Vacuum Up Cool Stuff for Your Presentations

Do you have one of those diaries that includes a daily quotation on the page?  Or maybe you subscribe to a service that sends you uplifting quotes?  I have noticed that social media is also a great hunting ground for cool quotations too, as people share them around.  We probably note these and then move on with our lives.  For the presenter though, these are gold.  We need to be collecting these sound bites to lob into our presentations.

We might kick off the talk with a pithy quote or perhaps end with one.  This is a great way to start proceedings by setting the intellectual frame of reference for the audience.  Get them thinking and pondering about what we are saying. Ending with a great quote is like an excellent desert after a great meal, we leave feeling better.

Conveniently there are books of quotations in general and then there are collections of quotes from leading individuals.  If Winston Churchill had received a buck for every time he has been quoted, the sum would dwarf the wealth of the robber barons from Silicon Valley.  The point is, there is no shortage of material, only a shortage of imagination and awareness about using it.

The daily news is usually a tedious and depressing rendition of distant disasters, deadly deeds and dirty tricks being orchestrated somewhere on the planet.  It is also a good source of interesting tidbits we can inject into our talks to assist us in making a key point in our argument. Instead of just using it for the wrapping up of the vegetable peelings and fish bones, scan the pages for more gold. I find using a pen to mark an article helps me to locate it later and then cut out the piece that attracted my interest.  Then it is peelings bound, as it heads off to the trash.

We need to be looking for evergreen tidbits, because news rapidly becomes irrelevant.  We may not have a convenient speaking spot looming on the horizon to coordinate with our little explosive.  Capture them for later use.  You might be thinking, I don’t fancy trying to store all these random bits of newsprint, getting dusty and tatty somewhere in the house.  These days we can take a photo with our phone, upload that to a cloud corral like Evernote and store it there.  Usually we are after short bits of fierce and fiery additions to our text, to illustrate a point we are making, so we don’t need the whole article.

Other speakers are also occasionally a good source of quotes and stories.  Let me give an example of one I heard recently.  Mr Nagato, the head of Japan Post was relating a tale about former Prime Minister Mori.  Prime Minister Mori probably spent more time playing rugby than studying English when he was a lad, so his linguistic challenges were many. 

Japan was hosting a G7 meeting and he had to greet all the heavy hitters as they arrived.  His minders had been working him over, to be able to get out a couple of simple phrases without the aid of interpreters. You can sense impending disaster already can’t you!  So the phrases were “How are you” to which most people would say “I am well thank you” or something similar and Mori would then reply  “me too”.  This is the normal give and take and nothing too exotic or overly ambitious.

So Bill Clinton rolls into town and rather than following the script Mori says “Who are you” by mistake, to which Bill says “Hilary’s Husband” and without missing a beat, Mori says “Me too”.  Bill carries on with “Good luck” and moves on inside.

Now that was a great story and Nagato san had very cleverly worked that into his topic, which had nothing to do with that G7 episode.  We all laughed and felt good about Nagato san and his talk.  This was no accident.  He had calculated this as a way to relax his audience and win them over to his side. It worked like a charm.

My point is, we are all swimming through a daily storm tide of quotes, tidbits, curiosities and stories which we can purloin and insert into our presentations.  This will make us more memorable and spice up our talks. All we have to do is open our eyes, start looking for them, then reach out and nail them down for future insertion.

How To Liven Up A Speech You Have To Read

Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches.  In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement.  We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity.  Politicians have learnt they usually get themselves into trouble when they are adlibbing, compared to when they are reading from a carefully prepared and fully vetted speech. 

Do I recommend reading the speech?  No, but sometimes the stakes are too high or the situation demands you read the whole thing. My Japanese is not perfect, but I prefer to engage my audience than lose them by having to look down to read the content.  Depending on the formality of the situation though, I might choose to read it.  How can we liven this process up though?

What could my friend do when he was reading his speech to make it more engaging for his audience. He could have departed from the text and just spoken directly to the audience, while maintaining full eye contact for some of the sentences.  Looking down at our speech means we have to break eye contact and this creates a barrier between us and the audience.  By having a few sections where we replace sentences in the text with bullet points, to which we can speak will give us that chance to make continuous eye contact with members of the audience.  His Japanese ability was sufficient for him to do that.  For most people, they will be operating in their native language anyway.

We can do a similar thing with slides.  We might show a picture, a graph or some key words and just talk to them, rather than read from the notes.  The visual aspect supports what we are saying, so we lessen the burden on our words to sell the message.  If we are doing it in a foreign language like my friend, we can have the perfect grammatical clarity needed up on screen to describe what we want to say and then just deliver the same key message in our own more natural if imperfect language.

He could also have used stories more in his speech.  Stories engage our audience and we can transport them to specific locations, seasons of the year or times of the day through telling our stories.  They key thing with stories is to tell something about locations or people with which the audience will be familiar.  I heard a great one the other day from the head of Japan Post Mr. Masatsugu Nagato.  He was speaking to the Economist Conference Network in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and doing so in English.  He told an amusing story about when previous Japanese Prime Minister Mori met US President Bill Clinton when japan was hosting a G7 meeting in Okinawa.  The point I want to make here is his audience were familiar with Mori, Bill and Okinawa.  We should do the same.  Try to get your audience seeing the scene in their mind’s eye.

Rhetorical questions are also great for getting engagement.  When we ask a question of our audience, we are forcing them to concentrate on what we are saying and think of the answer.  Depending on the occasion, sometimes it is hard to know if the speaker really expects an answer or not.  That is the ideal situation.  We want to create some tension in the room because that creates connectivity between the speaker and the listeners.  By throwing out questions we get everyone on the same wave length, at the same time and that builds our connection with our audience. We don’t need twenty of these, just a few will do the trick.  For example, in a twenty minute speech, probably one every five minutes or so would work well.  Remember, we need to step it up in our speech about every five minutes to keep everyone attentive.  This might be using questions, employing the slide deck or telling a story.

So we don’t have to become captives to the text and lose our engagement with our listeners.  These have been some simple ideas we can use to keep the talk interesting and engaging.  It doesn’t matter if you are speaking in a foreign language or your native tongue.  These ideas will work a treat.

The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance

The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over.  We pack our stuff up and get back to work.  Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention.  The memory of having done the presentation quickly fades and we find we have lost the opportunity to build on our experience.  We usually don’t get all that much frequency with our business presentations and so every shot we get is a great chance to grab lessons from it and improve.  But we don’t.

We don’t because it wasn’t factored into the planning at the start.  If it is an afterthought, it will get overcome by all the other pressing matters requiring our attention the moment we hit the door of the office.  So as part of the planning process we should include a review of what we did, compared to what we planned to do.  We need to gauge how it went and which parts we thought resonated more with the audience. 

When is the best time to do that?  Immediately the presentation is over.  Don’t organize your schedule so that you have to go into client or internal meetings straight after the presentation.  Head for a coffee shop, sit down, relax a bit and start making some notes.  If you are a high energy presenter like me, you will be drained at the end of the presentation anyway and a brief rest is a good idea.  I leave nothing on the table when I present, I try to put it all out there and give every ounce of energy and passion I possess.  It is exhausting.

So go back to the presentation in your mind. Were you able to get there early, check out the venue and meet audience members as they filed in, getting to know about their interest, why they came, gauging their level of expertise on the subject?  Did the MC quote from your carefully crafted introduction or did you have to fill in the missing bits yourself. How was the opening? Did it go as planned?  How was your speaking speed – did you speed up or were you able to keep it at an even, easy to follow pace?  Were you using voice modulation to keep the audience interested or was it all the same strength from beginning to end?

Were you consistently making six second eye contact with members of your audience, so you could connect with them, sell them on your key points and judge their reaction to what you were saying?  Were you able to use your gestures to emphasise your argument?  Were you able to keep the order of your key points after the opening?  If you were using a slide deck, were you dominating the screen or was it dominating you.

Were you controlling the proceedings well, marshaling the various stages of the presentation.   For example, did you go into your first close, receive the applause and then call for questions, nominating how many minutes there were for questions?  Were you remembering to paraphrase the questions, so that everyone could hear them. Did you control the final impression by adding your second close, so that the last thing the audience heard was what you wanted them to hear?  Did you come down off the podium and mix with your audience at the end to extend your personal brand?

Having done this checklist of how it was supposed to flow, then think about how it went.  Were people nodding to your points, were the questions hostile or more on point wanting more detail?  How many people stayed to talk with you?  How many compliments did you receive which were genuine as opposed to flattery?  How did you feel it went?

Now ask yourself, what did I do that was good?  Then after listing these up start asking yourself, how could I make this better for next time.  This will include general points which will be relevant for any topic and any occasion. Do not get into beating yourself up over what you perceived went wrong.  Keep the momentum going forward, keep it focused on the positive.

If you were able to record your talk, then certainly play it back and have a close listen to it.  If you were able to video it, even better. Seeing and hearing yourself is a great antidote to the paucity of presentations you may be able to give in a year.  These records help to keep you focused on improvement.

Don’t bother asking what people thought.  You will get a whole bunch of uninformed opinions from people who hardly ever give presentations.  If you want to get expert opinion, then invite an expert to attend and have them give you professional level advice.  The average punter will only give you critique and work on destroying your confidence.

This whole exercise will probably take about 40 minutes. Time enough to relax over a coffee or a tea and reflect on where you can improve.  Make sure you write it down and keep it as a record, which you can consult before your next presentation.  Keep doing this and you will definitely improve.