It was a strange feeling. I was back in the Super Safe Classroom after 7 months of teaching solely LIVE On Line. In the online world, we are engaging our audience every two minutes. Remember, this is the Age of Distraction. Audiences are weaponised at home with unseen devices to escape from our grasp and our message. They will be multi-tasking like demons on speed, given the slightest pretext. We have to be very, very focused on keeping them engaged. Teaching live in the room, I had to suppress the urge to say “give me a green check”, or “give me a smiley face” to keep them active and onboard with me.
It led me to think about how much engagement I was getting previously with an audience. Occasionally, I might ask them to raise their hand in response to a question. This is a bit of a tricky thing. You can very quickly wear out your welcome with this type of request. There is that creeping feeling of being manipulated by the speaker. We are in the eye of the storm right now between the pre-Covid and post-Covid era, as presenters. This whole schmozzle will probably take at least a year or more to clean up, once vaccines become widely available. What will be some of the differences around giving presentations, when we get back to some semblance of normality?
In the good old days, I would be looking for some head nodding to let me know if the audience were engaged or not. Is that going to cut it anymore? Our body positioning can be very dynamic. I was at a talk in my hometown of Brisbane, where the presenter took this to another level. The speaker was introduced by the MC, “Ladies and Gentlemen please join me in welcoming our speaker today, Mr. Brown”. There was no Mr. Brown. The stage was completely bereft of presenters.
Suddenly he started. We could all hear his voice, but he was nowhere to be found. It was quite startling. We all sat there perplexed, craning our necks around left and right frantically searching for the origin of the voice we could hear. He then very slowly and deliberately walked up the middle aisle from the very rear of the hall, to the stage speaking all the while. It was a spectacular entrance, I have to say and quite bold to do it that way. I haven’t had the guts to try that yet, but maybe now I will give it a go.
As I previously mentioned, we would teach students not to overdo the hand raising bit, but what about from now on? Will live audiences be more comfortable with getting more involved in the talk? Let me make an important clarification here. I am not talking about those diabolically dreadful dross webinars, where the speakers are captured in tiny boxes on screen, like an assortment of cheap omiyage chocolates in a tacky box. These are very sad and boring affairs, with all the talking heads just droning on and on.
I am talking about LIVE On Line, where there is tremendous interactivity. “I am unmuting you Tanaka san, so please come on camera and share with us your thoughts” or “Let’s go to Suzuki san for some comments on this issue. Suzuki san come off mute and tell us your ideas please”. “Give me a green check please, if this has been your experience too?”.
Will we be calling on people for their comments on some issue? We always have a chance to get there early and meet a few of the punters as they arrive. We remember their names or maybe we made a note on their meishi. We take the opportunity to have a conversation on the topic before proceedings get underway. We could say, “Tanaka san, earlier we were speaking about this very issue. You had a very interesting take on it and would you mind sharing it with everyone. Can we get a mic for Tanaka san please?”.
Will we be walking into our audience more? Using our body language to get up close and personal. Jesper Koll is a well known speaker here in Tokyo and must the most entertaining economist in captivity. He will suddenly lurch forward to where you are sitting, in the first or second row, tower over you and hammer you with a rhetorical question. The problem is you have no idea if this a question you have to answer or whether he will answer it himself. Trust me, when he swings your way with that question, you break into a sweat because usually these are questions for which you have no good answer. He has your full attention.
The LIVE On Line rule is you must have interaction every two minutes. For the in-person talk that would be too much, I think. However, as audiences have been trained to accept more interaction with the speaker, maybe we have to lift our game and get them more involved than we did in the past. Let’s try it when we next get an opportunity to present in a real, rather than a virtual room.
Speaking is easy, so being clear should be easy too. Well that sounds good in theory, but there is more hope in play here, than actual technique going on. Imagining that your usual conversation style is sufficient for presentations is another exercise in hopeful thinking. Wait a minute, people say that we should speak in a conversational style, so isn’t this confusing or contradictory? What is meant by “conversational” is that the feeling should be relaxed, familiar and inclusive rather than aloof, stiff and hierarchical. Being clear when speaking to audiences is no accident. Careful planning is needed and so is a pair of pruning shears to trim the excess from your discourse.
We have a common tendency in casual speech, to spend a lot of time saying something which can be communicated much more economically. Often, we begin by making a reasonably clear statement and we are doing well in the speaking clearly stakes. Then we spoil it, by adding a lot more content to the same point. In one of our speaking exercises called the Magic Formula, the action step the speaker is recommending and the benefit of that action, both have to be communicated in five seconds each. How hard can that be, you might be thinking?
In our training classes, I hear the participant punch out the key point clearly and in time, but then they just keep adding and pilling on the words. They begin to waffle. This is a habit we need to kill, when making more formal presentations. Today’s audience of thrusting multi taskers have no patience with dross. In fact, they have no patience period. They lurch for their mobile phones and seek refuge in the internet, to escape that white noise in the background. That white noise is you by the way, taking too long to get to the point.
Being clear revolves around having a crystal central message, which has been constantly worked on until you can write in on a grain of rice. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but the point is to get it down to as few words as possible. This requires massive effort to get clarity of the message you want to convey. Once you have sieved the nuggets of your speech, then you start looking for the framework to hang the speech on. You need a structure that arranges the point being conveyed wrapped, bound tightly by evidence. A great example of evidence is to tell the background as a story, involving events, people, places, seasons and times. Evidence can also be statistics, examples, data – anything that will satisfy the logical types in your audience, who only believe in facts.
This main body of the speech is where the key arguments are made and it has to be tight, tight, tight. We arrange the argument, point then evidence, point then evidence, all through the main points. We do so while employing brutal brevity. Get out those razor sharp pruning shears. If the content isn’t strongly supporting your key points with muscular evidence, then tighten it up or cut it out. Getting each key point down in size, gives you greater scope to add more salient points. Usually, in a thirty minute talk, you will get through around three to four main points. Three main sections of the speech packed to the gunnels with waffle and fat with fluff, destroys your credibility. Instead compare that to five major points supporting the argument, all lean like a racing greyhound. We should be keen to glean the dynamite points from all the material available and make room for as many of those power points as we can manage.
The flow between the points should be silky smooth, with the end sentence of one setting up the start of the next section of the points and proof you are putting forward. We need a bridge between the sections rather than lurching abruptly from one point to a different point. Doing it this way will be baffling our audience. Often this is what happens though. The speaker wanders all over the place, frothing up three or four main arguments and leaving a trail of confused punters in their wake. Waffling on is the mantra of the graduates of the Hopeful School of Public Speaking. We don’t want hope, we are going for clarity and surety.
Speaking speed is a tricky balance. We don’t want to kill our audience by bludgeoning them with a monotone, lifeless delivery. We want to speak with a lot of energy and naturally we tend to speed up in the process. The more passionate and engaged we become, often the faster we go. We need to maintain the passion, but adjust the torrent flow. More pauses, shorter sentences and a good cadence are best. If you notice you are speeding up, then stop speaking and create a small pause, so that you can regroup and continue at a better pace. Concentrate your passion and energy on key words which you want to emphasise. Doing this will mean they stand out in the mind of the audience. All words are not equal. We choose which ones to give more power to, making them stronger.
Speaking powerfully, clearly and with passion is a brilliant combination. This is the result of planning not hope. The other key success ingredient is to practice. Getting the cadence right only comes through practice. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have A Dream” speech wasn’t the first time he had delivered it. He had given it many times refining it and practicing it, until he had a sufficiently large enough stage to make it a beacon for racial equality.
I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year. I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further. What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don’t have that chance to present publically so often. I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model. They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak. Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself.
Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip? How hard could that be? Surprisingly many people can’t stand up straight. They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual. Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor. This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed. Stand straight and don't’ sway about.
Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides. Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker. Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person. You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing. Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience.
It is very hard to build up the energy after you start. For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later. When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there. Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already. We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message. A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention.
The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying. A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, “this is a huge global project” and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don’t match. For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body.
What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept. Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc. When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated. However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal.
If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them. The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact. Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong. They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one. This is fake eye contact.
We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact. We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk. Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive. Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there. That is powerful.
Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly. Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words. It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak. Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety.
We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation. We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting. We need to really ramp up the energy output.
We have a different role when we are in the limelight. We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying. An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience. We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation.
If you start adopting these seven tips into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective. Are any of these tips especially hard? Not at all. What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better.
A bonus tip is to rehearse. Don’t experiment or practice on your audience. Don’t spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission. Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review. You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.
Waffle. This is the enemy of speakers and presenters. Ums and Ahs are obvious fillers. We all recognise them when we hear them and we know we have to do a better job to eliminate them. The more insidious waffle sneaks into our talks wholly uninvited and assassin like. The impact on the audience is immediate. They are lunging for phones to escape from you to a better place. Waffle camouflages our key message. It hides it like those fleshy vines you see in documentaries, which have engulfed and overwhelmed an ancient city, deep in the jungle. Yet we are oblivious to it.
We teach the Magic Formula for persuasion success. It requires the discipline to get your key action recommendation and the benefit flowing from that, down to five seconds each. Five seconds is a pretty unambiguous number, with zero wiggle room. Yet in the role play practice sessions we hear fifteen and twenty seconds action calls. Why is that? The direction was get the key point you want us to act on down to five seconds. Waffle is the human tendency. We are draw like suicidal moths to the flame of unnecessary elaboration.
Why do we limit the action and benefit statements down to just five seconds? Why not make them ten or fifteen seconds? The five second goals is a force of nature, that pushes you to become more succinct and much clearer. We are all babblers and just keep talking and talking. Usually, long after anyone continued listening and beyond making any intelligible crucial point. You have to winnow your words, to filter out the non-essential, to drive to the heart of the matter.
This is the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so that people are now jointly poised to stop listening to you and to stop believing what you say. It is getting harder and harder to hold an audience’s attention, so we must get to the point quickly and in a way which is credible. Does that mean we should start with our action and benefit from the get go? It is a really great idea if you love to debate with your listeners and you enjoy the cut and thrust of fencing with critics.
The modern brain is deadly. Combined with our Darwinian education system of promoting winners and vanquishing losers, audiences have become demonic. As soon as you unfurl your conclusion, you will now be facing an army of arm chair confounders, discombobulaters and critics. They become totally deaf to the many and good reasons backing up your recommendation and their brains are on fire with the million reasons why this is a lousy idea. They may be rivals within the firm, flaky colleagues, bosses, picky clients or just smarty pants types who love to demonstrate how much smarter they are than everyone else in the room.
The genius part of the Magic Formula is that you don’t have to serve your own head up on a platter, to the raucous, uncouth and great unwashed mass of disparagers. Before you tell them your recommendation, you spice things up with context, background, evidence, testimonials and experience. I can disagree with your conclusions drawn from the context, but I cannot easily disagree with the context itself. This is very handy, because it forces everyone to get the background, before they run off half-cocked dissing your idea. The key is not to waffle on and on in the context explanation.
The background needs to be tight, to the point, rich in evidence and perspective. If not, those business school types who confuse written communication with oral offerings, will go after you saying “get to the point”. True, an executive summary comes at the start of the written document. Just don’t re-produce this B-school model in your presentations. That is a guarantee of disaster.
Give them the background first, tight, taut, and terrific. Then tell them what they should do next and why it is good for them. This disarms critics. When you are telling the context, these overactive thrusters will be racing ahead to their own conclusion from the evidence. This is when you ambush them with your call to action. Most likely it will be the exact same conclusion they came to, based on the same context, background and evidence. What a sweet feeling to take the wind out of the sails of enemies, wannabes, nasty bosses and picky buyers.