Many people break the rules of presenting, usually unknowingly.  They have Johari Window style blind spots, where others know they are making mistakes, but they themselves are oblivious and just don’t know.  This is extremely dangerous, because when you don’t know, you keep hardening the arteries of your habit formation. It is diabolically difficult to break out of those habit patterns once formed because you become comfortable with sub-standard performance.  On the other hand, breaking them for effect, is very powerful and can be a tremendous differentiator in a world of mainly tedious presentations.

There is an old saying that “to break the rules, you need to know the rules”.  Presenting is the same.  Breaking them unwittingly or in ignorance is not the same thing as a conscious, well informed, professional choice.  Let’s take some rules and break them on purpose.

The “berserker stage fiend” is the presenter who wears a furrow in the stage as they pound across from left to right, over and over again throughout the presentation.  This is normally derived through a combination of heightened nerves and low self-awareness.  They are not tuned into how much all of this pointless striding backwards and forwards, is diminishing the power of their message.  Moving with purpose is fine, but incognisant hyperactivity is not.

We can however, for effect, suddenly explore dynamic activity on stage to drive home a point.  For example, if we were to relate the story of the leadership teams’ panic over the nail biting 90% drop in revenues, thanks to lockdowns caused by Covid-19, we could suddenly start pacing furiously across the stage. We mimic and then exaggerate the emotions of that moment. We move on stage in this way with the intention to demonstrate the sheer scale of the dilemma and the psychological impact it was having on the leaders.  We wouldn’t be doing this throughout the whole speech.  That would engender an audience meltdown. For a minute or two, it is a dramatic re-enactment of the fear, frustration and sense of doom’s arrival, that everyone was feeling.  Together we bring forth a dialogue of distress, fusing it with the frantic on stage pacing movements.

The “galactic black hole” presenter sucks all of the energy out of the room.  They completely break contact with their audience.  This time the desired effect is one of total despair, all hope lost, no solutions available and facing massive unforgiving defeat.  The speaker drops all eye contact, stares at the floor about a meter in front of them and drops their chin onto their throat, so that they are looking downward at an accentuated sharp angle.  The shoulders hunch over and the body energy is reduced to a minus number.  The voice is frail, catching, weak, whispering but still audible.  You definitely need a microphone to pull this one off.  With this “in character” rendition of the replay of the horrific experience, we exaggerate for effect.  This is not something we should sustain for too long or do too often.  It works best as a single, short duration, audience undermine effort.

The “whoop and holler “presenter goes way over the top.  Sometimes you will see comedians use this device.  They employ the micro psycho rant, at top volume, to drive home the point.  This energy rocket differentiates the point being made from all that has gone before. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism holding audience attention has become a zero sum game between the presenter and the punters’ hand held phones.  Either we keep them with us or they slip into the magnetic field embrace of internet access.  For these reasons in telling the story, we might want to imitate on stage, an explosion which took place back at the executive suite.  Or it might be the re-enactment of a big client meltdown of epic proportions.  We become overly dramatic for dramatic effect. 

Yelling at your audience isn’t normal behaviour.  We have to set it up and then move into character to pull it off.  It has to be a crescendo.  It peaks then subsides back to normality. But for those few seconds, we are going all out to flag the key message we want to bring to everyone’s attention.  Voice, gestures and body language are combiningg for the big combust.

Pacing like a frantic madman, ignoring completely or totally yelling at our audience are radical ideas in presenting.  These pivots break the rules, but when required, may help us to break through to our audience.  It will depend on the context of the topic, the audience and the event, as to whether these big guns would be employed. At least we need to have them in our armoury should we want to call on them.  Choosing them with purpose and doing them without intelligence are divergent universes. We know the rules perfectly, but we choose to break them, on our terms and at our pleasure.  When fully congruent with the points we are making, they work for us in ways others presenters cannot match in the major messaging stakes.

Bonseki is a Japanese art creating miniature landscapes, on a black tray using white sand, pebbles and small rocks.  They are exquisite but temporary.  The bonseki can’t be preserved and are an original, throw away art form. Speaking to audiences is like that, temporary.  Once we down tools and go home, that is the end of it.  Our reach can be transient like the bonseki art piece, that gets tossed away upon completed admiration, the lightest of touches that doesn’t linger long.  Of course we hope that our sparkling witticisms, deeply pondered points and clear messages stay with the audience forever.  We want to move them to action, making changes, altering lifetime habits and generally changing their world.  In the case of a business audience, we are usually talking to a small group of individuals, so our scope of influence is rather minute.  How can we extend the reach of our message?

Video is an obvious technology that allows us to capture our speech live and ourselves in full flight.  How often though, do you see speakers videoing their talks?  It is not like people are constantly giving public speeches in business. Apart from myself, I don’t recall seeing anyone else doing it.  You need to tell the audience this is for your own purposes and they will not be in the shot, otherwise you have to get everyone to give you their written permission to be filmed.  You may get criticism about being a narcistic lunatic for wanting to capture yourself on video, but the only people who make that type of comment are idiots, so ignore them.

With video, instead of a standard business audience of under fifty people, you can broadcast your message to thousands.  The video is also an evergreen capture which allows you to keep using the content for many years.  Video has the added benefit that you can cut it up and create snippets to take the content even further. You can have ten videos sprung from the original.  This again extends the ways in which you can use the medium.   People have different appetites for information, so some may want to feast on the whole speech, whereas others want the digest or just the part on a particular topic of most interest. 

Video has two tracks – the video and audio components and these can be separated out. Very easily you can produce the audio record of the talk.  Everyone is a firm multi-tasker these days.  I sometimes hear people pontificating that you cannot multi-task, blah, blah, blah.  What nonsense. Walking, exercising, shopping and listening to audio content are typical multitasking activities.  Busy people love audio because it saves them time and allows two things to be done at once.  Now your audio content can be accessed by even more people. 

Did you know that in August 2019 Google announced that in addition to text search they were employing AI to enable voice search too.  This will take a while to roll out but this is the future and audio books have recently overtaken e-book sales.  The audio track can become a podcast episode and be on any of the major podcast platforms.  Also we can produce a transcript of the talk.  There are transcribing technologies that are very good today which can reduce the cost and time of this exercise.  Now we have a text version, we can project the value of the content further.  It may go out as an email, a social media post or be reworked into a magazine article, or it may become a blog on your website.

Repurposing of content is the name of the game.  The video and or the snippets can be sent out to your email list, put up on social media and always sit there on YouTube.  The same can be done with the audio track.  Now what was a simple, ephemeral interlude in a room of fifty punters, has developed a life of its own and is being pushed out far and wide.  The same message and messenger, but a vastly different impact and duration.  If our object is to influence, then we need to make sure we are supporting the effort to give the speech with the tools available to maximise the results.

This requires some planning and some expense.  But as I mentioned, we are not leaping to our feet every month giving a public speech to a business audience.  This is something we would be lucky to do two or three times a year.  When you take that into account and consider how much we can leverage what we are doing, we get a lot more bang for our buck.  We are going to give the talk anyway, so all the preparation is the same, yet the influence factor can be so much grander.

Rushing out the door to get to your talk and arriving in the nick of time is bad, bad, bad.  You have cut it very fine. Breathless, you greet the hosts, who are looking suitably pale as they thought they had an event with no guest speaker.  The shambles has started and now the odds are it will continue into your talk, as you battle with the tech.  The laptop decides to throw a tantrum and not behave.  The slide clicker won’t cooperate and the microphone has developed a bad case of static.  You become flustered and your equilibrium has been thoroughly turfed out the window.  I have done all of these things, fortunately not all in one, at the same event but definitely accumulatively.

The worst delusion ever was when I had this genius thought that I could create my talk on the plane, flying from Osaka to Sydney overnight and then go straight to the venue from the airport.  Man, I was so efficient too, arriving just in time for the talk.  Mercifully, it was an internal peer presentation, so no clients were exposed to this total unmitigated disaster.  I was cranky too because of no sleep on the plane.  I turned into a bear, not a cuddly Koala bear, more a Grizzly bear in the Q&A, when someone had the temerity to question my thesis.

I learnt my lesson the hard way.  Getting there early has so many advantages, so we need to prioritise that over the many competing tasks we are facing.  It is a choice we can make and should make.  Wouldn’t aimlessly chatting with punters before the talk be a waste of my valuable time, you may be thinking?  No. Arriving an hour before the gun goes off is advised.  You have plenty of time now to stiff arm the tech into submission and make it behave.  Check the microphone is working properly.  Confirm that we can we get the slide projector to talk to the laptop? 

If the organisers have breezily told you don’t worry about lugging your laptop around and to just bring the USB, then don’t listen.  For some unknown reason, the slide layout can change depending on the type of laptop being used.  That was news to me until it happened.  Fortunately, I arrived early, connected all the gizmos and bingo the layout had gone totally crazy.  I reworked the entire deck, while sweating profusely and got it done with one minute to spare.  Whew, I was a wreck and we hadn’t even started.  But I was able to do it.  Imagine if I hadn’t gotten there early enough.

Getting there early also harks back to why you are doing this talk at all.  You have plenty of other things to do with your valuable time.  Presumably you are there to win converts to your message, fans for your firm and build your professional network, image and profile.  Not too many speakers are there under duress.  They may have been roped into giving this talk because they owe someone or feel some giri or obligation.  That can happen, but it is extremely rare for most speakers.

Getting there early allows you time to work the room as the audience members are traipsing in.  You are charm personified as you smile, exchange cards, chat, thank them for attending and create that all important positive first impression.  The key here is to let them do all the talking.  Your turn will come, so let them tell you why they are here for the talk, what interests them about the topic etc.  In this way, you pick up valuable data on the topic and on the zeitgeist in the room.  You are also winning over fans for your presentation before you even give it.  It is rare that anyone can withstand this type of charm offensive before the talk, then suddenly turn into a Frankenstein monster at Q&A time and start savaging you.  That scrum of the great unwashed are those who turned up late and you didn’t get a chance to smooze them.

Don’t be in hurry to bolt out of the room after you have finished either.  Allow the time to spend chatting with those who have a big enough interest to stay back and engage with you.  They will want to exchange business cards and build their network, so make time for them to do that.  There will be those with a burning interest in the subject who want to ask a question of you directly and privately.  There will be business groupies who like to meet big shots and by definition, being the speaker, you are a big shot.

You will have gotten a good sense of how things went by your observations of people’s faces as you were in delivery mode, plus from the nature of the questions at Q&A.  After the talk is over, you can also get a good gauge by how many people want to hang around in a long line to meet you.  Don’t rush off.  Instead, allocate the time to be gracious with people who are also allocating their time to talk with you.  The charm offensive has to go all the way, so don’t try and be “efficient” and truncate it.

I have also found that if you are high energy speaker, a powerful and passionate presenter then the whole thing is draining.  Also, if you are introvert like me, all of those people are wearing you out.  I find being charming is really tiring. So don’t forget to build in a bit of recovery time for yourself, rather than rushing straight back into the fray.  Find a quite coffee shop and take a few moments to regroup and quietly reflect on how it went.  This introspection is important and even better, take some notes and keep the record for review before the next event.

In Part One, we looked at the ideas of primacy (the first thing we remember) and recency (the last thing we remember) and what this means for speakers. Now in Part Two we will go deeper with our entry and exit points of the chapters within the talk and how to choreograph the big crescendo for our polemic’s sparkling conclusion.

We naturally have to pump a lot of energy into designing the opening stanza of our speech.  On the surface of it, this would seem to be our one big chance to establish our theme, point of view and talk direction with the audience.  The opening is a battering ram to smash into the brains of the assembled masses and launch a takeover of their every thought.  This is easier said than done though, because any lapse of logistics or vocal quality and energy will see them scampering for the mental exists to get their internet fix mainlined through their phones.

Even if we do manage to hijack them at the start, we cannot presume we won’t lose them somewhere midstream.  That is why when we do the planning for the talk we need to design distinct chapters into the talk.  These chapters are constructed around the evidence that supports our central proposition.  Now these chapters have a primacy and recency function as well.  The opening of the chapter has to dislodge that last thing we told them and replace it with the new bauble. 

Most speakers pay no attention to this chapter idea and just arrange their talk to move from one section to the next.  The sections of the talk compete with each other for audience attention and we have to be aware of that.  At each chapter start we need a mini-battering ram to blast the tunnel deeper into the listener’s mind.  We have just told them some scintillating detail backing up our overall point and now we need to dislodge that, so we can ship in the next point.

Stories are good for this exercise as are questions, quotes, facts and statistics.  We are wading deep in our evidence portion of the talk at this point, but the facts need to be arrayed before the audience in such a way that makes them irrefutable.  In a forty minute speech each chapter will be about five minutes long, so taking out the blockbuster opening and the first stupendous close before the Q&A, we probably have time for six or seven chapters.  So that means we need some variety with each opening.  Starting each chapter with the same thing becomes predictable and boring. Predictability is the speaker’s nemesis, because it invites the audience to escape from us now that they know what is coming next.

In the planning stage investigate the point you are making to support your overall argument and see what type of opening the evidence lends itself to.  There may be some doubling up with opening gambits, but try for as much variety as possible to keep audience attention on you the speaker.  The end of each chapter is mini-close as well.  That means we have to come up with a zinger one sentence finisher that really makes your key argument sing.  This is all a matter of planning and that is the rub.  Most speakers do a poor job of planning because they are waist deep in slide assembly and logistics.  This is what they call planning but that is delusionary.

We have used each chapter to make our case and each chapter ending to summarise the facts and evidence of that section.  At the first close, before the Q&A, we need to bring the whole juggernaut to a crescendo.  Again, this is all about our design creativity and communication expertise.  Naturally the vocal delivery is a rise at the end of the final sentence that barks credibility, power, conviction and belief. 

We finish strongly, implant a pregnant pause that invites the audience to recognise we have finished and that they may now unleash their frenzied applause.  We then glide straight into the Q&A, following which we add another powerful close.  It can mimic the first one, it could be different, it is all in the planning and what type of impact you want.  Nevertheless, the vocal delivery will again be triumphant, strong and commanding.  Many speakers end with a whimper, their voice quietly falling away. Don’t be one of them.  Go out powerfully, with energy, verve and supreme confidence.  Deliver an ending they won’t forget, because we know the power of recency and we want our message to stick.