck behind the lectern. You might not get one, but you won’t know unless you ask for one.
Finally, it’s not the end of the world to speak from behind a lectern or to stand in one spot, but if you can do something that you already do every day, walk and talk at the same time, and have the audience associate you with the skills of highly paid professional speakers, why not do it?

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

There are three main categories of eye contact most presenters display.

One. The bottom 5% of speakers stares at their notes, their slides, and their shoes—anything but at their audience. This is the worst thing you can do.

Two. The next 94.9% of speakers do some variation of the “windshield wiper.” They are looking at their audience and going back and forth, perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly. The good news is that they aren’t like those speakers in the bottom five percent. The bad news is that this windshield wiper effect does give any one audience member the feeling that the presenter is speaking directly to him or her. No one audience member ever gets eye contact for more than one second because the speaker is looking at “the group” and not an individual.

Three. The top .1% of speakers use their eyes in a way that is very different from the first two groups. These speakers will pick one specific person and hold eye contact with that person for one full thought. This may only be 5-6 seconds, but it is long enough for the audience member to really feel a personal connection with the speaker. The presenter will do this with as many people as possible in the room. The presenter will not play favorites with friends, or pretty people, or people in the front row. Instead, everyone in the room will get personal eye contact.

When the presenter is doing this, he/she is zeroing in one person at a time and at the same time, zoning out everyone else in the room. This gives the presenter the feeling of having a close, personal intimate conversation with just one other person. This creates a very powerful connection between the audience members and the speaker.

The third option is clearly what you want to strive for. This skill is not hard in the sense of learning how to be a brilliant composer is hard, but it isn’t natural either. It’s natural to look at someone you are speaking to for just a couple of seconds and then break eye contact. It’s natural when standing in front of people to have your eyes dart nervously back and forth across the room. So it will take some practice to master this high level of sustained eye contact.

If you are giving a presentation to only one person in the room, then this rule doesn’t apply. It might freak the person out. But if you are standing and presenting to more than a couple of people, it is a highly effective technique.

This also works for extremely large audiences as well. Let’s say you are speaking to a convention hall of 2000 people, you are on a stage in the spotlight and the audience is in the dark. You can’t even see the faces. Here is what you do. Just pick one spot in the crowd and look right at that spot for a full thought, even though you can’t see anything. The affect on the audience will be just as powerful. The 20 or so people in that general area will all feel like you were speaking directly to them. After 6 seconds or so, then look to another part of the crowd. Continue to mix it up. Don’t look around the room in a clockwork rotation. Instead, look at the front left, then the back left, then the middle of the room. You don’t want to look mechanical or like you are moving in a set pattern.

Your eyes are a very powerful tool. By looking directly at an audience member for 5-6 seconds you will occasionally make someone uncomfortable—that’s OK. Better to make them slightly uncomfortable than to make them so comfortable they fall asleep (which is what most speakers do). Remember, you aren’t being rude because you aren’t singling anyone out and you are giving equal attention to everyone. If you are speaking for 20 minutes to a room of 50 people, that means you can give each person individualized eye contact form you several times during the course of your presentation.

In a subtle way, your eye contact is also conditioning your audience members to be better, more attentive audience members. We have all been in audiences where the presenter was so focused on his or her slides or notes that he would not have noticed if an audience member in the first row fell over, had a heart attack and died on the spot. As audience members, it is only natural that when we feel presenters are ignoring us that we start to daydream and get lost in our own thoughts. But when someone is looking right at us, we feel as though that presenter can tell if we are paying our attention. We as audience members start to focus on the presenter because the direct eye contact from the presenter makes us feel there is a chance he or she might call on us with a question at any time.

The final benefit to holding eye contact longer like this is that even the audience members who aren’t receiving your eye contact will looking at you as seeming much steadier and less jerky than most speakers who have their heads bobbing and weaving around.
There is only so much a presenter can do with his or her content to make it more interesting, but when you couple great contact with great eye contact for your audience, you get a much more powerful affect on everyone in the room.

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!

In theory, it is possible to move your hands too much and to gesticulate so wildly that you distract your audience. But in a quarter of a century in coaching people around the world I have never had a client who moved his or her hands too much. Yet, every week, sometimes every day, I have clients who freeze their hands, or hold pens or grab lecterns to keep their hands from moving.

So let’s focus on what the most likely problem is: when you are nervous, you will probably tense your body up and stop moving your hands. This makes you look nervous to the audience and that’s a problem. We want to look natural, relaxed and confident to our audiences so they can focus on what we are saying, not what we are doing or not doing with our bodies.

The first thing that happens with presenters I am coaching go in front of the video camera for the first time is they stop moving their hands in a natural manner. They will hold their hands in a fig leave position as if they have to go to the bathroom. (We may want to use a cartoon here).

Or they hold their hands behind their back in the military at-ease position and it looks like they are about to be arrested along side OJ Simpson. (Perhaps a cartoon here). Or they hold on to a pen as if they were about to say something so spontaneously brilliant that they might have to write down their own quote. Or they grab a hold of the lectern as if it were a life raft.

All of these things are horrible ideas for you the speaker to do.
Quite often I will video record a presenter who has frozen his hands in the first practice presentation of the day. When we are watching the video, I will ask the trainee what he thinks. He’s often say, “I seem a little flat, boring and stiff.”

Then, I ask, “Have you ever thought about moving your hands a little?”
The trainee responds, “Oh, no TJ. I never move my hands when I speak.”
Of course, while the trainee is saying this sitting down in front of me, he is gesturing with wide sweeps and chops moving both hands and arms! Fortunately, I am secretly taping the trainee moving his hands in this manner.
Next, I will say to the trainee, “how would you like to see someone who could be a role model for you. Someone I think you can relate to, but who moves and sounds much more confident and comfortable than you?”
The trainee says yes and thinks that I am about to show video of Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. Instead, I show video of the trainee himself from moments before when he was sitting down and gesturing forcefully while explaining how he doesn’t gesture.
Then I ask, “Which presenter do you like better?”

This always produces a laugh; more important, it creates a break-through. He much prefers his natural state of speaking. It makes the presenter realize that his natural state of speaking is fine. His only problem is that he “acting” in front of people when he is giving an “official” presentation. He doesn’t need to learn some new theatrical skill to use when presenting in front of people. All he needs to do is to stop acting and to move in a natural state.

This sounds easy, but it still takes practice because we get nervous when we speak in front of people and that’s what makes us freeze our body parts. So when you are speaking to a new group of people for the first time or if you are doing anything that takes you out of your comfort zone, you may need to consciously think while speaking “I am now moving my right hand…now I am moving my left hand…” You have to prime the pump at the beginning of your presentation by forcing your hands to move. This sounds phony and contrived but if you practice it, you will look natural and relaxed.

Other experts will tell you to only move one hand at a time, or to keep one hand in your pocket—this is terrible advice. I find around the world that most audiences respond best to most presenters who talk and move in a normal manner. And most people move both hands when they speak. Yes, there are a few exceptions such as in Japan where it is considered rude to gesture when giving a business presentation. (Always try to find out if there are local customs that supersede your own practices and then follow the local customs) But in general, you will be seen by your audiences as much more confident, authoritative and believable if you move your hands when you present.

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.

Every decision you make as a presenter has to be geared around this question: How is what I am doing helping my audience? This is why I favor, in most circumstances, you letting anyone you are speaking to ask questions to you at any time.

Obviously, if you are speaking to a large crowd of 500 people or more, you cannot stop every 2 seconds to take a question; you will take questions at the end of your presentation. But chances are that during a typical month you have a lot more opportunities to speak to 1, 10 or 20 people at a time. When you are speaking to smaller audiences, you are much better off letting people ask questions at any time.

Average and mediocre presenters ask audiences to hold their questions until the end because of the following assumptions they hold:
1.    Audience questions are interruptions.
2.    The question will interrupt my flow. It might even make me lose my place in my presentation.
3.    The question will disrupt my carefully laid out order.
4.    I will look like an idiot if I can’t answer the question!
5.    I will cover that point later in my presentation.
6.    If I answer the question now, I won’t finish all of the points in my presentation.
7.    I know best what my audience needs to focus on.

The problem with all of these assumptions is that they are all based on the premise that the presentation is a concrete thing that is owned and operated for the benefit of the presenter. Wrong!

If you allow people you are presenting to to ask you questions at anytime, the following good things are generally true:
1.    We now know that at least one person we are speaking to is paying attention to us and is not sleeping, daydreaming, or checking email.
2.    The questioner is trying to process and reflect upon what you are talking about.
3.    The questioner may be really helping us by asking a question that everyone else in the room is thinking.
4.    The questioner may be forcing us to fill in a gap of knowledge or logic in our presentation that everyone else in the room needs in order to understand us.
5.    When you answer the question you now know with 100% certainty that you are covering messages that are of extreme interest to some of your audience.
6.    The questioner has provided the audience with some audio variety because now people get to hear two voices instead of just yours.
7.    The questioner has provided some visual variety because now people in the audience can turn their head and eyes slightly to look at the person asking a question.
8.    The questioner really appreciates you answering the question.
9.    Audience members are impressed that you are willing to share the spotlight with others.
10.    Audience members are impressed that you can think on your feet and don’t mind being interrupted.
11.    If an audience member asks an insightful question, you look good by giving an insightful answer.
12.    If an audience member asks a dumb question, you look classy by answering it patiently (of course the person asking the question doesn’t see it as dumb)
13.     The whole presentation goes from being a potentially boring lecture where you are in control 100% of the time to more of a communal experience where everyone feels a part of a positive outcome.

Most presenters take a very dim view of questions. As mentioned above, there is this attitude of “the questioner is interrupting me.” This is a destructive attitude. Instead, your attitude should be “great, now someone wants to help me make this an even better presentation and is willing to do part of the work.” A foolproof presenter has the same attitude toward questioners that Tom Sawyer had when trying to recruit kids to help him paint his fence.

Once your attitude has switched to viewing questioners as really adding to a collaborative process, your presentation gets easier, not harder. I know it sounds touchy feely to talk about how the whole room is working together, but the presentation really does work better that way.

There are some limits to questions however. If someone persists in asking more than 2 questions or starts to ask a series of irrelevant questions, you can politely say the following “I’d like to give your questions the full attention they deserve. If you could meet right here immediately after the presentation I will go into more detail with you on that. Thanks.” And then move on.

But give your questioners a chance, the odds are they will add to your presentation and make it better. Once you realize that, you will turn what used to be seen as an irritant or distraction to you into your new secret weapon.

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.

Here’s why. When you read a speech the following negative consequences occur.
1.    Your speaking speed becomes consistent which robs your voice of its conversational tones.
2.    Your volume becomes consistent.
3.    You don’t vary your pauses.
4.    You lose eye contact with your audience.
5.    You can’t see what your audience is reacting to positively or negatively.
6.    You become monotone.
7.    Everyone falls asleep.
8.    You communicate nothing.
Are you convinced yet?

When an amateur presenter announces that he or she is planning to read a speech it strikes me as absurd as a lifelong coach potato announcing that he wants to take up exercise so he is going to start by climbing Mt. Everest. Sure some trained experts can reach the top of Everest, but an amateur would die trying.

Network news anchors like Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams can read a presentation from a Teleprompter and make it sound natural not because they were born with this skill. They can do it because they have done it every day for the last quarter of a century and they still practice.
Ronald Reagan was a master at being able to read a speech and make it sound authentic, real and believable. Many people erroneously believe Reagan could do this because of skills he acquired as an actor. But it wasn’t the skills he learned that helped; it was the discipline. Most people don’t realize how much work Reagan put into delivering a major speech like the State of the Union Address.

For starters, Reagan would work intimately with the writing of various drafts with his speech writers over a period of months. Next, he would read the finished speech text out loud for three hours every night for a week in the residency above the Oval Office in the White House. Then, he would spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsals of the speech on the day it was to be delivered. It’s important to remember that he wasn’t doing this to memorize the speech. He was still reading the speech from the Teleprompter.

Reagan put all of this time and effort into the speech preparation because he realized it’s not just the words that count, it’s how you deliver them. Reagan’s goal was to read the words in such a way that you were never conscious or aware of him reading. Instead, you as the audience member could focus on the meaning of his words and get the sense that Reagan really believed his words.

So if you still want to read your speech, be my guest. But are you willing to put in as much rehearsal time as Reagan did?
I didn’t think so.
Reading full texts is difficult, dangerous and unnecessary. Instead, just rely on notes.

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.

Here is a question I ask every one of my clients: “How often would you dictate a letter to an assistant, and then instruct your assistant to send it to all of your clients, your boss, and the media, without spellchecking it, editing, reviewing it, putting it on nice letter head, or getting another set of eyes to review it?”

Clients usually chuckle and say “never.” But then I inform them, “That’s exactly what you are doing if you give a presentation and you haven’t reviewed a video of your presentation. A presentation is NOT the words you’ve created on paper or a computer screen. A presentation is you actually speaking in front of other people.”

Most people are nervous before they give a presentation and yet calm when they send out a letter to clients and prospects. What is the difference? With the letter you had the opportunity to work through several drafts and to get to the point that when you looked at the letter, you are pleased that it is the best it can be and is devoid of major errors before you send it out. That’s why you aren’t nervous about sending letters.

But the same principle applies to presenting. There is no good reason not to go through drafts of your presentation until you get to the point where you like your presentation. Again, I’m not talking about the words of your speech. I’m referring to you actually speaking.

This brings up a point that never ceases to amuse me. Countless how-to books on speaking say things like “if a video camera is available, try to record your speech and then review it.” “If a video camera is available…???” What year are we in, 1910?

You don’t see books on resume writing say “if a computer is available and if you can find a spell-check program, you may wish to check the spelling in your resume before sending it out.” It is equally absurd in this day and age not to use a video recorder to rehearse your presentation.
For starters, your phone probably captures video. Your computer likely has a web cam that will capture your rehearsal. Personally, I never go anywhere without a Flip Digital video recorder, it is no larger than a cell phone, has one button, cost less than dinner for one in Manhattan, and plays back instantly.

Please, please, please, I beg of you—video record your presentation rehearsal. If you disregard every other piece of advice in this book but follow this one piece of advice you will have unlocked most of the secret to giving foolproof presentations!
I will warn you, if you have never seen a video of yourself speaking, you will not likely enjoy watching yourself. Tough! Your audience has to watch you; shouldn’t you see what they are looking at and hearing?

If you are like most people, when you watch the first draft of your presentation, you will be amazed at how boring, tedious and monotonous you sound. Wouldn’t you rather know now than after you give this stuff to your actual audience?

You can’t give up after one video rehearsal. You’ve got to analyze the video and figure out what you like and what you don’t like. But here’s the rub, everyone focuses on the stuff they don’t like. The key is to focus on the parts of your presentation that you like so you can do more of it.
The next step is to rehearse and video record your speech again. Review again. Are you happy yet? If not, keep revising it, rehearsing it recording it and reviewing it until you are happy. Is this tedious? Sure. But you already do this with print documents going out of your office. Why is your presentation less important than a print document?

Clients always complain to me, “But TJ, I can’t stand looking at video of myself. Why do I have to do this?” Then I ask them, “How often do you get up in the morning, get dressed in the dark and go to your office without looking at a mirror once?”
Of course people say “Never.”

Then I ask why? After all, you don’t have to look at your face all day. Yet we all look at a mirror before we leave home because we want to get an accurate sense of how the rest of the world sees us all day long. We like to know if we missed half of our face while shaving, if our lipstick is on straight, or if there is grape jelly smeared on our chin. In fact, we don’t just look at a mirror once in the morning. Chances are we look at a mirror when new first wake up, then after we get out of the shower, then again while we are shaving or putting on makeup, again after we are dressed, and maybe one last time before we walk out of the house.

By looking at a mirror several times, we are essentially going through drafts of our public face. A mirror is the ideal way to do this. The result is that when you leave the house, most of us are confident in knowing that while we might not look or be perfect, we have at least put our best face forward and we have an accurate sense of how others see us.

When it comes to checking our presenting, mirrors don’t help; only video does. I strongly urge you not to practice presenting in front of a mirror. Instead of focusing on delivering ideas to an audience, you will focus on your big nose or some part of your face you don’t like. Plus, there will be nothing to analyze once you are done.

The video creates something tangible for you to critique to see your strengths and weaknesses. That’s important to learning most new skills. Imagine if, when you were in elementary school, you tried to learn how to write by dictating an essay to your English teacher and you never saw the transcript. Now, imagine that when she graded your essay but didn’t show you the words; instead the teacher just told you what you did well or poorly. Do you think you ever would have become a competent writer that way? Of course not; you would not have been able to see what you were doing.

You have to see video of yourself speaking if you want to improve and there is absolutely no excuse not to do so unless you make less than $1 a day.

Now, for the second part of my question—how long should you rehearse? You need to keep on rehearsing until you can look at the video and say “Wow, that (fill in your name here) is a great presenter. If I can do half as well in real like I will be the best presenter there.” That might take you five minute or five days of rehearsal; no matter how long it takes it will be worth it to the one person who counts the most—not you but each individual member of your audience.