Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Three

We are continuing our in depth series on mastering presentation visuals.

When you have a presentation to give, always get to the venue early and run your slides through their projector, on their screen, in that venue. You can spot trouble immediately and make any final adjustments you need to make there and then. Often the environments are different in a way that is not helpful.  This happens when you are using different computers. For example, at work I am using a Windows environment but at home I have a Mac environment.  When I do things on PowerPoint on my Mac and then I take it to my desktop at work, it looks different on screen to my expectation.  Something in the formatting processes changes.  It is a mysterious thing to me, as to why it changes, but it changes.

So be very careful when you are shifting formats through using other people’s computers.  Particularly if you are taking a USB, a disk, etc., and you stick it in the venue’s computer and then suddenly, boom!  All your formatting has changed and you’ve got no time to do much about it.  So always go early if you are going to use their computer, with your USB or whatever, and check, check, check. 

The visuals must have some relevancy to what you are presenting. Make sure it is not surplus or distracting or competing with the message.  If you have something that is really exciting on the screen, very interesting, make sure you, the presenter, doesn’t get lost in the proceedings.  Particularly if you are presenting video, be very careful that the video doesn’t overrun what you’re doing.  Don’t allow the video to take over the whole presentation.  Use video sparingly. 

It’s sad for me to see CEO’s, of major corporations, get up there and go straight to the video.  They always start off their talk very passively, because they know they are just there to introduce the corporate Propaganda Department’s efforts.  They miss such a huge opportunity to build a dynamic first impression, to connect with their audience, to really put their stamp on the talk.  They go straight to the video, because they don’t like presenting. Or they’re not confident. Or they think somehow, that sort of dross corporate video is going to be so riveting for an audience, that the video alone is going to sell the whole message.  No, no, no. You sell the message.  That is job number one or the speaker. The video is a slave.  The video is a servant to you.  Use it as an adjunct, as supplement, not as a substitute for you.  There is no substitute for you actually.  You are the main thing and make yourself the main thing. 

Electronic backup is good.  Depending on the event, it is not a bad thing to have a second laptop there, primed and ready to go.  Because things do go wrong.  Have a back up USB with the presentation there.  Things do go wrong.  Recently I was at a presentation, and the actual IT guy himself was doing part of the presentation and he couldn’t get his presentation equipment to work.  So now we audience members, have got a semi sparse balding pate confronting us. His head is crouched down over the keyboard, like a mechanic under the bonnet of a car, trying to fix the engine.   His patchy, balding pate is facing us, as he is trying to get the computer to work.  Not his best look probably.  Things do go wrong, even for IT people who are experts in this area.  So don’t think it’s always going to be perfect. Arrive early and be ready for trouble.

Don’t let the visuals capture you.  Capture your audience instead.  How do we do that?  With an audience, there are lots of things we can look at.  We can turn around and look at the screen behind us.  We can look down at our screen on our laptop in front of us.  We can look at our notes on the lecturn.  Don’t do that.  We should not be looking much at any of those things.  We should be looking at our audience. 

We should be breaking our audience up into pockets of six sectors.  Baseball has the answer.  You’ve have left field, center field and right field.  So there’s three basic brackets that you can break your audience up into.  Audience on my left, audience at my center, audience on my right.  I’ve also noticed they have what they call the inner field and the outer field. So that inner field might be the front half of the venue.  The back half is my outer field.  So now left, center right.  I’ve got front and back.  That creates six pockets. 

The key is to try and involve the audience members sitting in all six pockets.  Don’t just look continuously at the left side of your audience.  Similarly, don’t just look at the right side of your audience.  Don’t look at the front row and ignore everyone else.  We have all seen speakers do this and they are disenfranchising large swathes of their audience as a result.

Take your eye contact and involve every single group throughout your presentation.  Try and look at an individual sitting on one of those sectors, for about six seconds. Less than that means it looks like fake eye contact.  Too much more than that six seconds and it gets a bit intrusive. So six seconds is a good enough period of time to be making a comment. You have been looking at an audience member in one pocket and then you switch and look to another pocket.  Don’t do it by numbers like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in order, left to right.  Break it up.  Look left to right randomly.  Look for different sectors so it is not predictable. 

Keep that audience eye contact and occasionally glance at the screen, but keep the main contact with your audience.  Remember, the audience is the key thing.  Your monitor of your laptop will tell you what is on screen, so you can refer to it without having to look backwards at the big screen.  Although, sometimes for me, I prefer to present without glasses. I will sometimes use the big screen to just check what is being shown rather than my monitor on my laptop.   But I try not to spend too much time looking at the big screen.  Just glance at it and talk to my audience. 

We will continue on next week with Part Four.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Two

Here we are back with Part Two of the exciting journey into how to use visuals when presenting.  Given how straight forward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it?  Let’s keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing.

Bar graphs are great.  They make it visually easy to compare items.  For certain, heavy numbers focused presentations, you want to compare different variables using bars. 

Line charts are also clear, quick to understand and show change over time. When you want to compare two or three items over time, it is very easy to see this one is up and that one is down, these are flat.  Try to avoid more than three lines though, because it gets very confusing very quickly.  Simplicity rules when dealing with numbers.

Pie charts are also fantastic for showing the parts of a whole.  What is the share of something?  As long as there’s not too many slivers, then a pie chart works well.  When you have too many slices of the pie, it gets very hard to fathom the relativities between items.  For that task bar charts or line graphs are better. 

People still manage to get this wrong. The real key is to only show one big graph per slide, if possible or two graphs, if a comparison is needed.  As soon as we put up more information on the slide than that, the information becomes very small and the mind is assaulted by too much data at one time. Keep it minimalist and clear.

With lighting, be very careful when the room gets set up.  Get there early is the rule. Honestly, I am yet to meet any people who set up the rooms, who also do presenting themselves.  They are just told by their boss, “You set up the room.  Put the chairs here.  Put the lectern there.  Put the mic there”.  Particularly at hotels, I notice that a lot of times hotel staff, very unhelpfully, will turn off all the lights in the room. The whole stage area is black and the screen is the main light source.  No, no, no. 

You want the lights on that audience.  You want to see your audience.  You want to be looking at their faces.  What is their reaction to what I am saying?  Am I boring them?  Are they with me?  Are they nodding?  Are they shaking their head?  Are they distracted, looking at their phones? You must see your audience. 

So keep the room lights up on the audience.  Do not let anyone turn it down.  If they do, then stop immediately and request they put them back on again.  If you have to turn it down at all, turn it down very, very little.  Try and keep the room lit.  Around the screen area itself, it’s good if you can actually have the lights off just above the screen.  Then the screen becomes easier to read.  But definitely leave the lights on you.  When they shut the lights down, you are now in darkness, so you are invisible to an audience.  Just a minor voice in the dark.  No, have the lights on you, spotlights on you, so the audience can see your face. Your face has got so much power of persuasion.  You can add so much more credibility to the message, through using your face, your gestures, your body language.  Don’t miss the opportunity, make sure that the audience can see all of that. 

I am struggling to think of too many venues that manage to isolate out the lights above a screen.  But today with most projectors, the screens are pretty good, even with all the lights on, so it’s usually not such a big deal.  And again, if you design your visuals with that in mind, you’re not going to be too dependent on too much information on the screen.  When we have a particularly bright room, there might be a lot of natural light.  Then often you have a slide with light background with very dark text as the contrast.  That works very well.  So the contrast of dark fonts on a light background in a light room can work.  Or sometimes in a dark room you might go the other way and have a dark background with white and even white bolded text on a screen to really stand out and have the contrast. 

Colors on screen are tricky. You rarely see people using them well. Colors like black, blue, green work very well on a screen.  They are the best colors.  Stay away from orange, grey and particularly red.  Black and blue work together well as a contrast.  Green and black also work well together as a contrast.  They’re good colors to mix and match on the screen: black and blue, green and black.  Red can be hard to see.  In fact, I was at a presentation not that long ago on marketing.  Quite good content and reasonably well delivered, but the screen!  Dark blue background, red on dark blue.  No one could read it very easily.  So avoid red.  It is hard to read on a screen. 

Also don’t go crazy and try and have some sort of rainbow federation going on.  Putting all the colors up there.  It is too distracting and too confusing.  Remember, you are the message.  You.  Your face, your body, your gestures, your body language, your energy. You are the message, not what is on that screen. The screen must be a slave to you.  It is a servant to you.  Not the other way around.

So when we are preparing, one of the tricky things is we often sit around in front of a screen.  We are at a very close distance when we are preparing the visuals.  Then off we go to give the presentation and we are in a big room, a big venue, with a big screen.  And somehow it doesn’t look like it did when you was preparing it.   And you go, “uh oh”.  Usually that is too late.  When you were preparing your computer has a presentation mode function.  Go to that and then run your slides through that and see how it looks. 

We will continue to go deep with this topic in Part Three next week.

Presentation Visuals Mastery (Part One)

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting.  Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation?  What about visuals?  What’s too much?  What’s too little?  What’s the best way to make this work for me?  Well there’s a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning. 

What about the types of visuals that we need to use?  How many visuals are required?  Some people have very few.  Some people have a lot.  I once gave a five minute presentation and I used for that, I think, about 90 visuals.  Now you might be thinking, 90 visuals in five minutes?  Are you nuts?  Well that particular presentation was a warm up to a keynote speaker.  We’d sponsored the event and for that we got five minutes of stage time.  Now I remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln.  Something along the lines of, if you want me to give a three hour speech I can get up and give it right now.  But if you want a 20 minute speech it will take me three or four weeks to prepare it.  And that’s right.  To give a very long speech, rambling speech is relatively easy.  To give a very concise sharp speech is very tough. 

Five minutes is a really tough time period in which to speak, very hard to have impact.  So in that particular case, I used 90.  I was using a visual every two seconds.  As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen, lots of visuals were just hitting the audience because in that five minutes I needed to get something across about Dale Carnegie Training Japan. 

I wanted to give some visual stimulation, because I didn’t have many words in five minutes to really get in front of that audience with very strong ideas.  So I was using that as a technique.  For that particular case it worked very well. 

Generally speaking, I usually want to use too many visuals, because I am too greedy and I see all these great things I can show people, and I want to show them.  But I really have to pair it down. I have to really discipline myself to really cut them out.  Oh, I really want to use that graph.   Oh that’s a great visual.  No, no, no, no.  Cut it out.  Cut it out.  Try and keep it in some sort of range that works for you depending on what the purpose of your presentation is.  Degree of permanency is something you need to think about.  It might be better to use a handout.  It might be something that is too complex to put up on the screen. 

Unfortunately you often get this.  I worked in the financial sector for a number of years and had to sit through countless presentations of spreadsheets up on screens with numbers that were so tiny, the person standing next to the screen giving the presentation had no clue how to read it themselves and they would say crazy things like, “I know you can’t see this but…”.  Well of course we can’t see the thing, it’s too damn small.  Get those sorts of visuals in the hands of the audience, rather than try to see it on the screen. 

As for the size of the audience, for a very big audience, the visuals may be more important than a small audience.  Think.  Does it back up the content of what you are saying?  How much time have you got to prepare?  Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the PowerPoint or the key note or whatever it is that they are preparing and no time on the rehearsal. 

So the whole balance flips and instead of having a case where you get the presentation structure, content right and then spend time on the rehearsal, delivery practice, it’s all sucked up into the visuals preparation, which is the wrong balance.  Be very cautious about spending all your time on that and not allowing enough time on the actual physical stand up and deliver and practice.  And finally the cost.  Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals or sourcing visuals.  That may not be something you want to do. 

Here’s some guidelines for using visuals.  As it was mentioned before, sometimes less is definitely best.  On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs.  Try to avoid sentences.  If you can, single words, bullet points.    Single words can be very, very powerful.  Just one word or even just one number can be very very impactful. You can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word.  Or just put up a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual.  You don’t have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves. 

What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what’s on the screen.  This is very critical.  We don’t want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you.  Which is where you want them.  And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule. 

If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand that within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated.  Two seconds-that’s not long.  But if it’s more than two seconds it’s probably too complicated.  So think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts or maybe just leaving it out and replacing it with something you can talk to.  Don’t try and have people try and make their way through something very complex on the screen.

Generally, the six by six rule means that again, less is best.  Six words on a line.  Maybe six lines maximum on a screen is good.  Again, keeping it very minimalist.  Six lines or less per visual is probably good.  And then six words across each line probably max.  

With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read.  You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32.  Large font so it’s easy to read if you are at the back of the hall.  In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read.  Whereas serif fonts like Times, Times Roman, which has got a lot of additional fancy work done to them, can be a bit distracting.  Try to use something like Arial or Sans Serif fonts that make it easy to read.   And again, be very very very sparing with all uppercase.  It’s actually screaming at your audience; it’s shouting at your audience when you use strong uppercase like that.  You can use it.  But use it very, very strategically and very practically to make a strong point.  So upper and lowercase is much more balanced.  Be very careful about using a lot or too much of all upper case. 

For visibility, be careful about the overuse of underline.  Yes you can use underline, but use it sparingly.  Bold, yes you can use bold, but the same thing, occasionally.  Italics, yes, but very rarely with italics because again it’s not so easy to read.  You can use them but use them very, very modestly.  

With things like transitions and animations, sometimes it’s good to reveal one concept at a time, because there is only one idea on the screen and then you can talk to that, so you are not competing with a lot of words on the screen.  Try and keep it consistent and simple.  So if you start like that then maybe continue like that. 

Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time, but try not to have it jumping around too much because then people get very confused.  If you are going to have animation where it might be wipe right for example, as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time.  Don’t have one wipe right then the wipe up and the next one is wipe left, next one is something else.  It’s very confusing for an audience.  And wiping left to right is good because that’s how we read.  That makes a lot of sense for people. 

And if we are going to indent on a visual, do it maybe just once on that page.  Don’t have a sentence and a couple of words and a whole bunch of indents.  Just try and keep it as simple as possible.  If you’ve got that much information, whip that over onto another page.  

Pictures are great.  Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  And a nice, nice photograph of something that’s relevant, of a book or picture or whatever.  Nice and people can look at that.  Very simply, they get it.  Two seconds, they’ve got it.  Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image, this picture, to what your talk is about today.

Next week we continue with Part Two of the correct use of visuals and look at graphs, colours, room lighting and some technical nightmares to avoid.

Um, Um, Um, Er, I, Um, Ah, Um...

My former colleague was a notorious “ummer” and “ahher”. “Um, I, um, would, um, like to um, say um, thank you, um, for um, this um, opportunity”. Listening to him was seriously, seriously painful.  Time seemed to freeze over, as it took forever for him to get to the point, which was mostly lost due to dreadful syntax. Your brain basically goes into meltdown mode and you miss the content because you have switched off. The ability to stand before others and express oneself clearly is a basic skill that sadly, is still lacking in many people.

Rambling, mumbling, zero focus on the audience, no power of persuasion, and “I Am the Brand” suicide continue to stunt careers. This is bad enough but some people decide to take it to extremes and really wipe out their career prospects.  When we ladle in constant ums and ahs to our sentences, we have a recipe for disaster on our hands.

My colleague was a world champion, winning the gold medal in this oral hesitation department.  I wasn’t as bad, but I wasn’t a clean skin either.   I found that it was a habit that I didn’t need and which didn’t help me as a professional.  The problem for most people is they don’t know what to do about it. I found a way out of this mess.  I will now share with you a guaranteed formula to end this reign of verbal terror you have potentially been raining down on audiences your entire life.

Experience tells us that off-the-cuff remarks are more likely to produce hesitancy in speech than a prepared presentation. Makes complete sense doesn’t it. It forces speakers to think on their feet, which triggers the dreaded filler words to bridge the gap between getting the brain in gear and cogent words emerging from the mouth.  It seems that for those hard-core ummers and ahhers, it makes little difference whether it is a prepared piece or something spontaneous.  Reading a prepared speech should be easier, because what you have to say is written down there and all you have to do is follow the lines and read it, without having to first think what it is you want to say.  Even so, some people make this another form of torture for an audience, by relentlessly umming and ahhing all the time.  This should be avoided at all cost. No wonder people rate public speaking higher than death in surveys about their worst fears.

These filler words like um and ah give us time to think, but why do we need them? If we know what we want to say, we should just be able to get right into it.  The problem is the way we prepare for speaking in front of others.  Usually, readying a presentation means working on PowerPoint slides for 99.9% of us.  Herein lies the first mistake. Slaves to PowerPoint will never become effective communicators, because the focus is on the data, rather than the messenger. We know from research that how we say something is more important than what we say. Please absorb that sentence again, as I am sure for many people that sounds ridiculous, outrageous, bogus, outlandish and total rubbish.

You may think, “Surely content is king and people will pay more attention to the message than smoke and mirrors used for the presentation”. But this is not the case.  When a presentation’s content and delivery are incongruent, only 7% of the message is heard and 93% is lost due to distraction, caused by how we look and sound.  Professor Mehrabian’s famous study came to this conclusion and in this age of distraction, it is more true now than ever before. How we say it includes how we use our facial expression, voice modulation, eye contact, gestures, posture, pauses etc. No wonder presenters who devote 99.9% of their time to PowerPoint content, at the expense of rehearsing their delivery, are dull, dull, dull. If listeners are only getting 7% of what we are saying, that does not constitute very effective communication.  PowerPoint is not a substitute for good communication — it is merely an aid.

It is not only the dreaded slide deck.  The president of a firm, who at their public presentation immediately launches into a corporate video, joins the ranks of “presentation scoundrels”. This happens more often than it should.  The PR or marketing department, have been coopted to rescue the big boss from actually having to speak much to their audience.  Videos should never take the place of strong communication for key messages. Like PowerPoint, they are just for support, so use them sparingly and make your face the key communication tool, followed by your voice, gestures, pauses and posture as noted.  Using notes, either on paper or through the mechanism of the order of the slides, is perfectly acceptable. Reading those notes is not. Especially if you insist on reading them from the screen to us and doing so with your back toward the audience. 

I attended a presentation where the speaker was well dressed, well groomed, the whole package — until she proceeded to read entirely from her notes. You could hear the entire air of her credibility being sucked out of the room, the moment she started reading. If you know your stuff, unless it is incredibly detailed and technical, you can get by without having to read notes. It was obvious she had not been trained and was not knowledgeable about public speaking.  Don’t be relegated to the dustbin of totally forgettable speakers like her.

We should allow our notes to spark the messages we wish to convey. Prior to delivery, practice, practice, practice! No one expects perfection, so incorrect pronunciation or pauses to consider subsequent remarks are natural and acceptable.

On top of these issues, we make things even worse when the speech delivery is so annoying and therefore distracting, because of all the ums and ahs.  The use of filler words is permissible a few times in a presentation, but the higher the frequency, the tighter the hangman’s noose is being tied around the speaker’s own reputation and personal brand.

Here is the Dr. Greg Story’s rule on avoiding filler words: Practice before you deliver in front of your audience.  Here is how you need to practice.  Decide the first word of each sentence and hit that word hard. Allow no other noise to escape your mouth, before continuing with the next word in the sentence. Once you get to the end of that sentence, SHUT UP.  It is very, very important to purse your lips together at the end of that sentence, so that no sound can escape. Keep repeating this process and there is no possibility of filler words ever being uttered. It takes hours of practice, of course, but I guarantee you this works.

I wasn’t quite in the league of the erstwhile colleague I referred to at the beginning, but I did give him a run for his money at different times. We all do these ums and ahs, because we are trying to fill the vocal vacuum, while we think.  We can think in silence.  We do this during pauses between the points we are making. Pauses are a natural thing and a better alternative to our ums and ahs.  Like me, everyone I have taught this method to has eliminated filler words almost entirely. They followed this simple technique until it became habit — a positive habit.  Pursing, pausing and practicing are the keys to success.