The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

What are other common timewasters that I can avoid when preparing for my presentation?

Giving presentations is in some ways very similar to managing your personal finances and losing lots of weight—there is tons of bad advice out there and anyone can have an opinion!
I’ve tried to gather all the advice that, if followed, would waste lots of your valuable time.
The following are instructions that you will NOT have to follow because they are either bad advice in general for all presenters or bad advice for you in particular to your goals of giving a pretty good presentation:
• Memorize the first minute of your presentation.
o This is tough to do and isn’t worth the effort. It’s a great way to create stage fright and panic.
• Practice your presentation while looking at yourself in a mirror.
o A waste of time. Guaranteed to make you obsess over your crooked nose or receding hairline. The one thing you don’t have to do when giving a speech is look at yourself.
• Visualize your audience naked.
o Terrible advice. Depending on your audience, this is either too disgusting or too distracting.
• Limit your PowerPoint to no more than 10 slides.
o More than 10 slides won’t necessarily help you, but in the real world, people who use this artificial constraint of 10 end up cramming 4 slides worth of content onto one slide. Nobody can read it!
• Write out your entire speech word for word.
o There is no need to do this—just have a simple one-page outline using bullet points.
• Obsess over the size and color of your PowerPoint font
o Generally, a complete waste of time.
• Worry about moving your hands.
o Actually, you should move your hands when you talk. Only nervous people freeze or hold their hands when they speak.
• Cramming every single fact, number and data point on what you and your department have done in the last six months into your presentation.
o If the people you are presenting to really had to know every single thing you do, then they’d have your job. It’s your job to tell them only what’s truly important to them.
• Brainstorm on every single possible question that could be asked by an audience member.
o Sure you need to be able to answer most questions, but there are an infinite number of questions that could be asked. It’s a waste of time to worry about hypothetical questions when the bigger danger is that you haven’t prepared anything interesting or memorable to present in the first place.
• Worry about the sound of your voice.
o Nobody cares or notices your voice. As long as you can be heard and understood then it is highly unlikely that your voice is a problem you should concern yourself with. Besides, there is nothing you can do (easily) about your voice!
• Obsess over special effects, dissolves, and builds in your PowerPoint.
o Even if people notice your special effects they won’t relate it to the messages of your presentation. Special effects usually become a big black-hole time drain. Far better to spend your time preparing something interesting to say.
o
• Put off giving your presentation until you are more seasoned or experienced.
o Quit conning yourself. Giving presentations is makes a person seasoned and experienced.
• Gathering more and more research.
o Enough already. Chances are you already have enough research and raw facts. The longer you stay stuck in the mode of gathering data, the less time you have for processing the data, shaping the data, highlighting the data, preparing stories about the data, and rehearsing your presentations.
• Using a thesaurus to find big words.
o This is great if you want to look like a pompous fool. Use the simplest, shortest word you can think of.
• Anything that takes you away from focusing on a handful of key points with examples and stories to make each point come alive and delivered in a conversational manner.
o Everything else is BS!

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

What is the Best Way to Handle Nerves? How do I handle pre-speech jitters?

It makes sense for most people to be nervous before giving a presentation. Most people give boring presentations and why should you be better than most? OK, I know I’m being depressing, but I’m just being realistic. It actually is quite rational to be nervous before a presentation. But the main reason most people are nervous before a presentation is fear of the unknown. If you haven’t actually seen yourself give your presentation, then you don’t know what you are presenting to the outside world. After all, a presentation is not what is on a PowerPoint slide or a chart, a presentation is you standing or sitting in front of people and you are talking. If you haven’t seen yourself on video giving your talk that means that the rough draft of your presentation is the one you give to your final intended audience. Ugh! Rough drafts are usually rough by definition—so it makes sense to be nervous if you are going to wing it in front of people.

If I were coaching you to become a world class, spell-binding orator, I would tell you that you have to rehearse for days and days and watch dozens of video rehearsals. But I want to make your life easier and save you time. So all you have to do is rehearse on video until you’ve seen yourself give a pretty good presentation. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to generate a standing ovation, and you don’t have to reduce your ums and uhs to zero—you just have to be pretty good compared to all of the other people your bosses and colleagues compare you to. How do you know if you are pretty good? Just watch the video of yourself practicing. If you think you are pretty good, then you probably are. Great! Now you are good to go. But if you think you are incredibly boring, monotone, and tedious or confusing, you are also probably right. Practice your presentation again on video. This time, do less of the stuff you don’t like, and do more of the stuff you do like. Now, review the video again.

For a very high percentage of people—and I hope you are one of them—2 video rehearsals will often be enough. The first time you see yourself practice the speech you will hate it. Spend a few minutes tweaking your outline, and then do the speech again on video. Watch it. Now, you are likely to see something you can live with—congratulations, you are now virtually guaranteed to give a pretty good presentation.

The following is an excerpt from my upcoming book “How To Give a Pretty Good Presentation” (Wiley 2010)

Tailoring the speech for the type of audience. Personal stories vs. just the facts.

If you simply want to give a pretty good presentation, don’t waste time trying to figure out how to tailor your speech to your audience in terms of stories versus facts. Because audiences around the world are all the same: they want stories that involve relevant ideas and facts that affect them. If all you do is present the facts, ma’m, there is an excellent chance your speech will come up short—just below pretty good. Instead, if all you do is deliver facts, there is a great chance that your speech will be incredibly boring and be instantly forgotten.

It is true that different audiences will tell you they like different styles as far as facts, versus concepts versus stories. Ignore them. Instead, you do want to tailor your messages to your audience, so, by all means, do some research and find out what messages your audience is interested in, what questions do they need answers, what problems do they have that you can solve. Then give them a presentation that is focused on a handful of messages that are important to them and to you, give them a story for each, and give them the most essential facts for each message.
I know you’ve heard that one size doesn’t fit all, but in this case, it really does. Messages may differ from audience to audience, but the best way to tailor your speech to an audience really does not change.
Don’t be fooled when people tell you their audience is different because everyone has advanced degrees or are all industry insiders. Yes, their audience is different because every audience is different, but audiences are never different tin the way people think they are. Audiences are different in that certain messages will bore them or interest them in different ways. But audiences are more alike than they are different. And they #1 way most audiences are alike is that they easily bored to death by a presenter who tries to “just stick to the facts” and leaves out all of the examples, stories, and vignettes.

http://www.universityreviewsonline.com/2005/10/101-youtube-videos-to-teach-you-the-art-of-public-speaking.html

I’ve never believed in the old saw, “never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to” unless you are in a court of law. After all, how else would you ever learn anything? But at some point, it is futile to ask questions when you know the answer is extremely negative. On a taxi cab ride today from an airport in Los Angeles I was subjected to extreme heat (90 degrees plus) with no air-conditioning in the back seat. The driver had air conditioning, but he informed me that he didn’t want to have any contact with passengers in the back to protect his safety, thus the glass protection separating the air-conditioned front seat from the sweltering back seat. To make matters worse, the cab was filled with signs asking passengers not to talk to the driver, as he did not wish to be disturbed. After nearly passing out from the heat, I rolled down the back window, even though the driver admonished me for doing so. At the end of the trip, the driver turned to me and asked,”Sir, was your trip satisfactory?”

Some questions don’t need to be asked when the answser is glaringly obvious and the questioner doesn’t seem to be sincere.

The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”. Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.

Should I give a PowerPoint presentation?

Your Corporate Communications Department: “Yes, use the PowerPoint so that we can maintain a consistency of message. This way everyone will be seeing the same thing and we can maintain control.”

You: “Yes, I should use a PowerPoint. This will make it really easy for me to give the speech. This way, I don’t have to remember anything or practice, because all my points will be in front of me.”

***

Your Audience: “If you are going to give a Powerpoint the way most people do, i.e., do a boring data dump of bullet points, then please, for the love of God, please, please spare us! But if you are going to use interesting visuals, pictures, or graphs that are genuinely interesting and relevant, then, by all means, use a PowerPoint.”

The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”. Consistently, the worst advice speakers and presenters get, comes from everyone who is NOT your audience. The following gives examples of some of the WORST advice people are often given. It is followed by the advice of your audience. Listen to them. They are your true judge and jury.

Should I make this a formal or informal presentation?

Your boss: “These are important client prospects–this had better be your best formal presentation!”

Your marketing department: “We’ve already written and approved the PowerPoint slides, and they’ve gone through legal. So make this a formal presentation.”

You: “Wow, this is scary. I don’t know half of the people in this audience. I better make this a formal presentation so that I can give myself some cover in case anything goes wrong.”

***

Your Audience: “Formal? Informal? We don’t care! As audience members, we are only aware of two kinds of speeches, good and bad. We don’t car if you are sitting in jeans or standing in a tuxedo–just make sure that what you have to say is interesting and relevant to us. You can be formal or informal, but if you wast our time or bore us, we will tune you out in 3 seconds flat and start reading email on our Blackberrys.” 

The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience”

How will I know what my audience will remember?

Your Marketing Officer: “Just give them as much information as possible. That way if they don’t remember anything in particular, they are at least likely to leave with the impression that you are smart and competent.”

Your College Speech Coach: “They will remember anything, as long as you tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.”

You: “It just depends on luck and the whims of the audience that day. This is completely beyond my control!”

Your Audience: “We audiences are pretty predictable. We remember interesting and relevant stories, examples and anecdotes. If you can make your points with an occasional surprise, unpredictability or humor, then we will be retelling your message to others for the next 5 years. The one thing we can absolutely guarantee you is that we will not remember a straightforward data dump.”

From TJ Walker’s upcoming book, “The Wisdom of your Audience.”

Should I tell my audience that I am very happy to be speaking to them today?

Your Speech Writer: “It is important to set the mood of you being gracious, so tell people you are happy to be there.”

You: “I want to be sincere and real, so I want to tell people that I am genuinely happy to have the honor of speaking to them today.”

***

Your Audience: “Boring! We don’t care if you are happy. Why don’t you spend your time making us happy by actually telling us something interesting? We are especially unimpressed when you read from a script with your head down and tell us that you are happy to be speaking to us in a wooden tone of voice. First tings first–tell us interesting stuff, create a shared experience for all of us, then we can all be happy together.”

The following comes from TJ Walker’s upcoming book “The Wisdom of Your Audience” (The best advice always comes from your speaking audience)

What is the best way to begin my speech?

Your Director of Communications: “Start by thanking your hosts or order of rank.”

Your Marketing Director: “Be sure to weave in our branding slogan in the first 30 seconds. Then tell people about all of our locations.”

Your director of new business: “Tell people about all of our locations and branches.”

Your mother, “Tell people how humbled you are by the nice introduction you received.”

Your inner voice: “Good morning. As you heard, my name is ___ and my title is ___. I’m happy to be here today. Thank you for that lovely introduction. Before I begin today, let me tell you about the incredibly boring history of my company starting back to its founding in 1923. Next, I’d like to tell you about all of the cities we are in (that you couldn’t possibly care about, because you aren’t in those cities.)

*****

Your Audience: “Stop boring us to death! We don’t care if you are happy to be here; we don’t know you well enough to care yet. We already know your name and title; the person introducing you told us–we aren’t stupid!!! Stop talking about you, you, you. We don’t care about you at this stage of our relationship. Instead, tell us something interesting and relevant to us. We care about ourselves. If you address our needs, we’ll be more likely to pay attention to the rest of your speech!”