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.
