Just go out there and be yourself

(Just so you know, this blog has moved to my presentation skills training site from now on)

I’ve come across this advice about making presentations in quite a few places over the years, and while it sounds good, it’s somewhat limited (and occasionally even just plain wrong). I know it’s usually meant well – spoken by a friend just before a terrified speaker goes up on stage in a last minute attempt to reassure them that all will be well – but the truth is that being a good speaker requires more than that. You need to “be yourself” and you need to “perform” at the same time.

Tricky? Of course; if it wasn’t tricky we’d all be doing it!
Think of the techniques to help you ‘perform’ as being like walking. Once you’re passed the toddler stage, you don’t really think about the mechanics of walking, you just use them – without thinking about it – to do the important stuff of getting from A to B.

What is certainly true is that all the great performers are themselves when they’re presenting their stuff: with a master, you never get the feeling that you’re on the receiving end of ‘material’. It always seems to be ‘just them talking’. Therein lies their expertise, of course. Billy Connelly, for example appears to be just standing their and saying the first thing that comes to mind. Be assured, he isn’t.

With this in mind, I’ve jotted down a few bits and bobs of advice which might help anyone who’s got to ‘got out there’…. Number three is the hard one!

1. Know your material inside out, back to front and sideways. That way it really comes from you and you’re not delivering it. Comedians can’t tell each others jokes because they somehow “don’t fit” and a presenter can’t deliver someone else’s material or material they’re not comfortable with. If you try you’ll unfortunately come across as confused, insincere (or both). You won’t have time to think once you’re in mid-performance (well, some people do, but not anyone who needs enough help to be reading an introductory article like this! 🙂 ) so make sure that you’ve thought about all the different directions you could go from any point in your presentation.
2. Forgive yourself a mistake. They happen. Your audience will almost always forgive you (and may not even notice!). What they won’t forgive is you allowing something trivial to put yourself off. It’s not the end of the world. A bad presentation is not a disaster. It’s not likely that there were many deaths involved and precious few people will have lost their homes just because of one bad presentation. Think of it as a kind of arrogance to be so upset by mistakes: you’re not that important to the people you’re talking to, 99.9% of the time.

3. Learn the right techniques. It’s all well and good being comfortable on stage, being yourself, having good material and so on if you can’t deliver it. Learn to use your voice correctly, to carry to the back of the room. Project, don’t shout. Making your voice louder is counter-productive: you’ll sound like you’re trying too hard and your credibility will plummet. To make matters worse, you’ll alienate the people at the front and you’ll finish, absolutely knackered – assuming you don’t do permanent damage to your voice, of course!

Techniques should be so integrated to you and your style that they stop becoming techniques at all, and just become a part of you. You should never let the people you’re talking to see the techniques, either. Last year I toured with a dance company and I can distinctly remember hearing a member of the audience enthusing to one of the dancers about how amazing it was to be able to work that hard and for that long: the amount of physical effort involved “was amazing“. The dancer was gutted, despite it being intended as a compliment by a fan who was absolutely blown away. Why? Because it shouldn’t have looked like it was a physical effort at all. Remember this one motto…..

If it looks like you’re working hard, you’re not working hard enough.

4. Don’t try and fake it. Stay with who you are. The last thing the audience wants to see is an impression of some else. If they’d wanted to see someone super-confident, ultra-swarve and free from fault, they’d have gone to see someone super-confident, ultra-swarve and free from fault. They’ve come to see and hear you for a reason.

I’ll say it again…. Number three is the hard one: that’s the key to all the others. If you can get the right method and techniques so far into you that you don’t think about them, you can both be yourself and perform at the same time.

Remember that this isn’t the whole story – and the details of how you do Number Three is something I’ve drawn a viel over here, but it’s not as hard as you think (well, hopefully!)

Cheers….. Simon

Open source = open road ?

Ah – the joys of Open Source!

I can hear myself harping back to nostalgic comments from when I was a kid about the freedom of the open road; you’d got a car, you’d got the road, you could put your food down and fly.

Is it like that?

Well no, of course not, we all know that really. But for us it’s close. Very close.

There are two things I need to tell you about my company before you understand why we’re so wedded to OS (particularly to OpenOffice). Firstly, we’re a presentation skills training company and so our use of technology can be very intensive at times: we’re fighting an uphill battle with bad PowerPoint. The second thing you need to know is that we don’t have an office – there are three of us all working from home most of the time.

Why’s the latter important? Because we all use a different operating system. One of us is a Mac-head. Good for him. Clare, my right hand, uses Windows because it came pre-loaded, and I use Linux. That means we all work to our strengths and our productivity increases.

That’s the upside.

The downside is file compatibility. Or lack of, potentially. Inject OpenOffice and it’s compatibility again. It ain’t quite seamless, but it’s pretty damned close!

Add that to the fact that the size of the files we pass around are generally much smaller from OpenOffice than they would be with Microsoft Office programs and you can see how much more convenient it can be.

Is there a compatibility problem with the ‘outside world’? We don’t tell our clients and they don’t ask & don’t notice. So “no” there’s no problem. I tell a lie: we had a problem once (once in three years!) importing a Word document which was password protected. Frankly that’s a better hit-rate than I used to get in an all-Microsoft environment!

Does it make a difference to our training? Not at all. You see, the big thing about training for presentation skills is that the actual software should come last (if at all). Our public training follows good practice by steering clear of the actual computer at first and teaching principles – and the principles can be applied to any software package you like.

Of course, it’s easier to apply those principles to some packages than others… but that’s an issue for a different posting…..

Speak sense

For a blog which is supposed to be about presentation skills tips, I seem to be doing little else for the last couple of days here but pointing you to other people's resources (note: must make time to put some original tips in during the upcomming week!) but I don't apologise for pointing you to this blog by David Petherick. I know David from a networking site we both use and he's a good bloke. His blog covers a whole range of stuff as well as the kind of things readers here will be interested in but there are some cool articles about not over-using jargon and so on…. and for that matter, not under-using it too.

By way of explanaition, the reason I've been so busy is that I've just done a re-write of my company website; it's now on a different server, looking different and taking a live feed from this blog too. Have a look and tel me know what you think!

~ Simon

The long goodbye (to Bill Gates)

As a voice & presentation skills trainer there's a big news story around at the moment – Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft. It'll be interesting to see what happens to his software design. The big example of how his personality impacts upon his software (for me, but I'm biased 🙂 ) is in the presentation software, PowerPoint. BG's great at what he does but what he does is… squeeze in lots of features: that's how he works, a great details man.
It's how all geeks work and God bless 'em for it. But that's not the right way with presentation software. That needs to be written from a user-perspective more than any other package, because "most users don't want to be" – not many people like giving presentations, so they use the software to hide behind…. and if the software drives them in a particular direction they'll naturally tend to go in that direction.

So if you couple fear with the tendency of the software to encourage you to think in a lots-of-details-and-bullet-points-sort-of-way. and you've got a recipie for a bad presentation.

…. and I think that stems from the top at MS.

It'll be interesting to see what happens….. maybe the package will develop a little more “usability” even if it doesn't develop many more features. It would be great if it did!

Simon

Somebody else’s presentation tips

are never as good as mine! 🙂 Actually, this stuff is great. Nice, clean simple and obvious.

I particularly like the ideas about starting with a big sheet of paper when you plan your presentation so you can see how the whole thing fits together at once. Having an over-view of your presentation is critical to getting a good structure; it's something that is pretty easy to cover on presentation skills training though as the benefits are obvious once people see it working for them.

Personally, I start with an A0 flipchart sized piece. One tip when you do that is to avoid the temptation to grab a bigger pen at the same time: if you do that you give up the advantage of having a bigger piece of paper in the first place. The whole idea of doing things on a big sheet is to take away any form of inhibition and you can best do that if your writing doesn't get crowded to the sides of the page.

Cheers….. Simon

Away with words

Here’s a really (and I mean really) simple tip for helping with your PowerPoint presentations. Take the damned words out! Leave only the barest of essentials.

Why? Because it increases your audience’s ability to do two things. Firstly, their ability to remember what you’ve told them goes up (28%) and their ability to apply this goes up even more (79%) – that’s accoriding to research by Richard Mayer, who published his work with the Cambridge University Press. Sounds good to me.

The idea, of course, is that when you take away the word on the screen and say them out loud, you’re stimulating your audience in two ways. If you leave loads of words on the screen, your audience will just read them (eyes take priority over ears) and you’ll find what you’re saying is ignored; it doesn’t matter anyway ‘cos if you’ve got loads of text on the screen you’d just be duplicating it anyway! 🙂

In short, if you want your audience to remember and understand what you’ve got to say, you should be telling people in your presentation, with the PowerPoint in support, not writing it out for them – don’t put the guts of what you’ve got to say on the screen.

Can’t argue with the science!

Stand-holders and their managers

Following on from the presentation I've just given at ITWORKS, I took a stroll around the stands. I walked around for nearly 30 minutes and only one person spoke to me (and she was a very nice young lady); other standholders ignored me. Nearly half of them were either

• on a mobile phone
• doing their administration/accounts
• filling in a crossword

C'mon guys, have some common sense! I don't care that you're "only doing it until a visitor arrives": no visitors will arrive if that's what you're doing! You have to present yourself as available and friendly!

Good grief!

Another tip for presenters on stands – or rather for their managers – don't send extraverts. Extraverts thrive on bouncing off other people. That's great if there are lots and lots of visitors to the stand all the time but if there aren't (as there wasn't at 10:15 this morning) they tend to collaps in on themselves, struggling to look enthusiastic. People who get their "emotional energy" from inside their own heads (introverts in the jargon) are arguably more suitable…..

The Service Network, the group I was speaking on behalf of, are going to put my overheads up on their website: I'll link to it when they do.

In the meantime, enjoy the sunshine!

~ Simon

Nervous posting.

Wednesday's a big day for me.  First thing the morning I'm making a presentation at IT WORKS 2006, about "How to Stand Out From the Crowd". Given that I train people to make presentations, I'd better get it right, hand't I?  The pressure, as someone just said, is on.

So how to handle it?

Well firstly, there's the usual 'mindgames' of telling yourself it's not an opportunity to cock up as much as an opportunity to impress and have fun.  Secondly there's all the specific techniques I'm mentionin in this column and will add to over the years (and teach on my courses).  

Let's face it, if nerves get the better of me, I should give up and go home….. but that's not the case for most people, because what they're talking about is the “art and science of talking”. The talking-about-it is a secondary feature to the important one of knowing-about-it. That means that for 'real people' it's not a disaster if they aren't perfect. All you need to be is “good enough” not “good”. A presentation is intended to get some information over to your audience: if you've done that, you've done enough.

Remember that the next time you're called upon to make a presentation – it's about the content. The presentation is there purely so that people can get at the content. That should settle your nerves a bit….

Stop the drinking

I don't know about where you are, but I'm sitting in the garden at 24 degrees as I write this. The forecast is for this to continue through the week. Great – except that in the middle of the week I'm supposed to be making a speech at IT WORKS 2006. I can feel the energy-sapping heat of a packed conference hall in my imagination already.

I'm tempted to take to drink……. Water that is.

Almost every other bit voice or presentation skills training you might get will tell you to drink plenty of water before/during your presentation. They're sort of right, but be careful. Don't drink it cold.

Yes, I know cold water is refreshing… but it's also cold – and there-in lies the problem. Your vocal folds are muscles. In fact they're working at several hundred movements per second when you speak (women at almost twice the rate of men, which is why female voices tend to be higher than male ones). Imagine you've just played a hot and sweaty game of squash (or whatever else gets you hot and sweaty): you'd not take a cold shower would you? No. Try it and you'll soon find out how quickly and how painfully muscles can cramp when they're shocked like that.

Okay, your vocal folds aren't in direct line between your mouth and your stomach, so that the water doesn't pass directly over them (if it did, you're on your way to drowning yourself) but it passes close enough to mean that the shock of the cold water will still hit your vocal folds.

As it does they'll tighten up and you'll find the quality of your voice deteriorates. If you're trying to sound credible and calm – or if you're trying to be able to speak clearly all day, as at a conference – you'll find that cramped up vocal folds will severely hamper your style.

My 7% rant! (But 93% of it won’t work……)

There’s a lot of fuss made about the ‘fact’ that only “7% of communication lies in the words” we use. The rest is split between the way you say it and the para-linguistics (body language and all that jazz) that go with it. The figures are often cited, but less often understood….

Can you play charades?

The answer, for me at least, is something like “Yes, but only when I’ve had a drink”. You might be more outgoing than me. Or less. The important point here is that no matter how good you are at it, unless the person miming is cheating and using a formal Sign Language it’s not an easy game. That’s the whole point.

If we could do it straight away it wouldn’t be fun.

And yet there are people involved in communications training that blindly and stubbornly claim that the words we use in communication account for only 7% of meaning and 55% of the communication takes place by using body language.

Oh yeah? So how come radio adverts work then?

Coupled with “tonality” (that is, the way we say things rather than what we say) the assertion is that a whopping 93% of communication has nothing to do with the words we use. If that was the case, I might just have managed better on holiday in France this year! Seriously, if you hear a language you’ve never heard before, do you really think you can understand 93% of what the speaker is saying?

No? Didn’t think so.

And yet there are people buying into this myth. To be fair it’s based upon some scientific research and they’ll probably defend themselves on that grounds: it’s also so widely banded about by various people so that many people regard it as ‘received wisdom’. It isn’t.

Frankly, it’s wrong.

Well, actually, it’s not so much ‘wrong’ as wrongly applied. It’s been taken out of context and bandied about with very little real understanding. The person who did the original research, (Prof Albert Mehrabrian of UCLA) made a big thing of pointing out to people that his research was specifically to do with personal likes and dislikes and that it could absolutely not be applied in other contexts. It was laboratory work, not ready to be applied in the real world, yet. It wasn’t generalised or robust enough.

Prof Mehrabian’s work was based upon volunteers in a laboratory saying one word only. That word was “maybe” and he picked it specifically because of it’s neutrality! Given those conditions, it’s not surprising that the ‘value’ of the word was only 7%. In fact it’s perhaps a bit worrying that it was as high as that!

No one’s disputing that there’s more to communication that the words you use. At Curved Vision we have theatrical backgrounds and we are very much aware of the old adage that “It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it” but I also have a thorough training and background is social science and research (PhD and all that.) so I don’t use the 7% stuff when I do the presentation skills training, not because it’s wrong, just because it’s irrelevant.

Well, “maybe” it’s irrelevant, but you’d have to hear my tone of voice to know if I mean it!
Best….. Simon