Whether we asking to give a talk or asked to present, we need an audience. The onus is on the meeting hosts to take care of the logistics of the venue and the associated tech needed to carry out the presentation. We cannot leave everything to them though, because our personal brand is tied up with the success of the event. Now “success” can be defined in many ways, but having a venue space for fifty people and having five people turn up, wouldn’t strike too many people as a triumph. This would be more like an embarrassment. We naturally want to get our message out to as many people as possible and so we want to maximise the audience size.
There are a couple of hooks for us to pull an audience for our talk. A key one is the title of the talk. This can sometimes be a talk title which must be approved by the organisers or you may be free to choose the one you prefer. If we look at newspaper, magazine or any media advertising headlines, there is a real skill in getting these titles to grab people’s attention. Most speakers are not trained copywriters. They never imagine they need to enlist the help of a copywriter to help with creating the presentation title. So we are all in the DIY school of speaker copywriting.
The best title selection will revolve around a number of factors, such as the content of the talk or the nature of the audience. Think of the title as a hook, to snag interest from potential attendees. What title would locate the sweet spot of both appealing to those interested in the topic and a compelling offer, to inspire the punters to turn up to the speech. The title cannot be too long, in the same way that headlines are kept brief. How can we get the explanation of the content and the hook, into as few words as possible.
Last week, I talked about how to use the Balloon Brainstorming Method to create your speech content. The construction of the talk I explained, starts with the punchline, crafted in as few words as possible, in order to drive clarity. I also went through how to create the base content sectors, which are the bones of the talk. Having done all of that, we then create the opening piece. This is there to smash through all the clutter in people’s minds, when they enter the venue, to hear our talk. The title is often best taken from that opening piece. We don’t use it word for word, but we look for the strongest hook therein, to finally create the talk title. We only have a few words available for that, so each word must really outperform for us.
I was recently asked to give a talk, but received no great guidance on the topic. The host wanted to pull an audience. So I thought about what is a common topic that would attract as many people as possible to attend. I chose “public speaking” because this freaks most people out fairly universally, across all cultures, ages and gender ranges.
I also have a lot of experience and am an expert on this topic, so I have supreme confidence to talk to an audience about it. This sounds like bragging, but we must have expertise and real confidence to stand up in front of others and pontificate. If you don’t have that, then please spare the rest of us the train wreck masquerading as your talk.
I used my Balloon Brainstorming methodology for the content creation. Finally I had to create the talk title. I had come up with 15 subtopics, which would be too many for the time allowed to cover, so I needed to trim that down.
I decided to go with twelve topics, because it is a substantial number, but doable in the time granted to me. So, I started writing out possible titles, to see if I could find one that would resonate. In the end, I came up with a title using alliteration as a means of grabbing attention. The hook was The “Terrible Twelve” Typical Errors That Presenters Make And How To Fix Them. I was pushing the boundaries on title length, but I liked the alliteration of “The Terrible Twelve Typical” components in the title. Key words were Typical, Twelve, Terrible, Presenters and Fix. Anyone reading that title would have a clear idea of the value of the talk. If they had an issue with presenting, they would feel this would be a talk providing substantial value, through its clear coverage of the topic.
The next step was to flesh out, in a few sentences, the content of the talk giving the audience a taste of what will be covered. This will be the text to accompany the title, when the hosts advertise the talk. Again, we only have a few sentences to work with, because there are always space limitations when advertising the talk. We should have some word count indication from the event sponsors, of how much we can say, when we are writing this piece. This overview has to reek with value to the audience and should cover the key pain points associated with the topic.
Finally, we need a customised Bio to go with the talk. It also will have a limitation on length, so only the highlights associated with your being an expert on this subject can be covered. It is not a job application, so don’t send in your modified CV. This has to be crafted by you as power text, not a shopping list of bullet points. We want to build our personal brand and establish our credentials to talk on this subject. Remember many more people will read about you, than will ever be able to attend the actual event. This is a free kick, advertising you to the world. So, what do you want people to know about what a legend you are?
A request came to me recently asking me to speak to an audience. So my first question was, “what would you like me to speak about?”. The answer was fairly broad. Actually, that is good and bad. Good, because there is plenty of scope to tackle various subjects, but bad because it is rather vague and obtuse. Where to start? I absolutely won’t be searching for previous slide decks on related subjects or thinking about the slides I could create on the subject. In this regard, I am in the minority of presenters. This is the minority you want to be in, because that slide first crowd is categorically not the group you want any part of.
When we are tasked to give a talk, how to do we work out what to speak about? A technique I always use when brainstorming about anything is the idea balloon brainstorming method. I will have a problem I need to solve. I need a system that generates the best possible ideas I can come up with and at hyper speed. Maybe someone else has better ideas, but they usually aren’t around when I need them, so I have to work it out by myself.
The first step is to use paper and pen. This is old school I know, but there is something about the creative process for me that works best on paper. I am also a visually oriented learner, so being able to “see” the ideas on paper works well for me too. This is me and you may be different. My point is to know what does work for you in the first place and try and master that system, rather than just fumbling around in the dark.
I write the key word or phrase in the middle of the sheet and draw a circle around it, an idea balloon type of look. Then I think about what are the related elements to this subject. This is at a high level in this first instance. Say I was going to give a talk on presenting. The center of the balloon would be the word “presenting”. Each element related to this topic would be written and then a circle drawn around it, creating idea balloons, with connecting lines drawn back to the center balloon. Elements might include “topic selection”, “preparation”, “delivery”, “audience analysis”, “common mistakes”.
Each of these elements would then be transferred to individual separate sheets of paper and each word goes in the center of its page and the process repeated. The order is important. For example, I need to understand who I am talking to before I plan anything. So I start with “audience analysis”, then drill down to the elements related to that which might include new sub-balloons such as, “gender split”, “expertise level”, “age demographic”, “industry”, “language fluency” etc. These would be points I would ask the organisers about, before I even started the speech preparation. I need to know at what level to pitch my talk – are they experts or amateurs or a mixture. This selection would normally be enough information and I wouldn’t need to drill down any further.
For other elements, I would want to go deeper though. For example, “topic selection”, would be the next logical step. I would place that in the centre of a new page and then start adding the sub-elements. This would include topics such as “topicality”, “data availability”, “my angle”, “my expertise”, “audience value factor”, “audience interest”. Taking each sub-element, I can go deeper again. On a fresh sheet of paper, I could place “topicality” in the middle and start building up ideas circling them into balloons on the page. For example, “Covid-19 health concerns”, “business disruption”, “working from home”, “isolation”, “staff retention issues”, “mental health”, “suicide increases”, “leadership issues”, “productivity”, “cash flow”, etc. As you see the list can grow very quickly for some sub-elements.
The beauty of this system is the combination of breadth of the topic possibilities and depth achieved with each topic, all being done again at a rapid clip. In ten minutes, you have multiple sheets of paper with a lot of ideas created from which to start making some selections. The next stage is tougher however, as you have to start making decisions on what you will select from the numerous possibilities. The talk has a time limit, so there has to be a sieving of the gold nuggets, that will have the greatest impact on the audience and provide the highest value. Remember, these are our personal and professional reputations we are putting on the line every time we present.
Once the topic is decided, I need to write a single sentence or phrase, which encapsulates what I believe about this topic. This is the punchline and should be completed in as few words as possible. I am forced to be clear. This is usually quite difficult, but the effort put in will help to make the conclusion we craft well worth it. The next step is gathering evidence to support the conclusion. There will be sub-chapters inside the talk, to arrange the evidence into a flow, that is easy for the audience to navigate. We need to remember that every five minutes we must switch up the presentation content, to keep our audience in our grip.
The last thing we design is the start of the presentation. This is where we build that all important first impression with the audience. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism this opening has some heavy lifting to do. We have to establish our credibility to deal with the sceptics and smash through all the clutter clogging up the brains of our assembled audience. It has to be powerful or the masses will be scrambling for their phones to escape from us.
Outlining our presentation is where we start. The assembly of the slides we will use comes last. It is important to get the order right. Do so and you will always come across as a polished professional when you speak.
You see it. The presenter publicly self-immolates. They might butcher the start, get lost in the weeds of their content or be put to the sword at the end in the Q&A. They can’t engage with their audience, are incoherent and quivering the whole time. It is a train wreck on display. Reputations and credibility are flayed alive. Here is the irony – they chose it to be like this. They made a series of poor decisions about this presentation and then reaped the whirlwind of total humiliation.
Rehearsing the presentation takes time. Time which could be devoted to adding massive content, multiple fonts and gaudy colours to the slides. This is why failures fail. They ignore logic and decide that practicing on their audience is much more efficient. It is not terribly effective though. The long term damage from short term decisions is substantial when you thrust yourself into the public eye. If you don’t have big brackets of time available, then just work on pieces at a time, over time. That means start early, so there is no mad rush at the end.
I made a genius decision once to prepare my presentation on the flight from Osaka to Sydney. No sleep and subsequently plenty of irritability upon landing made for a combustible cocktail. When someone in my audience had the temerity, the audacity, the gall to challenge my assertions in the presentation, it didn’t go well. I vowed NEVER to try that exercise in efficiency ever again.
Turning up just before kick off, to find there is some technical issue with your slides or the laptop or the audio is a life shortening experience. Always make the time to go early. I was giving a presentation to the Japan Market Expansion Competition and dutifully brought along my USB to plug into their laptop. Their Microsoft environment didn’t like my Mac presentation layout, so it changed the whole thing. I arrived early and found myself sweating like a maniac, as I tried to fix every single slide before the start. I finished with one minute to go, but I was a nervous wreck. If I am not using my own laptop, I go even earlier now.
First impressions start from the moment the organisers advertise the event and include elements of your bio. People are forming biases and opinions about you, which they are going to size up against what they see in front of them. Get there early, check the tech and then gracefully mingle with the punters. Do your best to be charming. Being an introvert, that is no easy task for me. Do your best to schmooze people in the crowd before you start and build supporters in the room.
Don’t eat too much at the lunch or dinner prior to your talk. Try instead to engage your table colleagues, again building rapport. You can always eat later if you are starving. When they call your name stride confidently and effortlessly to the stage. Have zero interaction with the laptop – don’t even touch it. Instead get straight into your opening. You don’t need any slides to begin with, so concentrate of creating a powerful and positive first impression. Once you have done that, then you can look down at your laptop and start the slide deck rolling. By the way, many balding presenters proffer a brilliant view of their sparse, patchy pate, as they lean forward over the laptop, fiddling with the machine. Don’t be one of them.
Start off with a power opening to grab attention. Remember, we are all self-focused and supremely interested in what happened to us this morning, what we need to do after the talk and what is coming up for us tomorrow. The speaker is competing with all of these high value items in the minds of the audience. We need to supplant all of that inner-focus with our ideas, views, suggestions and recommendations. Make sure to raise your voice tone from the get go, to set the energy level at the right point to carry through to the rest of the proceedings. It is very hard to start soft, then work your way up, so start strong then vary the tone from there.
Keep your eyes on the crowd the whole time. Read their faces. Are they buying what you are saying, are they bored, are they surreptitiously or furtively looking at their phones under the table, are they nodding in agreement? This is why, if some helpful venue flunkey turns the lights down, so that you are dominated by the screen, you should stop speaking immediately and ask for the lights to be brought back up. In my experience, the moment those lights go down, a big proportion of a Japanese audience is lost, because they are sleeping. It seems to be a bit like the rhythmic rocking of the trains here, that induces slumber. Lights go down and off they go Pavlovian like, to the land of Nod. I have seen that scenario play out a number of times here. I find stopping speaking for about ten seconds interrupts the pattern and then resuming with a powerful burst of energy and voice volume wakes them right up again.
Keep the main body to around three major points in a thirty minute talk. Pile on the evidence though, because we are always speaking to a room full of sceptics recently force fed a diet of “fake news”. Save the heavy detail for the Q& A, if you need it. Keep the points clear and accessible, pitched at the level of expertise of your audience. Forego all the acronyms and jargon which appeal to the cognoscenti, if the audience are mere mortal ordinary punters.
Don’t get into arguments in the Q&A. There may be hot questions hurled forth by provocateurs, self-aggrandising show offs, flouting their knowledge in front of the great unwashed. Answer them to the best of your ability and then say sweetly, “let’s continue this discussion after the talk. Who has the next question” and move on, giving them no more eye contact or recognition for the rest of the talk.
Always prepare a second close after the Q&A, so that you dominate the last item to linger in the memory banks of your audience. The conversation triggered by a final question can be completely tangential or even totally unrelated to what you were there to talk about. Don’t let someone hijack your purpose. Seize back control of the point of this presentation, by unfurling your final close. Thank the audience and then elegantly descend from the stage to mingle with the masses. Leave everything on the podium and pack the gear up at the very end.
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.