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.