203: Seven Tips From The Front Lines Of Presenting

I have the opportunity to give a number of presentations each year.  I video them as well, so I can study where I can improve them further.  What I find very interesting though, is that I am a poor model in some ways for others, who don’t have that chance to present publically so often.  I was teaching some presentation skills classes recently and the students are probably a better fit for most people as a model.  They are in the class because they need to become more persuasive and more professional when they speak.  Our High Impact Presentations Course is the Rolls Royce of presenting, so allow me to encapsulate some of the big breakthroughs I see in our classes, as tips that you can immediately adopt for yourself.

Stand up straight.

Well come on, you may be saying, is that a tip?  How hard could that be?  Surprisingly many people can’t stand up straight.  They put more weight on one leg than the other, kick out one hip and so look way too casual.  Others are swaying about the place from the hips, like a drunken sailor.   This swaying makes them look like they lack confidence and conviction about their messaging, which is extremely bad, but simply fixed.  Stand straight and don't’ sway about.

Turn your neck

 Do not turn your shoulders or feet, when looking at people in the audience sitting on the sides.  Amazingly, some presenters even half lean over toward someone who is sitting off to the side of the speaker.  Or, even more fascinatingly, they do this cute little soft shoe shuffle with their feet to face that person.  You look clunky, way too casual and unconvincing.  Stand up straight on the one spot and just simply turn your head to look at people to the sides of the audience.

Start strong

It is very hard to build up the energy after you start.  For whatever reason it is easier to start strong and then adjust the strength later.  When you begin softly you tend to get stuck there.  Remember, this is the Age of Distraction and we face the toughest audiences ever created. When they hit that room to hear your talk, their brains are chock full of stuff already.  We have to break into their brain and open them up for our message.  A strong start cuts through the crowd noise and grabs immediate attention. 

Use gestures intelligently

The gesture needs to be congruent with what we are saying.  A simple way to understand this is, if I was saying, “this is a huge global project” and had brought my palms together in front of my body facing each other only a few centimetres apart, showing a very narrow range, the words and hand position don’t match.  For that sentence, I need to have my arms up around shoulder height and stretching wide, almost at 180 degrees to my body. 

What many people miss is the opportunity to pair the gesture with the concept.  Use your hands as a measuring stick to indicate high, low, big, small etc.  When the students do this type of gesture in the class, they feel a bit shy, as if it is too exaggerated.  However, once they get into the review room with the other instructor, they see themselves on video and realise it looks very natural and normal.

Eyeball your audience

If we want to persuade our audience we need to engage them.  The most powerful way to do that is give them eye contact.  Politicians are geniuses at getting this wrong.  They do eye contact quick sweeps of the assembled punters, effectively connecting with no one.  This is fake eye contact. 

We want to pick up people in the crowd and give one person solid uninterrupted eye contact for six seconds, then immediately move to the next person at random in the audience and give them six seconds of eye contact.  We just keep repeating this throughout the entire talk.  Six seconds is long enough to engage without becoming intrusive.  Depending on the size of the audience, you may have been able to personally connect with everyone there.  That is powerful.

Use your voice

Speakers speak with their voice, but many are not really using it properly.  Using it properly would be to select certain key words in a sentence and either hit them harder or make them softer than the surrounding words.  It might be used to slow----things----down or SPEEDTHEMUP when we speak.  Also we can go high and low in modulation for more variety.

Turn the energy switch on

We speak with a certain energy output, when we are having a normal conversation.  We cannot transfer that same energy to the stage or to the online world when we are presenting.  We need to really ramp up the energy output. 

We have a different role when we are in the limelight.  We need to project our confidence, our belief in what we are saying.  An easy way to do that is drive up the energy output and radiate that to the audience.  We need to vary the power of course, throughout the speech, but the baseline will be about 20% higher than what we would experience in normal conversation.

If you start adopting these seven tips into your next presentation, it will be remarkably more effective.  Are any of these tips especially hard?  Not at all.  What is required is self awareness and the ability to adjust what you are doing to make it better. 

A bonus tip is to rehearse.  Don’t experiment or practice on your audience.  Don’t spend all your prep time on beating the slide deck into submission.  Allocate time to practice the talk and if possible video it for review.  You will be better at getting the time limits of the speech correct and will be so much more confident when the big day comes for your talk.