Maintaining the audiences’ attention presumes you actually have their interest in the first place, doesn’t it. Gaining and keeping attention are no simple achievements in this Age of Distraction. One of the interesting findings of online meeting studies is the miniscule number of people who are attending, who are NOT multitasking in the background. This means that the content and the delivery are not sufficiently gripping, to keep a grip on our listener’s attention.
We know that most people who present are pretty boring in the first place. This has been the case in the face to face world. So it is no surprise that these nefarious time wasters and energy sappers, should be up to their same old tricks on whichever semi-functional platform we all forced to struggle with. Escaping to a better place then is the easy choice and we tune out and check email, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, WhatsApp, Telegram or just surf the internet. In other words, we are not short of choices if we get disinterested in you as the speaker.
To grab interest at the start when in the room with the audience, we need to pare down every possible distraction, hesitation, segue, diversion or interruption possible. That means getting there early checking on the equipment, testing the microphone, ensuring the MC will do a proper job of introducing us to kick things off. We get right into a strong start, with a teaser of some sort to break through all the clutter in our audience’s minds. Then we can move on to thank the sponsors, start launching our slide deck, introduce our company and set up the importance of the topic.
In a thirty minute talk, we will break things into five minute segments, so we are dividing the delivery up into six blocks. In each change of blocks we need a transition, something to wake the audience up they have started to drift. It might be launching a rhetorical question.
Jesper Koll, a well know economist and speaker here in Tokyo, is an absolute master at this. He is very flamboyant. He will boldly wander into the forward tables of the audience, stand over the top of you and hit you with his question. You are now diverting your full attention to him, because you imagine you will have to answer this little doozy he has proposed, and do it front of all these business people assembled in the room. Everyone else is nervous too, in case he switches to another member of the room.
Just as you break into nervous sweat, he sweeps in and answers the question he posed. With a silent, private sigh of immense relief you realise, “oh, that was a rhetorical question, so I don’t have to front up with an answer”. To keep us all on our toes, he sometimes does expect an answer, in case we regular Jesper speech attendees think we can start gaming the system.
We might change the pace of the energy we are expending to lift it up to much higher heights, for a short burst of adrenaline transfer into the crowd, to keep them with us for a bit longer. We might tell a fascinating story that grabs interest. Or it might be the supply of some stunning, unknown facts or hot off the presses data, that will be deemed valuable and make everyone happy they attended the talk, because they feel they are getting value from investing their time to be there.
In the online world, we should keep everyone out of the room, until it is time. This way they don’t see the presenters for who they really are – tech novices, totally out of their depth with the platform, having side discussions in public about what they are going to do and who will be doing it. When it is time, be ready to go and go hard from the start, to kick things off well.
In the online world, we can’t apply the five minute rule. The distraction factor is nuclear, so we have to apply the two minute rule. Every two minutes, we need to be doing something to keep people with us. That means fifteen things have to be pre-planned, for a thirty minute speech, before you go live. It can be the things already mentioned or doing a poll, getting a raised hand, a green check, a red cross, entering something in the chat or calling on someone to unmute and share their thoughts on the subject.
In person or online, the secret is in the planning. Expect total distraction and then work back from that possibility, minute by minute, as to what you have to do, to overcome the gap between where you want the audience to be and where they can wind up.
In Parts One and Two, we have covered the mentality needed to be a professional presenter, how to structure the talk and how to deal with hostile audience questions. Now we turn to the delivery components. In the online world and in person, our voice is such a powerful communication tool. We hear those deep throated DJs on the radio or actors in the movies and realise we don’t have the same instrument.
Actually, no one cares. In business, we are all amateur presenters, because that is not our main job. If we want to be a full time professional speaker, then that is a different question. Our day to day job is running our section or the company or battling away in our defined professional field. We speak in front of audiences as a subset of our main tasks. So we go with the voice we have.
I have a rather husky voice. This is the product of 50 years of kiai or the yelling, that goes on in karate training. I would love to have a mellifluous, baritone voice that harkens the angels, but that is not going to happen. The chances are you are not going to throw your job in and become a full time DJ anytime soon either, so you go with what you have too.
What we can control is how clear and concise we are. Many people think out aloud. What escapes from their lips is the short form version of that internal conversation, in the form of ums and ahs. To eliminate this habit, learn how to purse your lips, ever so gently together, so that no sounds can emerge. When you speak, you open your mouth and when you are not speaking, your lips remain pursed. You decide what you are going to say and you hit it straight away, with no hesitation, then purse your lips when you finish. If you are thinking what it is you want to say, you do that while keeping your lips pursed. Keep practicing this technique and you will eliminate ums and ahs from your speech.
Who we speak to is also important. Now a lot of people speak fervently to their notes on the podium or their laptop screen or turn around and talk to the main screen in the room. They are certainly not talking to the audience. I remember Professor Walton teaching us about Pre-war Japanese history. He spent every lecture staring into space, about three meters above the heads of his audience. I don’t recall him making any eye contact with anyone during the whole lecture series in that semester and I would guess, in his entire career as an academic.
As a presenter, we need to speak to our audience. Sounds simple, but so many people get this wrong. In the online world, they are talking down to the faces on screen, instead of talking to the camera mounted at the top of the laptop. In the real world, they are whizzing their eye contact around at lighting speed, effectively looking at everyone and no one at the same time. There is no engagement going on.
Eye power is so powerful, so let’s use it. Lock eyes with your audience, one member at a time and engage that person for around six seconds and then pick up the next person at random. If you spend less time, it is not having any personal connection and if you keep burning a hole in their retina, it feels too intrusive. Don’t connect with people in any predictable order – keep your audience on their toes, awake and with you throughout your presentation.
In person or online, watching your audience allows you to adjust for their situation. If they look puzzled, then they probably didn’t get the point and you may need to rephrase it. If they are looking disengaged, then you need to get them involved using rhetorical questions. These are good because as the audience member, you don’t know if you are going to be called upon to answer it or not. Getting people to raise their hands is good and probably twice is the maximum number of times, to use this technique before it feels manipulative. If they are raising hands or giving you a green check when online, you can use this more often during the presentation.
Energy in conversation with a colleague or a friend is not the energy you need when presenting, whether online or in person. Crank it up around 40% higher than usual and start pushing our your ki, your intrinsic power, to the audience. Stand up straight, if in person and sit up straight, if online. Also if you are giving a presentation online, then try and arrange it so that you can deliver it standing up. It will bring a lot more physical energy to the audience and bolster your confidence and credibility.
Use a headset when presenting online for the best audio quality possible and if using a microphone with a live audience, try to use a lavalier microphone, so that your hands are free for gestures. Gestures are critical exclamation points in you talk. They bring power to what you are saying, bolstering the power of the words. Online still use them, although when seated, the range of movement is a bit more constricted, but still employ them for emphasis.
Online or in person, the basics are the basics and we must master them. We make a few adjustments for the online world but they are not game breaking. Practice remains the key and so rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.
In Part One we looked at the opportunity available for people who want to improve their presentation, persuasion and speaking skills. We delved into why are we speaking at all and who are we speaking to, which will define the approach we will take. The planning part is an obvious, but usually overlooked, component of the presentations’ world
Ironically, we begin with designing the end of the speech. How close can we get to compressing the key point of the talk into a single sentence. This discipline really forces us to be clear and concise about what it is we are going to say. So we start by writing the two closes of the talk. The first close is for prior to the Q&A, assuming there is going to be Q&A. The second is for after the Q&A.
Many speakers just allow the Q&A session to define the whole presentation. The issue here though is that, as the speaker, you have no control over what people will want to ask you. It is always astonishing to me, to hear audience members ask questions which are well off topic and unrelated to the point of the presentation. Why they do that is a mystery, but regardless, as the presenter there is nothing you can do to shepherd the audience toward asking relevant and insightful questions, to further tease out the gold from your humble offering.
This means the final impression from your talk, can be left dangling, wrapped around a remote and unremarkable subject, light years from the point you were making. We must seize back control. After the end of the Q&A, we repeat the key points we want the audience to have ringing in their skulls, as they file from the venue.
If you get a hard time during the Q&A, ranging from pushback to outright hostility, deal with it the same way. Do not allow your mouth to advance ahead of your brain and storm forth with the first random answer that pops into your head. Repeat the question in a substantially watered down form, which will suck all the invective and life power emanating from this incoming verbal missile.
If they say, “This is outrageous, your argument has been completely disavowed by all of the top experts, and you have the gall to be repeating it here today. In front of us. It is an insult”. You sweetly paraphrase, “The question was about expert opinion on this subject”. That reply took four seconds. You continue to buy yourself some more thinking time, by making a bland filler statement, such as, “This issue has aroused a lot of interest in our industry”. Another four seconds. Having eight seconds to think first is a world of difference to opening up your mouth and letting “whatever” pour forth. With these eight seconds, you are now fully mentally prepared to form your well considered reply.
When you do so, hold the questioner’s gaze for the first six seconds and then blank them for the rest of the proceedings. You show you are not afraid of them and then you spread your answer to all the other people in the room, engaging them with your eye contact. When you ignore the hostile questioner thereafter, you quickly drain all their negative, invective power from them.
Back to the structure of the talk. Having boiled down the whole brilliant concoction to a single sentence, we now work on the construction of the presentation. We need around three key pieces of evidence to support our assertions. Three is a good number, because it tends to make it easier for the audience to follow and yet also allows us enough room to go into reasonable depth. We work out the logical flow of the argument, to get the three points into order and then we add in the sub points and evidence to prove what we are saying. We have now framed the main body of the talk and this means it is time to work on the blockbuster opening.
The start of the speech has some key goals. We want everyone to stop multitasking and being distracted by their phones. We must make them cease chit chatting with their neighbours and devote their entire attention to us. Sounds easy. Today though, we all seem to have the attention span of a gnat, unless we are binge watching some popular series on Netflix. During lockdown, everyone was binge watching their hearts out, so their expectations have now reached stratospheric heights and here you are, about to present.
Unfortunately, as presenters, we can’t compete with these multi-million dollar, big budget extravaganza shows. We are left to our own devices to keep people away from their hand held devices. As modern day speakers, we find ourselves marooned in this Age Of Distraction. Therefore our opening has to be really well planned, to cut through all the mental clutter.
Whatever you say, begin with a lot of energy and volume, to scythe through the white noise bubbling away in the back of the room. You will have been introduced before your talk, but modern audiences keep chatting away without compunction, so go hard at the start. Open with a vexing question, a pithy quote, a gripping episode from the front lines or a bald faced, semi controversial statement. These are all good attention grabbers.
In Part Three, we will deal with the finer points of the delivery. Many a great start faltered midstream and lost the attention of the audience. People today are merciless about reaching for their phones, to disappear to a better world than sitting there listening to you drone on and on. Find out how to avoid that disastrous fate in the next instalment.
It Is Not Back To Normal As A Presenter – Part One
Gradually people are streaming back to the office, after having been sequestered away at home for many months. As a presenter, whether you are the boss, one of the troops or representing the company in public, things are not going back to what they were pre-Covid-19. The chances of making a public speech in front of a live audience are slim to none at the moment and likely to remain that way for a little longer. Because of physical distancing protocols, our favourite venues can’t handle the same numbers as before, so that changes the dynamics of the money needed to pay for the space. People are just staying with online presenting as a result. In the office though, bosses have to lead and team members reports have to be given.
A lot has been forgiven of public presenters since February. Online presentations are pretty bad. The audio is usually dodgy at best. The people delivering the presentation are rarely in charge of the tech. They compound this ignorance with a dead dog style delivery. Their monotonous voice deliveries are on full display. They point the laptop camera up their nose and they are constantly looking down at the screen, rather than up at the camera, so no engagement with the audience is possible.
People’s exposure in Japan to excellent talks and presentations was pretty much missing pre-Covid-19. So for the vast majority of the population, the ugly experience of dealing with failing presenters, has just moved out of the meeting room or the public venue, on to the online world of trapped tiny faces, in tiny little boxes in the corner of the screen.
This is such an opportunity. I doubt many presenters have been busily honing their craft during the lockdown. So again, those with excellent skills are going to stand out. They will be more persuasive and more powerful in their messaging, than their colleagues and competitors. In any aspect of professional work in business, reaching the top one percent in any category is extremely difficult. Well, that is except when it comes to giving presentations. It is certainly not crowded at the top.
Being highly effective in getting people to buy your message makes an enormous difference in how many people will follow what you recommend. These are the types of people, the company upper echelons love to promote into leadership positions. They do this because they recognise these individuals can move people and therefore move the needle and produce out performance. No matter how smart or technically skilled people can be, if they are inarticulate, hesitant, lacking in confidence in what they are saying, can’t be clear and concise they will not be convincing when speaking to others. Those on the receiving end will not follow them at all or with much enthusiasm. They are totally reliant on position power, because they themselves have zilch in terms of personal power.
Where do we start? No matter what the occasion or the audience, we need to begin by determining what is the purpose of this talk. Is it to inform, convince, inspire or entertain? This is such a simple step that most presenters miss. They dive straight into the details, labouring over the slide deck assembly, debating which slide to include and which to drop. Don’t do that. Instead, start with your WHY. Once we know why we are giving this talk, we can begin to construct the format we need to deliver it.
Next, who is our audience? What degree of knowledge do they have already on this topic? What are their preconceptions about this subject? What is the age and gender range? What are main their interests? How will this talk fulfil a need they have? Forget about what you want to say. Knowing what they want to hear is the key and then we build backwards to make that a reality for them. How do we work out what they want. What has Covid-19 done to change people’s expectations and outlook? We can’t just mope back to February and pick up the threads, as if nothing has happened in the last four months.
If we don’t know most of the audience members already and if we are not working together every day, we won’t have a lot of pre-knowledge of who they are and what they want. We can query the organisers of the talk about why they chose this subject matter. Who has signed up and what sectors are they from? We can ask people we know in the same sectors about what are the current hot topics or the main pain points. If the hosts will release the details, we can call a small sample of those who registered and ask them what we could cover that would give them the most value.
In Part Two, we will go deeper on how to structure the talk, the delivery finer points and how to handle difficult or even outright hostile pushback to what you are saying.