We are such a judgmental lot aren’t we! We form opinions about people within seconds of seeing them, often even before we hear them speak. We judge their dress, their body language, their style without knowing anything about them as a person. We are slow to unwind our first impression as well, so those first seconds of any interaction are vital.
We are all critics too, when it comes to presentations. We want the best, we want to be educated, entertained, wowed in our seats and we are usually disappointed. We carry that history of disappointment around with us like heavy baggage, to the next presentation. We shamelessly hold others to a level of accountability, we never wish imposed upon us!
The cold, hard reality is that Presentation Effectiveness can be a make or break skill in the workplace. At some point in your career you will be asked to present information to a group. It doesn't have to be a formal occasion. It might just mean answering a question or being invited to express a view or opinion. It is your job to ensure that you are ready to step up to the call. An individual who can present confidently and effectively immediately differentiates themselves from the rest of the group. Whether you are a pro or a beginner with presenting or public speaking, here are some practical tips for improving your presentation and communications skills.
Getting Rid of the Stress of Public Speaking
Many people are terrified of speaking in front of a group. Everyone is staring at you, your palms are sweating, your pulse is racing, strangely your throat feels suddenly dry and parched, your energy levels have dropped to precipitous levels, your knees might even be knocking as the fight or flight adrenalin kicks in.
Many of us can accomplish pulling off a presentation, but feel a certain amount of fear and stress. Speaking in front of groups does not have to be stressful or nerve racking; instead, the experience can help you stand out and get noticed.
Here are some tips that will help you fight through your anxiety and deliver an effective presentation:
Prepare, Prepare, Prepare
If you have a complete understanding of your material, it will definitely give you an advantage during your presentation. However, do not feel you have to memorize your material; you just need to be familiar with it.
You can read key points as mental prompts to help you keep the flow going in the best order, but don’t read it if you can avoid it. Many people are wedded to their text. They spend the entire time making eye contact with their own words on the sheet in front of them, rather than with their audience and then wonder why nobody was impressed with their presentation. Look at your audience – talk to them as if it was fireside chat, be relaxed and engage with everyone. I recall a brilliant lecture I attended at Harvard Business School, as part of an Executive Education Programme. One of the Professors had written down a list of 10 words on the back wall behind the audience. This was his 3 hour lecture presented entirely without any visible notes. A list of key words you talk to can be your presentation too or you might use the slide deck as the navigation to move your talk along.
Open with Confidence.
Here is a big secret - only you know you are terrified. Unless you tell us, we will imagine you are competent, after all that is what we are expecting. Japan of course, loves to start a presentation with an apology, often mentioning what a hopeless speaker the individual is. No, no, no! If you are sick don’t tell us. If you are nervous don’t tell us. If you are sad because your cat died, don’t tell us. Don’t say anything about how you feel, because then the focus is on you and not where it should be - on your audience. Work the room instead – focus outward not inward.
Your opening gives your audience a first impression of your presentation. Make sure not to leave anything to chance. Your opening sets the tone for your entire presentation. No ums and ahs please!
Here is how to avoid the usual speaker opening kicking off with hesitation in the form of Ums and Ahs.
Select the first word of each sentence and hit it. Purse your lips once that sentence is completed and then hit the next sentence’s first word. Once you finish the sentence purse your lips again. Keep doing this and hesitancy and timidity will disappear from your image as a speaker.
Also lift your speaking volume up to about 30%-50% higher than in normal conversation. This is not a normal conversation, so it needs a different approach. Stronger volume communicates greater confidence (even if you don’t have any!). You usually have microphones so you don’t have to shout but lift your energy.
If you have a reasonably strong voice and it is a small gathering, dispense with the microphone, so that your hands are free for using gestures.
Focus on a Few Key Points.
Know the major points you want to make. This will help ease your worry and increase your confidence. You should also use electronic visuals, note cards, or memory techniques to outline your key concepts. If you need some prompts then prepare them. If you are using a teleprompter make sure you can carry on without it.
Famous Hollywood Director Michael Bay just got started on his Samsung sponsored public presentation in Las Vegas. When the teleprompter failed, in short order so did he. You can see the disaster unfold on YouTube – it’s sad to watch.
Remember, the slides, the flip chart, the teleprompter are all secondary to you – you are the message. Importantly, only Michael Bay and the host on stage knew what he was going to say that day. By abruptly walking off stage in shamed, burning silence he said to the entire audience that he had forgotten his message, that he failed. He could have carried on with his thoughts and we would never have known it wasn’t the intended content.
Support Ideas with Evidence.
It is always important to provide evidence to support your main points. Supporting evidence will help your audience understand your points and will give you a chance to explain your points more fully. Point-evidence; point-evidence; point-evidence is the way to go. Just because you say it doesn't mean we believe it is true. Prove it!
Close with a Call to Action.
This will be the last impression your audience has of you and your presentation. It is important to ensure the closing reflects the purpose of the presentation. Your closing should summarize your content and give your audience a clear direction.
Don’t forget that you must repeat your close again, after the end of Q&A. Most people lose control of the proceedings when they get to Q&A and many a meltdown has been witnessed at this vital last impression juncture.
Don’t allow someone’s random question content to define your final impression or final message for the audience. I remember I was giving a presentation in Japanese, to an audience of HR professionals about how great Dale Carnegie training was and teaching them how to use some of the key human relations principles.
It was going gangbusters until we got to the Q&A. This very charming, well dressed Japanese lady in her early 70s put her hand up to ask a question and for the next 10 minutes launched into her own speech!
You must stay in command of the messaging and so the show ain’t over until you sing the last line of the wrap up after Q&A. Repeat your close so the last message they get is the one you want them to get. This is the mark of the pro!
Action Points
There are a number of common structures for giving presentations and one of the most popular is the opening-key points/evidence-closing variety. We consider the length of the presentation, the audience, the purpose of our talk and then we pour the contents into this structure. Generally, in a 30 minute speech we can only consider a few key points we can cover, so we select the most powerful and then look for the evidence which will persuade our audience. This is where a lot of presentations suddenly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The structure flow is a simple one. The analysis of the occasion is straightforward, but at this next stage we can get confused about what we are trying to achieve. We might become so engrossed in the evidence assembly component that we forget the crucial “WHY” aspect of this effort. We are not here to produce mounds of statistics, battalions of bar charts or proffer reams of text on a screen. Technically oriented presenters love to bludgeon their audience with detail, usually forcing the font or scale to be so small, it is barely visible on screen.
No, the WHY is all about persuading the audience to agree with our conclusion or way of thinking, This is communication skill rather than archeological or archival skill. Line charts, pie charts, comparison tables are trotted out to do battle with the perceptions and biases of the audience. The errors though include a presentation style where the actual detail is impenetrable and so is not fully accepted. The tendency to imagine that this superb, high quality data will stand by itself and not require the presenter to do much, is another grave error. “I don’t have to be a good speaker, because the quality of my information is so valuable”, is a typical, if somewhat pathetic excuse.
Another common error is to invest the vast majority of the available time for the presentation preparation on the accompanying slides for the talk. Digging up the data, tweeking the detail, creating the charts, arranging the order etc., keeps us quite busy. So busy, in fact, that we forget to practice the delivery of the talk. We find ourselves peering down at our audience, presenting the content for the first time up while at the podium. We are in fact practicing on our audience and this is definitely not a best practice.
How should we fix this approach? Some examples of evidence are really powerful when they are numbers, but instead of drowning our audience with too many numbers, we can select a gripper and use a very big font to isolate out that one number. We then talk to that number and explain what it means. If we want to use line charts or trend analysis, then one chart per slide is a good rule. We don’t split the visual concentration of our audience. We speak to the significance of the trend, knowing that our audience can see the trend line for themselves.
To improve our communication effectiveness, we go one step further and we tell stories about these numbers. Who was involved, where, when and what happened. We recall stories more easily than masses of data, so the evidence and context are more easily transferred. This helps to get us around to the WHY of our talk, the key point we want the audience to absorb. And we practice the delivery over and over until we are comfortable we have the cadence right. We recall Professor Albert Mehrabian’s study about the importance of not just what we say, but how we say it. Emphasising particular words, adding gestures for strengthening key points, engaging our audience by using eye contact, allowing pauses so ideas can sink in and reducing distractions so our actual words are absorbed.
Structure, rehearsal, storytelling and congruent delivery combine to create a powerful success formula for presentations.
Action Steps
Our mental approach to our activities determines our success. We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point.
We know we have to make a presentation, so we get straight into the details and logistics, without spending even a moment on our proper mindset for the activity. Given we are putting our personal and professional brand out there for all to see, you would recognise this was a fairly important opportunity to get it right.
The mindset game is a critical one, especially if we are nervous about giving presentations. Confidence is paired with credibility in the presentation game and we have to exude both. We may be very unsure, nervous, even petrified but we must never show that side to our audience. Hesitation kills the message delivery and therefore the impact.
Often we think that our wondrous content will carry the day, that we can be hopeless presenters, but somehow it won't matter. There are few subjects where we are the font of all knowledge and therefore everyone else has to put up with our ineptitude.
Normally, we are competing for the attention of our audience. Social media has made a hell for presenters because within two seconds our audience can escape to any number of other more interesting worlds. People are becoming used to multi-tasking, reading their Facebook feed, while they are doing something else like listening to us.
We need to have a powerful faculty to compete with the wonders of the Internet. A big part of our appeal is our message’s worth and the delivery of that worth. Both are required. To get the right combination, we need to sell that we are confident in what we're saying and our content is valuable. This means we are able to deliver the talk without having to read the text. We can talk to key points in front of us or up on the screen. This is different from burying your head in text notes and not engaging your audience. To have the confidence to work the room while speaking, means you have to know the content. You created it or adjusted what someone else put together for you.
Start with a powerful opening, including the key message captured in your conclusion. Isolate out 3-5 key points so make your argument and support them with evidence. Design both your first close and your second close for after the Q&A.
You have managed your schedule well, so that there has been ample opportunity to practice the delivery. People who are spending all their time on the making the slides
forget they have to rehearse the delivery for an audience. They usually prefer to practice on their audiences, then wonder why the whole thing was very flat with no engagement of their audience.
In the weeks leading up to the talk we are the thinking about what we want to say and how we might say it, we are combing the media and books for juicy quotes and examples to back up what we are saying. We are playing it out in our mind's eye. During this mental imagining, we see ourselves as very confident and successful - we are predicting our success by seeing it before we even do it. We are seeing the audience nodding and agreeing with what we say. We can see ourselves enjoying the moment and feel in full control.
When we have rehearsed, we know the timing, the cadence of the talk. We know where to pause, which words to hit harder than other to emphasize our key points. We are confident on the flow of our talk and with this knowledge we can now relax and enjoy the process rather than dreading it.
Action Steps
We may not have the chance to give that many public presentations in a year, but usually we will have some common themes which we can speak on. As businesspeople, we will have our areas of expertise and experience and based on those attributes, the hosts will invite us to present. Basically, in the lull between hostilities, we do nothing and just wait for the next chance to speak. If we want to improve as presenters, that passive approach doesn’t make any sense. There are a number of things we should be doing between presenting gigs.
Further researching our expertise areas should be a constant item for us. We are daily looking for things in the media, in journals and on social media which we can collect and stash away for when we need it. We can’t put it in the shoe box like our tax receipts, because we need to be able to find it when we need it. So a simple sorting system is required, so that we can extract what we have found, when the occasion presents itself.
We need an idea collection system as well. At different times we get some genius inspiration about one of our topics and then that thought is totally overtaken by the next thought and then lost forever. Instead, we need a place where we can quickly grab that thought and keep it for later when we need it. Ideas pop up at the most unlikely times, so we need something with us all the time. Usually, our phones have apps suitable for that quick notation we need. Again, we need a basic filing system, so that we can locate that excellent insight, observation or idea.
We may have a great amount of knowledge and experience on certain topics, but those searching for speakers may never know we exist. This is where we need to be constantly making any effort to alert others that we know lots about a few things. I was reminded of how important this whole “be found” thing is recently. Ironically, we were doing leadership training for a large consulting firm and had been doing it for quite a while. One day, out of the blue on LinkedIn, I received a message from a junior person in that firm asking about whether I could speak to a conference they were holding. In the note to me, it was mentioned that two people who knew me had recommended me for the gig.
I was happy to be considered, but confused as to why the connection had come through this circuitous route? I have given over 550 public speeches, pump out six podcasts and three TV shows a week, have written the book Japan Presentations Mastery, have 27,000 followers on LinkedIn and have published thousands of articles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe the person doing the research was hopeless. Maybe it was Covid, where public presentations basically vanished, I don't know, but it really highlighted for me how invisible we all are. Anyway, we have to make a positive effort to be found and we have to calculate in that the designated researchers may be sub-standard, so we need to do even more to be found.
Also, we should always try and video our presentations. This provides us with material for our “show reel” where we can select the bits and pieces to show a prospective speaking gig host our goods. As I mentioned, the chances to speak in a year are relatively limited for most of us, so we need to produce some proof that we are the one they need for the next speaking spot. Videos can be edited and flashed up to make us look even more amazing than we already are and they can be on our websites, on YouTube or sent to the hosts, when they inquire about speaking to their audience.
We shouldn’t be too snooty about taking speaking gigs either. Imagining you will save it all up for the big stage and be totally awesome is wishful thinking. We should grab every spot we can get, however humble, so that we build our craft. We should also keep notes on where we went well and where we need to improve, so that the real time insights are not lost in a busy life. A lot of little events can help hone our skills to really shine at the big events. As I have mentioned a million times, having incredible data to share doesn't mean your presentation is going to be spectacular. The brilliant content won’t save you from decimating your audience with ums and ahs, or a monotone, boring, wooden delivery.
Speaking in front of others, in this Age of Distraction and this Era of Scepticism, means the act of presenting has never been harder. Audiences are well equipped with their gateway to the internet in their hand. In the first ten seconds, if you sound dull, they bolt and don't wait. Also, the “fake news” era has driven up the scepticism scale people are gauging us by when speaking. The bar has never been higher for public speakers. That means we have to become Masters of the Mechanics of speaking at the very least. Great content is meaningless, if no one is taking any note and you have lost control of their attention
So, between major speaking gigs, we have work to do. We should be in a constant state of prep, always anticipating our next chance will emerge and making sure that we will be more than ready to take that opportunity.