As speakers we have a tremendous amount of things to concentrate on when presenting. Is my speaking speed at the right cadence? Am I being clear with what I am saying? Are the audience able to follow the navigation of my slide deck? Am I losing attention to the wiles of the mobile phone, as people escape from me to the internet? We can all have a lot of considerations buzzing around inside our brains. These considerations are all directed to ourselves. Our delivery of the message to the audience can get lost in all of this mental effort and consideration.
Let’s assume the fundamentals have been completed. The audience analysis has clarified at what complexity level we should deliver our talk. We have planned a blockbuster opening to seize the audience’s attention away from all of the competing distractions for our message. We are providing evidence and proof to back up what we are saying, in this disgruntled, newly cynical world of “fake news” phobia. We have cleverly designed two closes, one for after the main body of the talk and the other for after the last of the enquiries in the Q&A. We want to dominate proceedings and ensure we control the last thing the audience hears, rather than the content of some random offering which was totally off topic. Most importantly, we have not spent the majority of our preparation time jostling one slide with another to build the deck. Rather we have been rehearsing our talk to ensure we have it within the time limit and that we have the right structure and flow for the presentation. We have pre-prepared possible answers for the most likely questions we can anticipate, so that we are never caught off guard.
With all of this in the bag we are ready to rumble with the delivery. Many technically oriented speakers believe that the delivery is trumped by the high value of their content. They have written themselves a “Get Out Of Jail” card for this component, to excuse their lack of skills in this area. Delusion reigns. If you are droning on in a monotone, saying “um” and “ah” every five seconds and generally demonstrating no enthusiasm whatsoever for your topic, then no matter how brilliant the content, many in the audience will simply escape to the internet to get away from you.
Here are six points of persuasion for your delivery, which will ensure the audience stay their hands and don’t lunge for their phones as soon as you start speaking. To help us recall all of them, we will move from head to toe as a simple memory trick, so that we don’t forget them.
Eyes
Eye contact is powerful and totally underused by most speakers. If you fear your audience, making eye contact with them is terrifying. If you have followed the fundamentals outlined earlier, your fear will diminish and you can get on with the business of engaging your listeners. Our rule is 6x6. We want to look deep into the eyes of our audience members one by one and hold their direct gaze for around six seconds. Less than that and there is little engagement. More than that and it becomes intrusive. Here is a little trick. In a big audience, when you select one person in the crowd to engage with, at a certain distance the twenty people sitting around them all believe you are looking at them. It is also hard to look at two objects simultaneously, so focus on just one eye of the audience member and talk directly to them for six seconds. Mentally divide the audience into a baseball diamond, so that you have the inner and outer fields, left, center and right fields. This gives us six sectors to engage with at random, to make sure we are covering the entire venue and not favouring those closest to us rather than those at the rear or those on our left side over those on the right.
Face
The slide deck mustn’t dominate that most powerful illuminator of ideas – our facial expressions. However, many speakers have one facial expression throughout, regardless of the content of what they are saying. We want to perfectly match what we are saying with how we are saying it. If it is good news look happy, if it is bad news look serious, if it is puzzling, look curious, etc. Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research showed that when we are incongruent between content and delivery, our audience becomes distracted from our message.
Voice
Voice modulation provides contrast and variety, which are important elements to keep our listeners with us until the very end. An audible, conspiratorial whisper is just as powerful a message communicator as a stentorian outburst. All loud or all soft are the attention decimators we need to avoid. Mix it up and go for variety.
Gestures
Holding the same hand position for longer than 15 seconds, saps all the power from it and it just becomes annoying. The faucet idea of “turn it on, turn it off”, is the right metaphor for how we should be thinking about gestures. Combining gestures with our eye contact, facial expression and voice power can really project our words and phrases into the minds of our audience.
Pauses
We need small breaks to allow our audience to digest what we have said, rather than snowballing them with the next offering, until they cannot remember what we said five minutes ago. Pauses help us to control our delivery speed too, so that we are not rushing through the content.
Stance
Standing with our weight split 50/50 across our legs always looks professional. Don’t slouch, stand up tall and straight.
These six delivery reminders will ensure your message is received clearly. We go to so much effort to prepare our talks and so much stress to deliver it, then it will be a total waste if our message is not getting through.
The Japanese idea of Shu-Ha-Ri is a combination of three characters – 守破離. I first came across this concept when I was living in Australia and studying karate there. It is a very typical concept in all traditional arts in Japan. Each character has a separate meaning, so they don’t make up a compound word, as is often common with Japanese phrases. The idea represents a learning journey. Shu is to protect the traditional techniques, the basics, the fundamentals. Ha is to detach and break away from the tradition, to innovate and depart from our attachments to what we are doing. Ri is to transcend to a level where there is no self-consciousness of what we are doing, we make it our own, because we have absorbed it all and it is now part of us.
This is very much the journey of the presenter. I was reminded of this the other day when I was giving a talk to a Tokyo American Club audience. I was the guest speaker and I chose as my topic the Six Impact Points Of Persuasion. One of those six points was on the use of gestures. In the Q&A, one of the audience members asked me if I was using gestures during my talk with conscious thought or whether they were just happening naturally. Actually, I had never thought about that and I realised these were unconscious acts driven by the content of what I was saying and by my delivery skills as a presenter. I was in a mental state of Ri, in the Shu-Ha-Ri format.
For most businesspeople this is a very hard stage to reach. They often get only a few opportunities a year to speak. Unfortunately, they usually do no rehearsal and only deliver that talk once in their lives. Also, they get no coaching on how to make their next talk even better. Even if there are only a few chances to stand up in front of an audience, we can get to work improving trying to move to the next stage. It may be that stage one – Shu – could occupy us for a number of years, but as we say, the best time to start becoming excellent at presenting was yesterday and the second best time is today.
In this first stage of Shu, we need to consciously remind ourselves what we are supposed to be doing. We need to make sure we get our feet in the right position to make sure our body posture doesn’t start excluding audience members, because we are only facing half the hall. We need to remember to look people in the eye when we speak, as opposed to letting our gaze wander aimlessly like a cloud over the whole audience and find we are paying no attention to anyone. We need to engage the audience and using direct eye contact is the best way to do that. We need to manufacture our gestures to match the content of our message and to hold them for no longer than 15 seconds so that the power doesn’t disappear from the gesture. We have to get our face involved rather than letting it become wooded and that is actually a pretty hard habit to break. We have to remind ourselves not to slip into a monotone voice when presenting and make sure we have vocal variety and that we are not getting too fast.
As we get more chances to speak, we keep concentrating on these points, so that we make sure we are covering all the bases. At a certain point we start to internalise what we should be doing and have to expend less energy to keep checking what we are doing. We are getting into the Ha stage. We start to think of new things we could be doing. Perhaps we will move around the stage a bit and try and get closer to the audience. If it is a big stage, we want to move to the left and right extremes and try and connect with the members of our audience there. We are no longer worried about out foot position, because we are capable of re-setting our body so that we never eliminate half the audience from our gaze by looking off to only one direction. We become more comfortable with our gestures and they are not needing to be forced anymore and are occurring naturally. In fact, we might be getting more flamboyant and larger with our gestures to reap a bigger impact on the audience. We are getting better at being more focused on the audience, than on what we are doing.
In the final stage of Ri, we are not even conscious of all of these little building bricks we need to make the presentation a success. We are not even conscious of ourselves because we are now totally focused on the reaction of the audience and reading their thoughts about what we are saying, to see where we need to make some adjustments. We are now focused on what they like and what interests them. We start to get into a close embrace with our audience as we move them around, dancing to our tune. We are in sync with them and they with us, as we become one unit.
Next time you present, make a mental note about which stage you feel you are in. Start thinking about what you need to be doing to move along the journey to the next stage. When you break the process up, like this, it provides good insight into our progress and helps us to move forward.
Contemplating this title you may be thinking “I am not boring”. You would be a rarity in business then, because think about how many interesting business presentations you have heard in your life to date. I would reckon you would have trouble counting them on one hand. If you believe you are not boring, then you are one of the elite amongst business presenters. Is that the case?
Why are so many businesspeople such duds as presenters? The answers are not hard to find. There is a basic miscalculation going on about content and delivery capabilities. The underlying mistake is thinking that if my content is really good, I don’t have to be really good in delivering it. Once upon a time, information was hard to find and speakers could bring something fresh to their audience. Search engines have ended that monopoly on insights and data.
The other issue is audiences today are tough, tough, tough. Steve Jobs has ruined it for all of us. In 2007 he introduced a weapon of audience mass distraction called the iPhone. If we sound even vaguely boring, audiences abscond to their conduits to the internet and leave us behind, no longer listening to what we have to say. The Jobs era has overtaken the Mehrabian era.
Professor Albert Mehrabian did some research in the 1960s and found some disturbing trends regarding audience attention deficits. His research however has become some of the most misquoted and poorly understood in the modern era. His numbers are heralded and trumpeted far and wide, but usually totally out of context. He found three statistics which help us to identify the issues we face as presenters. If you ever hear any guru or pseudo guru telling you that presentations are broken up into brackets of 55%, 38% and 7% run for the hills yelling “fake news”. They will explain that 55% of a presentation’s messaging success is made up of how we are dressed and our appearance, 38% based on how we sound and 7% on what we have to say for ourselves.
What Mehrabian actually found was that these statistics only become relevant when what we are saying is incongruent with how we are saying it. What does that mean? I am sure you have seen this – the president is reporting the excellent results in a monotone voice, with a wooden face devoid of any expression, with zero body language. The delivery doesn’t match the message and we get easily distracted. In the Mehrabian era, that meant getting focused on what the speaker was wearing or how their voice sounded and audiences were missing the messaging.
Today they are lunging for their app encrusted mobile phones to get to TikTok or their email or one of their other favourite social media platforms. Our message is out the window, often even if we are a highly polished, professional and engaging speaker. We have to do our best to reel the audience in to hear our message and we need to use some key leverage points to achieve that.
A monotone voice is guaranteed to have the audience flee from us, so we need to use voice modulation to create the variety we need to retain attention. We can elevate key words for the audience with either power or softness, using a type of conspiratorial whisper to grab attention. The key is in the variation and the link to volume control to raise the attention given to certain key phrases or words. Pauses are another voice control aspect which makes a big difference to how easy we make it for our listeners to follow what we are saying and for them to navigate our presentation.
To voice we add gestures to dramatize what we are saying. The coordination of strong gestures and sets of key phrases really lifts the message in the minds of our audience. The gestures tap into our body language and we can accentuate good and bad news accordingly. If we also add in direct eye contact with members of our audience, the effect is mesmerising and will stop them from reaching for Steve Job’s speaker tool of attention destruction. They will stick with us right to the end and absorb the messages we are promoting and that is why we are giving these talks in the first place isn’t it?
It seems ridiculous that such simple tools can lift us from speaker Death Valley oblivion to being listened to without distraction. Mehrabian gave us hints on Stage One of the Death Valley escape routes, but Steve Jobs threw down a much more formidable challenge as speakers. The numbers are more like 99% mobile phone competition and 1% message success today.
Being boring and incongruent isn’t even the divide anymore. Interest isn't enough to escape the gravitational pull of the mobile phone. We have to be very effective, engaging and professional, in full command of all the tools at our disposal to vanquish the siren calls of the internet for our listeners. And you think your quality of information will restrain them from escaping? That is a massive delusion. Even worse, for the rest of our working lives, the situation will never improve for us as speakers. Time to face the reality.
As a presentations trainer, I can appreciate the difference between class participants when they cross that bridge and begin to display confidence when they are presenting. Nerves and fear drive most people when it comes to giving presentations and just telling them to “be confident” is actually ridiculous. If they could do it, they would, but basically they have no idea how to project confidence, when they are imploding through stress and fear. The focus is all on them and not on the audience and that is a big mistake.
Here are four building blocks to improve our confidence when speaking in public.
The survival of the human species has in no small part been due to fear and hence taking necessary precautions. When our brain comprehends a dangerous or stressful situation about to occur, we don’t wait around for that to unfold. Instead, we start pumping chemicals into our body, particularly adrenaline, to get ready for fighting our way out of trouble or for flight, as we take off and distance ourselves from the danger. We need to accept that this is entirely normal and that the flow of chemicals into the body is not controllable.
We also face mindset issues around whether I can do this successfully or not. Again, this is natural. If you said, “I am going to go out there and be a total train wreck”, then there would be no fear, because we have set such a low marker for ourselves. Rather, we set a very high bar and sometimes that bar is set way too high. We need to be calibrating what we are doing here. If we say to ourselves that this is a journey as a presenter and today I am going to work on three things in my talk and not worry about trying to be perfect, then the pressure is rapidly reduced.
When we see people highly skilled in a profession or activity, we respect them for their abilities and accomplishments. It is the same when we see a great speaker. What we can’t see is their first presentation or their early days as a speaker, when they weren’t so skilful. Our mindset shift has to be from lack to capability.
We have skills in many areas, but we conveniently forget that we built those skills up over time and we weren’t complete at the start. We can go into our memory banks and draw on our history of achievement in various areas in our lives and assure ourselves that we can become skilled in this presenting arena too, just as we have done in other areas of our lives to date.
If we keep doing the same things, in the same way, we will keep getting the same old results. If we want to see some growth, some advance, then we need to make some changes. Einstein is credited with saying that doing the same things over and over again in the same way and expecting a different result is basically crazy. There will be one of two changes required. Either we tweak something that we have already been doing or we bring in something new. These both have risks attached to them.
To progress, we need to add new skills and abilities to our repertoire and this is what we have been doing our whole lives, so the idea is not strange. We don’t have to start with something massively risky though. We can start small and build from there, as we become more comfortable with our presentations. Pick something which is a small risk and try it. Next analyse how that went and adjust for the next speaking chance. If we keep doing this, we grow our range of possibilities rapidly and dramatically.
We have mentioned mindset and a great function of how we think is what we think about. In the early 20thCentury, psychologists discovered that we could change our situations in life by changing how we thought about them. Until then it was fate, luck, God’s will, etc,. and we had no control over any of that. The idea that changing your thinking could change your life is a well accepted concept today and so we spend a lot of attention on our mindset.
What are we shovelling into our mind though? The media is a full of bad news, fake news, conspiracy theories, etc. We need to apply some strong filters to what we allow into our mind, if we want to become more confident and successful. Our own media – our self-talk - also must be harnessed and controlled.
“I can’t” language needs to be switched to “I can”. Just swapping the words though won’t get us very far. We need to add some evidence. For example, “Because I have done the preparation I can do it", or “ because I have done this before at a smaller scale, I can use that base to go bigger this time”, are better approaches.
Confidence is a project for all of us. We can be super confident in some things and terrified in others. The focus on building our confidence in new areas like presenting are key and these four tools will definitely assist in that effort.