Hey, Stop Fidgeting When Presenting

It has never been tougher to be a speaker. We live in the age of hyper distraction, with instant gratification felt to be too slow.  In fact, “slow phobia” is rampant everywhere and hand held digital device escape hatches abound.  Migrating away from all that distraction, to get people focused on your presentation is hard enough.  Things become more desperate though, when our nervousness starts the chemical adrenaline pumping through our veins. We feel the elevation of our breathing rate and we notice our hands starting to shake.

One of the nasty byproducts of all of this internal pressure and nervousness, is we begin to distract our audience by fidgeting.  Professor Albert Mehrabian’s famous and usually misquoted research, says that we run into problems when what we are saying and how we are saying it don’t match up.  The “how we are saying it” bit is broken into three distinct parts. The actual words, which Mehrabian depressingly found only accounted for seven percent of our communication success.  Body language contributed to thirty eight percent of the messaging and finally how we were dressed and how we looked made up the other fifty-five percent.  Often these numbers are misquoted. Mehrabian’s important caveat about incongruity is not mentioned.   That is to say, when what we say doesn’t match with how we say it, the audience is easily distracted away from the message.

Our words may be painstakingly composed, delivered in a well paced, clear tone.  We may be magnificently turned out for the occasion, just dressed to kill.  Our fidgeting however, is overwhelming everything else. The message radiating out through the fidgeting body language is contradicting the words coming out of our mouth or at least distracting from them.

One of the main culprits in the fidget field are our legs.  We shuffle about aimlessly on the spot.  Or we start striding around the stage looking highly strained and nervous.  We might well remain anchored to the spot, but we are not content with that.  We feel the need to sway our hips about like a mad captain on a rolling pirate ship.  We are rocking and rolling from side to side, all the while drawing attention away from our messages.  

In the same vein, we also fail in the “looking confident” arena.  All of this movement is competing with the words and we don’t want that.  That swaying itself is telling the audience “I am not rock solid about what I am saying, I am unsure, I am nervous about it”. Rather, the legs should be kept straight, with just a slight relaxation behind the knees to unlock the joints. Feel like you want the top of your head to push up into the ceiling. This will make you taller, straighter and give you more physical gravitas.

Another favourite of the failing presenters is to shuffle the direction of their feet around.  When they want to look at the left side of the audience, they shuffle their feet around in that direction. When they want to look at the right side, they shuffle their feet all the way across to the right.  Again, all of this fidgeting, this moving around, is distracting to the audience.  Why do it that way? If we want to look left or right, we should keep our feet anchored and just swivel our neck.  If we felt the need to go for more engagement, we could turn from the hips and have the upper body facing to the left or right, without moving our feet at all.

When we do move our feet, it should be for a clearly defined purpose.  When we are on stage, we can move to the very apron of the stage, closest to the audience. We do this to get physically closer to the front row, to add to our voice and gesture strength with our physical body presence, to underline a point we are making.  Now, we shouldn’t stay there too long though, because the proximity will become too intimidating to the person closest to us.  They are thinking “psycho axe murderer” as we tower over them.  Also, the power of our physical presence starts to dilute very quickly, if it is just held in that same position. So there is no point holding it there for too long.

We should retreat to a more centered, neutral position.  From here we can step back and make a more macro point.  We do this to engage the entire audience, if the point we want to make is an expansive one.  Now that we are standing more toward the rear of the stage, we need to use our arms in a bigger fashion than normal, to signal we are making a macro point.  Again we can’t stay there too long because the power wanes.  We need to move back to the middle, to the more neutral position.  None of this is random or fuelled by nervousness. It is thought through and planned, with the impact on the audience in mind.  We are not shuffling about through neglect, nervousness or negligence.

Our hands are another trap.  We might be holding them in front of our body, twisting them together because we want to form a protective barrier between us and the audience.  We might be tapping our thigh with our hand or even worse slapping it, making a noise. This competes with what we are saying, for the attention of the audience.  

Another favourite is using one hand to squeeze the fingers of the other hand, as if we were ringing out a towel.  Playing with our tie knot trying to loosen the compression, because we are feeling hot under the lights or to lessen the intrusive gaze of our listeners is another tick.  

Thrusting hands in and out of trouser pockets, highlights the conundrum we are facing about what to do with our hands when presenting.  Because of the adrenaline, we are unable to even keep them there, so we fidget, thrusting and withdrawing, thrusting and withdrawing, driving our audience crazy.

Shuffling papers on the lectern is a break from our usual rigid gripping of the edges of the furniture.  We align the sheets together left and right.  We then push the bottom of the pages together, banging them on the lectern, to get them into a more disciplined state.  All the while, this is competing with what we are saying and how we are saying it.

Video yourself and you will be shocked by how much you are fidgeting.  Instead, choreograph your movements carefully so that nothing is haphazard.  You move because that will add to the strength of your message.  Your hands are monopolised by considered gestures, to add weight to what you want to say.  You stand straight and tall, engaging your audience left and right with minimum distraction.  Remember, we want the audience focused solely on our face and our words.  These are powerful communication tools to help us isolate out our message. That is the only place we want the attention to be directed.

The Presenting Persona

Be authentic, be yourself, be conversational - all good advice, except the presenter does have a distinct role to play though.  When we are speaking in front of others, it is no longer an intimate one on one conversation.  The talk has a purpose, there is an audience, there are expectations, time limits apply. We have to rise to the occasion.  

Telling ourselves that the people are gathered here for the information and not all that fluffy stuff that goes with presenting is self-delusion.  Today, everywhere you turn people are hammering you with video of themselves presenting something or other.  The technology is such that you don’t even have to click anything yet the video is off and it has subtitles, so you don’t even need the sound.  Live video on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram etc., is another no safety net new innovation that is merciless.  Social media has unleashed a monster of constant content deluge and high wire danger.  

Once upon a time, you didn’t have to concern yourself much with self promotion, but in this day and age of endless outmuscling the competition, everyone is a self proclaimed expert. The flood of exposure makes it hard to remain relevant.  Your competitors are perpetually pumping out an array of content to reinforce their personal branding, to make sure they, and not you, are top of mind.  Imagining that your inherent wonderfulness and righteousness will be discovered is wishful thinking.

When we get up to speak in front of others we are being judged.  The audience is questioning whether we have the goods or not?  Do we know what we are talking about and are we bringing value to them? Most of us spend 99.9% of our time speaking with others at a distance of under a meter apart (unless you are in the countryside, in which case I will be two meters!).  This is a case of using everyday conversation where we don’t need to project our voice or body language.  

When we are on stage as a presenter, we have a different role.  We need to radiate credibility at distance and a big part of it is the amount of energy we pump out into the audience.  This is known askior chi- the intrinsic energy we possess.  I have studied Tai Chi for ten years and Karate for 47 years, so I have seen and experienced it. I know it is a fact.  People who are low energy, quiet, softly spoken types struggle with this projection piece.  They are fortunate though, that the microphone technology today is so very good, that you can project quite well, without having to have a big voice or shout yourself hoarse.

The energy projection to the audience part however, is a bit harder because there is no technology to help with that.  Strong and big gestures though can accentuate a vocal point we are making.  The tendency with a lot of speakers who are untrained, is to use no gestures or to use them quite low, around waist or hip height.  Holding your hands protectively in front of your groin or clasped behind your back, kills the opportunity to add gestures to the mix of your communication catalogue. Using gestures held too low means, they are hard to see, invariably small in scale, not very dynamic and totally fail to engage the audience.

Get them up and around shoulder level and make them larger than you think they should be.  From our point of view, as the speaker,  it seems we are getting wild with our gestures, but from the onlookers viewpoint, it looks congruent with what we are saying.

The voice strength is the same concept. We need to hit the words that bit harder than normal.  The power we put into the words translates to the audience as credibility and trust.  We sound like we are convinced and the audience wants to see that from us.  We don’t want to be hitting all the words at the same power. 

We need a solid stream of strong vocal delivery, from which we vary our strength, either up or down, for variety.  A monotone

puts people to sleep, so we need vocal change to break through and grab attention.  Counter intuitively, an audible whisper is very effective to draw attention to the point we are making.  This works particularly well when we combine it with the body language of whispering a secret, something just between the audience and ourselves.

Mentally we need to get into a different space when we are presenting.  Our persona needs to switch up from normal everyday interactions. We are now in the realms of showbiz and we have to exaggerate things a bit more than normal.   Pausing for effect is more powerful than just delivering a constant stream of words.  We need to give the audience thinking time so that the ideas don’t just crash over the top of each like a succession of wild waves in the surf. 

Using our facial expressions, in combination with our words, is more theatrical than normal conversation, but it is very effective.  A quizzical expression when we mention something we doubt, just adds to the power of doubt we want to foster in the mind of the audience.  If we watch plays, then we see this usage all the time, because the actors are restricted to face, voice and body to get their message across.  We don’t have to be manically melodramatic but we can up the tempo quite a bit by using the same techniques when we are presenting.

Part of the problem is self constraint on our willingness to do this.  We mistake normal conversation as the base of reference when we are a presenter.  Our starting point should be the stage and what actors are doing.  It is also too much.  We need to wind it back from that, because that is too exaggerated for business.  Having said that, we do need to lean in a bit harder in that direction, more so than in the direction of a corridor conversation.

Mentally, we need to see we are now in a different role.  We are there to perform for the audience, to lift them up through our information, our passion, our belief, our commitment.  The delivery of the information is critical and there is no escaping that some things work better than others. Speak in a tiny little voice and you will rapidly become totally invisible to your audience.  Start striding. around the stage like a berserker, left to right, left to right and you will distract the listeners entirely from what you are talking about.  The bigger the audience, the bigger the venue and the larger the persona you need.  We have to step out of our everyday selves, to step up.  We need to project if we are going to get cut through.  Shrinking violets have no place on stage.

Dealing With Feedback When Presenting

We can receive feedback in the rehearsal stage and after the actual presentation itself.  Both can be very dangerous.   Asking your loved ones at home for feedback is tricky.  They may love you, but they may not know much about the subject itself, the subject of presenting and techniques for giving feedback. Pretty toxic cocktail right there, with potential to create domestic issues at home, if you don’t have enough already.

“What do you think?” is a bad move in the feedback game.  When you are practicing, you cover many aspects of presenting and asking such a broad and unfocused question, invites in irrelevant comment which is unhelpful.  Rather than asking such a combustible question, start by sitting down and creating your own checklist. 

You can break this up into a few categories.  You might nominate the structure of the talk.  In this way, you can isolate out the sections of the talk, looking at the potency of the evidence you presented in each section to back up your point. You can nominate other areas, such as the transitions between sections, the opening, the first close before Q&A, the second close after Q&A, Q&A itself.  In this way you are dissecting your speech. You are breaking it down for the person listening, to consider before they give a comment.  You might have them score you on a simple scale, just to get an idea of what resonated with them.  Remember though, this is an audience of one and you have to consider how expert they are and how representative they are of your audience.

In another section of the review sheet you are creating, you can include aspects of the delivery of the speech.  How was your posture, speaking speed, degree of clarity, pauses, eye contact, gestures, vocal variety. They can score on each of these to give you a guide on how you were doing.

By having various people observe your speech you can get a variety of viewpoints.  One big problem in Japan is no one here wants to give you critical feedback or even constructive feedback.  They will just try to flatter you and are fairly useless when it comes to the feedback game.  This is especially the case if you are their boss.  They won’t be so willing to tell it like it is.  If you are giving the talk in English then there is the additional curve ball of their ability in English to fully understand the nuances of language you might be using.

Feedback can also be fear producing.  This is especially the case when all you are getting is what was wrong with your talk. This is the natural flow for people giving feedback.  They want to tell you what was wrong and so your confidence gets killed as a result of all this tough love.  Actually, you don’t want critique.  What you want is for the feedback to focus on only two things – what was good and how can you make it better.  If you start to get critique, stop them right there and redirect them by asking for good/better feedback.

During the actual presentation, you can gauge how the audience is reacting to your talk.  If they are falling asleep that is a bad sign, although in Japan that is fairly common behaviour, so don’t beat yourself up too much.  That is why we never let the organisers turn the lights down to see the screen more easily. Within one minute, you will lose a big chunk of your Japanese audience.  Keep the lights up so you can see their faces and check how they are reacting to your talk.  If you get people nodding to your points take that as a win.  The more of those the better obviously. 

If you get mild or vicious questions, then you can interpret these results as good or bad depending on the purpose of your talk.  You might want to be provocative and want to outrage some in the crowd.  Or you want to win everyone to your way of thinking, so you are looking for questions that enable you to convince others, to adopt your preferred position on the topic.

Asking people you know or your staff, “How do did it go” is just a waste of time.  You want your feedback sheet selectively distributed before the talk, so that you can get additional feedback to what your eyes are telling you during the talk.  I would count people coming up to you after the speech and saying how great you are as flattery and of doubtful value, unless they are an expert in the topic or on the subject of giving speeches.  I know it sounds a bit harsh, but almost no one is going to approach you and feedback to you that you were crap.  So be wary of praise and look long and hard at who it is coming from.

For both rehearsal and for the talk itself, video is the best method of evaluating how you went.  You have your checklist so you can be very diagnostic on the video review component.  If you have your coach there during the practice, that is ideal and also important to have them in the audience as well, to give you the good/better feedback.  If you don’t have a coach, what are you thinking?  You should get one, because this speaking lark is a brand builder or a brand killer.  It is never neutral.  You are either winning or losing and don’t kid yourself otherwise.

How To Prepare With Your Coach For Your Big Speech

There is a major event looming on your schedule and as President, you will be expected to deliver the keynote address to a very important audience.  This was the situation recently when I was coaching a major corporation’s President for his speech.  I realised that the people around the President, don’t have a clear idea of what is needed to properly prepare for the big occasion.  The time allotted is also never enough.  It is made worse by the flunkies around the President, trying to cram other superfluous information into the briefing for the speech.  Superfluous from my point of view anyway.  The President’s time is at a premium and the key need is to focus on delivery practice with video review and massive coaching.

Here are some ideas to make the whole process more effective for the busy Presidents who are called upon to present in high stakes occasions.

Before getting to the session with the coach, go through the speech.  I recommend not reading it to your audience, if possible.  Having key points to hit in your own words is enough, especially when it is going to be interpreted into another language.  All that crafty crafting of words and wrangling with semantics of expression in English gets lost the minute the interpreters get hold of it.

If it is a speech you need to read, there is a strong possibility a speech writer will have been employed to work on it together with the munchkins in your organisation. Don’t use this for the delivery practice sessions.  Get hold of it before hand and start reworking it.  What you are looking to do is add more of your authentic voice to the content.  Get things expressed the way you would normally express them.  This process will cause you to own the words and they will be much easier to recall and deliver as a result.

I was looking at the speech provided in this coaching occasion and it was average.  The biggest weakness was the start.  It was totally mundane and boring.  Nothing to grab your attention.  Nothing to smash through all the detritus of the day up until that point. We all have so many things on our mind today, the speaker really has to work hard to break into that mental flow and grab our attention as a member of the audience.

Craft a powerful statement or use a great quote to start the proceedings.  Then you can introduce who you are and the name of your company.  It is a simple thing, but the impact is entirely different.  For example, I could introduce my speech like this, “Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”.  Or I could start like this, “Corporate education is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty.  Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan”.  In the second case, I have grabbed the attention of the listeners and they are wondering about what these miraculous changes are going to be.  They are concentrating on what I am saying so that they don’t miss anything.

If you are using a teleprompter, with the see through glass type mounted on a stand on the podium in front of you, this presents a few challenges.  This was the situation recently during the coaching session.  One problem is that you don’t want to have your hands anywhere near the podium, as the vibration will make the teleprompter images shake and the words become harder to read.  Also the position of the teleprompter to the left or right drags your gaze to that side of the audience the whole time.  If you have had the opportunity to craft the speech you can divert from the script or remember parts of it, so that you can engage with other sections of the audience.

Ideally, you will have two of these teleprompters, one on the left and one on the right mounted on stands in front of the podium. That improves the audience engagement quite a bit, but the danger becomes you forget to talk to the people seated in the middle of the venue.  Your head is constantly swiveling from left to right and back like a puppet.

Watching the playback on video does take time to do and as mentioned time is always at a premium in these situations.  However, the video review and coaching from the instructor are very helpful here.  You can see the way you were doing it before and then after the coaching  you can see with your own eyes how big a difference it makes.  This makes it easier to stop your old, bad habits and create new, better habits.  Seeing is believing.

Give lots of vocal and gesture energy to key words or phrases in the speech.  This becomes especially important if you are having your talk translated.  The audience sees you deliver it and then hears the words in their own language. Your gestures and energy though need no interpretation, so in that sense, you can appeal directly to the audience, without any intervention from someone else.  If the words refer to something with scale, then show big arm movements to match.  If a target was achieved that was high, show “high” by pushing up one arm as high as possible, to make an imaginary measure.  If it was a good result, then have a big smile and a lot of gesture strength to back that up.

The idea is to take this coaching and then project it further with additional practice.  You can do this on your own, using video or have people there to give you good/better feedback.  Running through the speech numerous times will be so beneficial and will create the momentum to make this speech a triumph.  I saw one of those quotes you get in diaries attributed to a Japanese proverb, which said “More sweat in training, less blood in battle”. I have never been able to find the Japanese original of that saying, by the way, nevertheless the idea is perfect for speech preparation.  Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Designing Your Presentation On The Head Of A Pin

The head of a pin isn’t much real estate is it.  The metaphor for presenting is to have pin point accuracy around what you are presenting. Going straight to the slide deck production component takes us too broad.  This should be the last element, rather than the first.  The temptation though is to get into thinking about different visuals, graphs, statistics, etc., we can show, to back up our argument. There is the rub.  Just what exactly is our argument?  What is the one key message we want to get across to the audience.  Often we have a number of things we want to get across and we go too broad in our approach. We want to think about getting that one thing on the head of that pin.

A good way to start is to brainstorm all of the elements of that subject area which are most relevant to the audience.  There is a dilemma here between what we want to say and knowing what interests our audience. Starting with the audience in mind though is a good discipline.  This is because designing something for ourselves runs the risk of alienating our listeners and delivering a talk to a totally bored bunch of faces.  This experience is plain painful.

Get the ideas out, taking the audience perspective. Get them out visually and then start to rank them by priority order.  This ranking process forces us to make judgments about which elements are considered more important than others.  Is this easy? Absolutely not.  Does it have to be perfect.  Not really, because the audience themselves are not united on agreeing what they think are the most important items.  As long as we can isolate out what we believe will be of the most interest to the audience and we address those, then we are in a good place as a presenter.

Before we start assembling the argument, we need to write down in one sentence, what is the key point we want to get across.  This type of wordsmithing is important to help us get clarity around where we need to go with our supporting arguments.  Getting the key point into one sentence then allows us to drag in evidence to back up what we are saying.  We have a limited amount of time in which to speak, so we need to pare down the possibilities we can cover to only the most rich and powerful arguments.  This paring process is like choosing between your children. I am often hopeless at it, because I tend to fall in love with too much material for the time allotted.  It is painful, but I have to toss stuff out and sometimes that process kills me to do so.

Once we have selected the most convincing evidence to back up our case, we need to arrange those points into chapters of the talk.  This is the main body of the presentation.  We have already created our conclusion when we were refining our key point.  We need to elaborate a bit more on that and work on Conclusion 1.  Following that we design Conclusion 2 which will be what we will use for after the Q&A.  We don’t want to lose control of the talk, so we decide how the presentation will end and what will be the last words ringing in the ears of the audience.  Our words.

Now we are ready to design the opening.  We need to achieve two things in the opening:  grab the attention of the audience and introduce our conclusion. The grabbing attention part might be a famous quote like “when you are going through hell, keep going” or “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” or “the teacher appears when the student is ready”.  These are recognisable quotes that gives the talk some credibility and smoothly allows us to transition into the key point we want to make.

We might start by telling a story on the basis that we are all designed from childhood to identify with storytelling.  It gets us in and we want to hear what is the point of the story.  For example, “It was early Sunday morning and the doctor attached the portable x-ray machine to my chest.  I was barely conscious, fighting for every breath coming through the plastic tubes delivering the oxygen. The results showed the lungs were down from three quarters filled with fluids to two third full.  I knew at that moment that I would live”.  Hearing that you want to know why I was in hospital in that condition.  This is the power of storytelling.

We might use a surprising statistic.  “Power harassment claims in Japan have increased by 320% over the last ten years”.  Our audience will want to know why that is and what does it mean for them.  We can move into our main point for this talk now that we have their full attention.

The success of our talk comes from having a clear focus on what the audience is interested in, combined with a very clear “write it on the head of a pin” statement about what is the take away we are going to deliver during our presentation.  The rest is mechanics around the Conclusions and the Opening.  The slide deck is the heavy artillery we bring into back up what we are saying with visuals to get the message across concisely and quickly.  The discipline required to start well will carry us forward to the end of the talk and we will be successful with our presentation.  This builds our personal brand and our reputation.