Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations. The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers. Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded. The slant taken was how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot high greasy pole. As with other luncheon speaker events, you had a chance to meet people beforehand and then engage with your table mates over the meal. I reflected that I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients. I noted that none of them worked for a mega beast even close to the size of this colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice didn’t quite hit the mark. How could that be, I thought to myself?
Who Is In The Room?
One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room. At what level should you pitch your content? Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes? These days it may be hard to get the full list of who is coming, because of privacy concerns, but usually you can at least get the company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, then hopefully the speech may have taken a different direction and would have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend.
Our Purpose Is?
We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk. Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade? Responding to the organisers request for a talk on a certain topic doesn’t determine the purpose. We are given the overall theme and analysing our audience, we know now what angle we should select. In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right. The relevancy bit was completely missing though, but at least the purpose was correct. An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech. Think back to the presentations you have attended. Could you recognise the event speaker’s approach or was it just a jumble, a catch all effort? I am putting my money on “jumble”.
First Three Seconds
We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet. Why three seconds? Over the last five years I have been asking participants in our presentation classes, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new. The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes. When I ask that same question today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds. It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned and well executed or we will have lost the room.
The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism.
Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments? They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. They are doing other amateur things like pounding the microphone asking “can you hear me down the back?” At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting. Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone?
How To Begin
Rules number one and two of presenting are rehearse before you give the talk and never practice on your audience. Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters. This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived. Get there early and check all the equipment. No microphone thumping please! Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go. We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result.
Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue. Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room. Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation. Why six seconds? Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one. However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive. We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our engagement time split is important.
Wrap Your Information In Stories
We want our message to be fondly recalled, savoured like a fine wine and fully imbibed by our audience. Many speakers, particularly technical presenters, have deluded themselves into thinking the data is all. They believe they get a free pass on needing to be a proficient and professional presenter, because the quality of their information trumps everything else. Not true. The audience will remember two things – you and the stories you told. Sadly none of that cool data you have cavalierly tossed up on screen is retained.
They will remember you as someone they would like to hear from again or not. The data wrapped up in stories is the way to make sure your key points are heard and remembered. Today, we have to overcome all the other competing things going on in audience minds, while they are sitting there listening to us. Even if they are enjoying your talk, some in the audience have no shame about flourishing their phones to do some multi-tasking, surfing the internet, while taking in your points. Stories stop them in their tracks and they will switch back to us. Here is the snapper though, how many speakers have you heard use stories well or at all? If it is so effective, why are speakers just droning on about the details? They just don’t know and it shows.
The good news is that the speaker proficiency bar is so low, we can easily shine by just avoiding some of these simple mistakes. We make it hard for ourselves unnecessarily. We want to be a gold medal winner, but finish up being a prize dud. The choice is yours, so which will you choose for your next presentation? Why not go for being a winner, a presentations Olympian, every time you speak.
This is horrible. Man, this is so bad, what were they thinking? I am watching a video of a leader asking for some major changes to the organisation’s finances and he is doing a woeful job of it. They have a dedicated Coms team, there are talented people in the leadership group, so I am asking myself how could this train wreck come to pass? I was also thinking, “you should have called me, I could have saved you a lot of wasted opportunity with your messaging”. Too late now, the video is out there for all to ignore. This is a classic case of people who don’t spend any time appreciating the importance of communication and presentation skills, suddenly going for the big ask and then falling flat on their face.
It was serious subject, a heavy subject and the background chosen for the video was given zero thought. When you are asking for a truckload of dough for a project, you want the background oozing with solid credibility. You need to look Presidential, capable, considered and trustworthy. That lightweight scene setting wasn’t given much thought but the talking head only occupies a small part of the screen. Having people moving around in the background distracts us from the key message. No one thought about that either. They should have told those people to buzz off for ten minutes, so the video could get done.
The camera saps twenty percent of our energy. If you are a low energy leader, you can come across as cadaverous. You need to ramp up the speaking power. If the message requires convincing people about spending more money, then you really need to amp it up, to come across as confident, considered and competent. The body language, gestures and voice modulation need to be on point. Hitting key words is a must, as are carefully thought through pauses. We need these to allow the audience to absorb what we have just said. Rolling thoughts over the top of each other leaves the viewers lost.
The camera is also unforgiving. If you can’t hold its gaze, then you look like a shifty Souk merchant trying to sell us some dodgy, dud stuff. You have to look straight into the camera barrel and keep looking at it the whole time. You don’t want to be sitting too close to the camera when you are doing this though. A massive close up of your dial isn’t going to work for most people, so better to back up a bit. It also allows for gestures to be used and more importantly, to be seen.
Looking away, looking down and looking at your notes are a no no. If it is an important occasion, a key topic, the big ask, then do what the world’s leaders have learnt – use the teleprompter. You need to refine the script and then read it, word perfect, while looking straight into the camera lens the whole time. This takes some practice, some effort in the preparation, rather than just pulling up a chair and free styling in front of the camera for a “once over lightly” approach to a serious subject.
I will never forget a gorgeous young American woman I saw on YouTube. She was the complete package. She was teaching people how to use the teleprompter. However her eyes were obviously reading across the screen left to right following the text. You don’t want that. You need to be able to zero in on the lens and read the text at the same time. That takes some time to get right. You also have to play around with the teleprompter speed setting as well, to find the right cadence for your talk.
There were no gripping stories to give us hope. Just a dry rendition of what he wanted to tell us. The visuals were not clever. Cherry picking the minimum damage case smacks of the carnival barker and snake oil salesman. Show us the real numbers, so there is more honesty about the proposition here for us to consider. He was trying to be too clever by half and failing miserably.
Our errant, non-persuading persuader really murdered the message. Once it is done, it is out there. His personal and professional brands both took a massive hit thanks to that video. His messaging missed the mark and I doubt people will be persuaded to join him on his programme.
I am not super opposed to his offering, I get it, but I am vaguely insulted by the lack of professionalism. If he can't get this right, how can I expect he can get anything else right. It is the remaining coffee stain on the pull down tray in the aircraft when you board, that gets you worrying about whether they can actually do a professional job on engine maintenance if they can’t get this simple thing right, why should I trust them with complex things?
There is no excuse for this exercise in bungled communications. In this day and age there is so much information available on presenting skills, it is staggering. For example, in my own case, I have broadcast over four hundred pieces on the subject, for free, over the last years. Don’t allow yourself to become part of the casualty ward of failed suicidal persuaders and communicators inflicting mortal harm to their brand, through lack of awareness and preparation. Get the training now, so that when it is time to step up and be counted, you can carry it off with aplomb.
It makes sense to be authentic when presenting, because this is the easiest state to maintain. As someone wise once noted, “if you are going to be a liar you need a stupendous memory to keep up with who you told what”. Presenting is something similar. Maintaining a fiction in front of an audience takes a lot of skill. In fact, if you have that much skill, why worry about faking it in the first place? Well, there is a place for fakery when presenting, but we need to know when is appropriate.
We know that the way we think about things influences how we well we do. Imposter syndrome is a common state of mind though amongst people, across a broad range of situations. You might write a blog and put it up on your website, or waffle away on Clubhouse or pontificate to an audience, live or online. But who are you to talk about this subject? Are you saying anything worthwhile or just regurgitating what far cleverer people have already said? Do you really know this subject? Is your experience valuable or even relevant to others? Are you really qualified to give advice to people running far bigger organisations that your own?
Looking over that list, it can be enough to scare you off emerging from the deep depths of your comfy comfort zone ever again. So, we have to create a positive mindset that “yes”, we have every right to address this subject area, even if we feel a fake when compared to other more famous or clever people. The funny thing is they suffer the same imposter syndrome too, relative to their illustrious peers. Academics, for example, are generally a put upon group, because they have to publish their research to get ahead in their careers. When they publish it, they are now exposing the weaknesses of their intellectual process, their inadequate research ability or their dubious writing skills, to the entire expert community in their area of defined speciality.
Confidence warrants confidence. If we sound and look confident, most people are likely to ignore the emperor has no clothes and is not perfect. They will be carried away with our enthusiasm for our subject, with our passionate belief in our findings and our commitment to share the knowledge. The problems crop up when we become nervous speaking in front of others. Normally, we are quite even keeled and confident, but with all of those beady sets of eyes drilling holes into us, we start to wobble. Suddenly, our imposter syndrome fears come flooding forth and soon our usual cool, calm, collected façade is torn to shreds, as we are exposed as a self doubting, insecure, fake.
Now how would the audience know we are a fake? Well, we very helpfully tell them, by saying daft things like, “I am rather nervous today”. Or “I am not very good at presenting”. Or “I didn’t have much time to put this presentation together and I am afraid it won’t be very good” and any other of the motley collection of dubious, sympathy seeking, self-serving, cop out proclamations. Do us all a favour and keep all of this imposter syndrome stuff to yourself. Here is a secret - we all want you to succeed.
If you are nervous presenting then fake it, such that you appear at least “normal”, rather than being reduced to a quivering tower of jelly on stage. If your knees are knocking from the nerves, then stand behind the podium until you feel more comfortable to walk around. If your hands are shaking and you have to hold a microphone, use both hands and draw it on to your chest, so that your body secures the erratically jiggling instrument. If your throat is parched, then have warm, room temperature rather than iced water, close by and drink it when you need it. The iced water constricts your throat and you don’t want that, so forgo the usual venue offered beverage and request the no ice alternative. If you begin to speak and instead of a mellifluent note, out pops a constrained, awkward, embarrassing squeak, then clear your throat and try again. If you stumble on the pronunciation of a word, try again. If you get the speech points order mixed up or miss one, then fake it and keep going, offering not a hint of anything untoward occurring.
If you act enthusiastically, you will become enthusiastic. If you act confidently, you will become confident. Yes you might be nervous, but as Winston Churchill said, “if you are going through hell, keep going”. That is the point. No matter what happens, the show must go on and that means you must keep going. If it is a disaster, then dust yourself off and climb back in saddle. As the Japanese saying goes, nana korobi ya oki (七転び八起き) - “fall down seven times, get up eight times”.
When I read this quote from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon from 1971 that “ a wealth of information would create a poverty of attention” I thought about its ramifications for presenters. Today, we are firmly swimming against a King tide of information overload, so Simon’s dystopian prophecy has come to fruition. This is the Age of Distraction for audiences. They are gold medal winning poor listeners and yet we have to present to them. We know that storytelling is one sure fire way to snaffle their attention and yet that path is littered with landmines.
Very few business presenters tell stories at all in their talks. They are enamoured with their high quality content. Which usually means the results of surveys, research or data collation. Data is rarely strong enough to linger long in our memories. This is because usually there is a ton of data, each morsel, each three decimal tidbit vanquishing the one before and so on and so on, until we recall nothing, as Simon predicted.
Business presenters imagining their data is enough are fooling themselves, because their messages are not breaking through that wall of distraction and that poverty of attention. For the few who do tell stories they are freelancing, going free style with no structure. They just relate what happened. What is the point of the story? Is the delivery getting the key messages in front of the audience in a way that they will remember it? Are the listeners seeing any relevance for themselves in this story?
Where do we start with the story? Do we get straight to the point, do we go to the key take away? “Hey, get to the point”. We often hear this from bosses and we mistakenly follow that direction with our storytelling. Why is it a mistake? We have to grasp the fundamental difference between writing a report, where we start with the conclusion we have reached from our analysis, otherwise known as the “Executive Summary” and giving an oral presentation. When we launch forth with our recommendation, we open up the flood gates of rampant critique.
Many who are listening start thinking that we are wrong, have misfired with our analytical findings and have failed to account for important alternate considerations. Why do they react like that? We have put forth our main point completely naked and unprotected, so that is all they have to go on. In the sequence, our explanation of how we came to this conclusion follows next. Critically, the critics are not really listening now because they are consumed by what they think is wrong with it, so the justification portion gets lost for them.
We should instead begin with our context, the background which has informed our conclusion, based on the data and experiences we analysed. We need to populate this context with people they know, places they can see in their mind’s eye and lodge it in a temporal frame which the audience can process.
The genius of this approach is that while sitting there listening to us warble on, the audience are racing ahead and reaching their own conclusions about the insights to be gained from this context. Given a certain set of circumstances, there are a limited number of conclusions to be drawn and the chances are very high, that they will have reached the same one you did. When you announce it, the listeners mentally say to themselves “that’s right”. Bingo!
Now instead of facing an audience of doubters, one uppers and thrusters, you are dealing with fans of your work. The key is to make the insight download very concise. When we teach this formula, invariably people want to jumble a number of insights together and run through them. Each additional insight dilutes the power of the one before it and so on. It is critical to select the strongest, best insight and only pull the velvet curtain back to reveal that one.
The final step is to take the context and the insight and then package it up and place it on a silver tray for the audience to take home with them, when we outline the relevance to them. Although we have produced an insight, it is an inert outcome. What does that insight do for us, how can we use it, where will this be valuable for us, when can we apply it? When we receive the insight wisdom with that relevancy formula attached, it makes sense. We feel attending the speaker’s presentation today was time well spent. We got something worthwhile which will help us navigate the future that little bit better and more easily. Again, this has to be done very concisely, for the same reasons discussed about explaining the insight.
So the formula is context, insight and then explain the relevance. If we mix it up we are making things hard for ourselves, so resist any calls to get to the point, by being forced to put up the insight like a sacrificial lamb about to be slaughtered. Hold it in reserve until the scene has been set. Sherlock Holmes and Poirot, great fictional detectives always revealed the baddie’s name after giving the background of the crime. It is a well tested, tried and true formula for storytelling, so try it.