Episode 52: THE Leadership Japan Series - How to Use PowerPoint, Etc. (Properly) When Presenting
Intro: Greg: Konnichiwa and welcome to Episode 52 of THE Leadership Japan series. I’m your host in Tokyo, Dr. Greg Story, president of Dale Carnegie Training Japan, and much more importantly you are a student of leadership, highly motivated to be the best in your business field. If you enjoy the program then you might consider subscribing on iTunes. Also, if you would like your own access to 102 years of the accumulated wisdom of Dale Carnegie training through free white-papers, guidebooks, reports, training videos, blogs, course information plus much much more, then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com. Today, we are going to discuss the proper use of PowerPoint when presenting.
Greg: Welcome to Dale Carnegie Training Japan, High-Impact Presentations. Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting. Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation? What about visuals? What’s too much? What’s too little? What’s the best way to make this work for me? Well there’s a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning. Firstly, to have impact when you are a presenter, you must have a good structure. It must be something that people can follow. It’s very clear as you transition from one section to another of where you are going with this conversation, where you are going with this skilled presentation. Naturally the content must be high quality. There must be clear points with evidence backing up what you are saying. The third one though is really the make or break it. If your delivery is not well-rehearsed, well-practiced and professional, it doesn’t matter how good your structure is, people leave the presentation with a very poor image of your company’s brand and your brand. If the structure is good, but content not very good, not very high quality, again you are just killing your brand. But even if your content is great and even if your structure is great but you deliver it in such a way that the audience is left bored or they’re not relating to it, they are not identifying with the message, then you have had zero impact on that audience. So a big part of the delivery is how we interact with the screen or with handouts that we’ve got for the audience. Today I am going to look at what we can do to really improve in that delivery aspect around using visuals.
Preparation is the key to everything. Very key question, who is my audience? You have to really understand who you are talking to. What is their level of expertise? What is their level of experience? What’s the age range? What’s the gender mix? What’s their interest in this particular subject? So before we get up in front of any audience, we need to investigate who will be there? What things we think will be most appropriate for that particular audience? I’ll talk about this in a little bit but why are you giving this presentation? What’s the purpose? What are you trying to achieve with this presentation? Let me come back to that in a little bit more detail in the next slide.
Well, how will I open? Critical question. You are competing with what’s already inside their heads, of every single person inside that room. They come to your presentation maxed out. They’ve got everything that’s happening in their lives in their head. What happened that morning, what they’ve got to do later in the day, things that are going on at work, things that are happening in their personal life. You are really competing with a lot of other stuff. Your opening has got to cut through all that distraction and it has to grab their attention so they’ll listen to what you have to say. If you don’t get that right and you lose them, and you’ve only got a few seconds to grab them, you are going to have a very difficult job to have any impact with that audience.
What are some of the key points you are going to make? You’ve got a certain time limitation. You can’t deal with everything. What are the key things I am supposed to be concentrating on?Make sure you’ve isolated those and then bracket them throughout the talk so that they flow in that structure that I talked about before, nicely from one to the other. And then again, what are the ideas and evidence that you are going to use to back up those key points? You make a statement. Ok that’s great. Well so what? What’s the proof? What’s the evidence? Who else says that? What are some testimonials? What are some authorities you can draw on that back up what you’re saying? And then finally, first impression. I mentioned before, it’s very critical to grab the audience attention. Lastly, closing statement. This is the last thing that is going to be ringing in their ears as they walk out of that venue. You must command that close. You must have the final key message as the last things in their mind as they leave you and leave the presentation. Even if you have Q&A, from when you finish your presentation to the actual final closing of the presentation, you must come back and have a second close. You might close, go to Q&A. Definitely don’t end it at the last question in Q&A. Wrap it up. Go back and close it up as you want it to close. You must keep in control of the proceedings.
Now I mentioned a minute ago about what’s the purpose here? There are basically four purposes of our presentations. Either we are trying to convince an audience or impress them about our company or something we are doing ourselves. Or it might be we just want to give them some information or inform them about something, update them on something that’s happening. Might be a new regulation, a new product release. It could be a new marketing strategy. Or we might be trying to persuade them or persuade them to take some action. Or we just might be there to entertain people. Depending on what you are trying to achieve, then you really need to think, what am I going to present that will help me to achieve that purpose? Don’t start with the visuals or you know, I found this really cool photograph. I found this really great graph or I’ve got this really interesting PowerPoint animation. Don’t start with the mechanics. Start with the point. What am I setting out to achieve, and then build your opening. Build your key points. Build your evidence and then build your close around that and then come back and look at the visuals. In fact I recommend you start with the close. Start with the thing you want to have people remembering. Start with that. Design that first, then go back and design how you are going to open this up. Then look at, what are the key points and what is my evidence around those key points. That sounds a bit counterintuitive, but begin where you want to end. It’s not bad advice. Go back and think, what’s the final key message I want to leave with this audience? How am I going to break into their attention that’s already crowded with lots of competing ideas and information? How will I arrange my structure so it’s logical? And then how will I hang the evidence and the ideas off that. Having done all that and having decided what the purpose is, now let’s think about the visuals. Visuals are great, but you don’t always need to use visuals. Sometimes it’s better not to use visuals. Sometimes a PowerPoint free or a visual free zone is great when you are doing a presentation. It doesn’t have to be a lot of visuals, but, they can dramatize ideas. They are also a bit of a guide to the presentation direction.
Many years ago I attended a lecture at Harvard Business School. It was an executive course that I was sent to by my company. The professor gave a three hour lecture, no notes. It was most impressive. I did notice at the back of the lecture theatre, on a piece of paper on the back wall, ten words. Those ten words was actually his three hour lecture. That was his guide to what comes next. I talk about this and then I go into this and then this comes next. Well a visual presentation can also be a prompt to us as a speaker as to what comes next. It keeps us on track with where we are going in our presentation. Visuals can also make the presentation easy to understand, particularly if you are talking about numbers. A graph or a pie chart or something like that is a very clear visual signal about a complex idea and helps the audience to understand the message we are trying to get across.
What about the types of visuals that we need to use? How many visuals are required? Some people have very few. Some people have a lot. I once gave a five minute presentation and I used for that I think about 90 visuals. Now you might be thinking, 90 visuals in five minutes? Are you nuts? Well that particular presentation was a warm up to a keynote speaker. We’d sponsored the event and for that we got five minutes. Now I remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Something along the lines of, if you want me to give a three hour speech I can get up and give it right now. But if you want a 20 minute speech it will take me three or four weeks to prepare it. And that’s right. To give a very long speech, rambling speech is relatively easy. To give a very concise sharp speech is very tough. Five minutes is a really tough time period in which to speak, very hard to have impact. So in that particular case, I used 90. I was using a visual every two seconds. As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen lots of visuals were just hitting the audience because in that five minutes I needed to get something across about Dale Carnegie Training Japan. I wanted to give some visual stimulation because I don’t have many words in five minutes to really get in front of that audience with very strong ideas. So I was using that as a technique. For that particular case it worked very well. Generally speaking I usually want to use too many visuals because I am too greedy and I see all these great things I can show people, and I want to show them. But I really have to pair it down. I have to really discipline myself to really cut them out. Oh I really want to use that graph. Oh that’s a great visual. No, no, no, no. Cut it out. Cut it out. Try and keep it in some sort of range that works for you depending on what the purpose of your presentation is. Degree of permanency is something you need to think about. It might be better to use as a handout. It might be something that is too complex to put up on the screen. And often you get this. I worked in the financial sector for a number of years and had to sit through countless presentations of spreadsheets up on screens with numbers that were so tiny the person standing next to the screen giving the presentation had no clue as to read it themselves and say crazy things like,“I know you can’t see this but…”. Well of course we can’t see the thing, it’s too damn small. Get those sorts of visuals in the hands of the audience rather than try to see it on the screen.
As for the size of the audience, for a very big audience, the visuals may be more important than a small audience. Think, does it back up the content of what you are saying? How much time have you got to prepare? Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the PowerPoint or the key note or whatever it is that they are preparing and no time on the rehearsal. So the whole balance flips and instead of having a case where you get the presentation structure, content right and then spend time on the rehearsal, delivery practice, it’s all sucked up into the visuals preparation, which is the wrong balance. Be very cautious about spending all your time on that and not allowing enough time on the actual physical stand up and deliver and practice. And finally the cost. Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals or sourcing visuals. That may not be something you want to do.
Here’s some guidelines for using visuals. As it was mentioned before, sometimes less is definitely best. On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs. Try to avoid sentences. If you can, single words, bullet points. Sometimes bullet points are, the point, the bullet is sometimes good. Single words can be very very powerful. Just one word or even just one number can be very very powerful and then you can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word. Or just a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual. You don’t have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves. What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what’s on the screen. This is very critical. We don’t want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they’ve got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them. And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule. If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand that within two seconds, it’s probably too complicated. Two seconds-that’s not long. But if it’s more than two seconds it’s probably too complicated. So think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts or maybe just leaving it out and replacing it with something you can talk to. Don’t try and have people try and make their way through something very complex on the screen.
Generally six by six rule means that again, less is best. Six words on a line. Maybe six lines maximum on a screen is good. Again, keeping it very minimalist. Six lines or less per visual is probably good. And then six words across each line probably max. With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read. You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32. Large font so it’s easy to read if you are at the back of the hall. In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read. Whereas serif fonts like Times, Times Roman, which has got a lot of additional fancy work done to them, these can be a bit distracting. Try to use something like Arial or Sans Serif fonts that make it easy to read. And again, be very very very sparing with all uppercase. It’s actually screaming at your audience; it’s shouting at your audience when you use strong uppercase like that. You can use it. But use it very very strategically and very practically to make a strong point. So upper and lowercase is much more balanced. Be very careful about using a lot or too much of all upper case. For visibility, be careful about the overuse of underline. Yes you can use underline but use it sparingly. Bold, yes you can use bold, but the same thing, occasionally. Italics, yes, very rarely with italics because again it’s not so easy to read. You can use them but use them very very modestly.
With things like transitions and animations, sometimes it’s good to reveal one concept at a time because there is only one idea on the screen and then you can talk to that so you are not competing with a lot of words on the screen. Try and keep it consistent and simple. So if you start like that then maybe continue like that. Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time, but try not to have it jumping around too much because then people get very confused. If you are going to have animation where it might be wipe right for example as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time. Don’t have one wipe right then the wipe up and the next one is wipe left, next one is something else. It’s very confusing for an audience. And wiping left to right is good because that’s how we read. That makes a lot of sense for people. And if we are going to indent on a visual, do it maybe just once on that page. Don’t have a sentence and a couple of words and a whole bunch of indents. Just try and keep it as simple as possible. If you’ve got that much information, whip that over onto another page. Pictures are great. Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And a nice, nice photograph of something that’s relevant, of a book or picture or whatever. Nice and people can look at that. Very simply, they get it. Two seconds, they’ve got it. Now they’re ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image, this picture, to what your talk is about today.
With bar graphs-they’re great. Easy to compare items, you know. For certain, particularly measurement related, numbers related presentations, you want to compare different variables by bar graphs-very good for that. Y charts, they’re great to show change over time. And you can compare two or three items over time and it is very easy to see, that one’s up, that one’s down, that’s flat. Again,it’s very simple to understand. And pie charts are fantastic for parts of a whole. What’s the share of something? As long as there’s not too many, then a pie chart works well.
With lighting be very careful when the room gets set up because honestly I am yet to meet very many people who set up rooms, who do presenting. The people who get the job to set up the room are rarely presenters themselves. They are just told, you set up the room. Put the chairs here. Put the lectern there. Put the mic there. Particularly at hotels I’ll notice that a lot of times, hotel staff, very unhelpfullywill turn off all the lights in the audience and just havethe whole stage black and then the screen is the main light source. No, no, no. You want the lights on that audience. You want to see your audience. You want to be looking at their faces. What is their reaction to what I am saying? Am I boring them? Are they with me? Are they nodding? Are they shaking their head? You want to see your audience. So keep the room lights up on the audience. Do not turn it down. If you have to turn it down at all, turn it down very very little. Try and keep the room lit. Around the screen area, it’s good if you can actually have the lights off just above the screen. Then the screen becomes easier to read. But definitely leave the lights on you. When they shut the lights down, you’re now in darkness so you’re invisible to an audience, just a voice in the dark. No, have the lights on you, spotlights on you so the audience can see your face, because your face has got so much power of persuasion. You’ve got so much creditability through the message through using your face, using your gestures, your body language. Don’t miss the opportunity that the audience can see all of that. I have to say I am struggling to think of too many venues that manage to isolate out the lights above a screen. But today with most projectors, the screens are pretty good, even with all the lights on so it’s usually not such a big deal. And again if you design your visuals with that in mind, you’re not going to be too dependent on too much information on the screen. We have a particularly bright room, might be a lot of natural light. Then often you have a light background with very dark text as the contrast. And that works very well. So the contrast of dark fonts on a light background in a light room can work. Or sometimes in a dark room you might go the other way and have a dark background with white and even white bolded text on a screen to really stand out and have the contrast.
Colors are tricky, you rarely see people using them well I have to say. Colors like black, blue, green - they work very well on a screen. They’re the best colors. Stay away from oranges and greys and particularly we’ll talk about in a minute, red. So with contrast, black and blue work together well as a contrast. And green and black also work well together as a contrast. They’re good colors to mix and match on the screen: black and blue, green and black. Red, oh my god, red can be hard to see. In fact I was at a presentation not that long ago in marketing. Quite good content and reasonably well delivered but the screen! Dark blue background, red on dark blue. I could not read it very easily. So red, avoid red. Just try and stay away from red. It is hard to read on a screen. And also don’t go crazy and try and have some sort of rainbow federation going on. All the colors we’ve got to have. Too many on screen. Too distracting. Too confusing. And remember you are the message. You are. Your face, your body, your gestures, your body language, your energy-you are the message, not what is on that screen. The screen is a slave to you. It is a servant to you. Not the other way around.
So when we are preparing, one of the tricky things is we often sit around in front of a screen, at a very close distance and we are preparing the visuals. And then off we go and we are in a big room, big venue, big screen. And somehow it doesn’t look like it did when I was preparing it. And you go, uh oh, too late. On your computer you’ll have a presentation mode function. Go to that and then run your slides through that and see how it looks. And also, another handy hint, get to the venue early and run it through their projector on their screen in that venue and then make any final adjustments you need to make there and then, because often it is different. And if you are using different computers, for example at work I am using a sort of Windows environment, at home I’ve got a Mac environment so when I do things on PowerPoint on my Mac and then I take it to my desktop at work, it looks different. Something, the formatting changes. Often it’s a mysterious thing why it changes but it changes. So be very careful about when you are shifting formats through computers. Particularly if you are taking a USB, a disk or something and you stick it in the venue’s computer and then suddenly, boom! All your formatting’s changed and you’ve got no time to do much about it. So you can always go early if you are going to use their computer with your USB or whatever, check. And the visuals should have some relevancy to what you are presenting so try and make sure it is not irrelevant or distracting or competing with the message. If you have something that is really exciting on the screen, very interesting, you don’t get lost. Particularly if you are presenting video, be very careful that the video doesn’t overrun what you’re doing. That the video then takes over the whole presentation. And use video sparingly. It’s sad for me to see CEO’s, of major corporations get up there and they go straight to the video. You know, straight to the video because they don’t like presenting or they’re not confident, or they think somehow that sort of corporate video is going to be so riveting for an audience that they’re just going to sell the whole message. No, you sell the message. The video is a slave. The video is a servant to you. Use it as an adjunct not as a substitute for you. There is no substitute for you actually. You are the main thing. Electronic backup is good. Not a bad thing to have a second laptop there, primed and ready to go. Because things do go wrong. Have a USB there. Things do go wrong. Have a disk handy. Things do go wrong. Be ready to have some backup if you need it.
Recently I was at a presentation, and the actual IT guy was doing part of the presentation and he couldn’t get his presentation to work. So now we’ve got a balding pate looking at us because his head is over the keyboard, like under the bonnet of a car, trying to fix the engine. And here he is, he’s got the head down with his bald pate facing us trying to get the plumbing to work. Not a good look. Things do go wrong, even for IT people who are experts in this area. Things do go wrong. So don’t think it’s always going to be perfect; be ready for trouble.
With an audience, there are lots of things we can look at. We can look at the screen behind us. We can look at our screen on our laptop in front of us. We can look at notes. But we should not. We should not be looking much at any of those things. We should be looking at our audience. We should be breaking our audience up into pockets of six. And what I mean, and I’m an Australian so I’m not particularly familiar with things like baseball. I’ve seen it played and I’ve noticed that with baseball they have sort of a curved shape in front of you. So you’ve got left field, center field, right field. So there’s three basic brackets that you can break your audience up into. Audience on my left, audience at my center, audience on my right. I’ve also noticed they have what they call the inner field and the outer field. So that inner field might be the first few rows of my audience-like the first half of the venue is my inner field. And the back half is my outer field. So now left, center right. I’ve got front and back. So that creates six pockets. So try and involve the audience in all six pockets. Don’t just look at the left side of your audience. Don’t just look at the right side of your audience. Don’t look at the front row and ignore everyone else. Take your eye contact and involve every single group and look at every single group through the process of your presentation. And try and look for about six seconds because less than that it looks like sort of fake eye contact. And too much more than that six seconds, it gets a bit intrusive. So six seconds is a good enough period of time to be making a comment or you are looking at an audience member in one pocket and then switch and look to another pocket. And don’t do it by numbers like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in one order, left to right. No, no. Break it up. Look left to right randomly. Look all over the place so you never quite know where you are going to pick up the next audience group, so it’s not predictable. And keep that audience eye contact and glanceat the screen, but keep the main contact with your audience. Remember, the audience is the key thing. Your monitor of your laptop will tell you what’s on screen so you can refer to it without having to look backwards at the big screen. All though, sometimes for me I prefer to present without glasses so if I can I will sometimes use the big screen to just check what’s on there rather than my monitor on my laptop because it might be a bit hard for me to see - can’t read it without glasses. But I try not to spend too much time looking at the big screen. Just glance at it and talk to my audience.
I’ve seen lots of people get lost with their notes. They’ve got copious notes and they start reading it. Don’t. That’s my advice. Don’t. Don’t read it. Do not read it. Have your points, sure. Have some points, have some notes. That’s fine. Noone will begrudge you looking at some notes to trigger the next phase of what you going to talk about. But talk about it. You’re the expert. Talk to what your topic is about. You’ve designed it. It’s your presentation. You know what the purpose is. Talk to the points. Don’t read the points. It just takes away from it. I forget where I was recently - something I saw, someone actually reading a presentation. They did a reasonable job of reading it, but it would have been so much more impressive if they had not read it, if they’d actually spoken to it. And you can, you know, you’ve got points you can talk to. That’s enough. So try to avoid looking down and reading. It’s noteffective. You are not going to have an impact when you do it that way.
Lecterns are a bit of a trap. Again, people who set up venues, they tend to set them up without thinking. So they’ll put the lectern there with the sort of stand mic. Try and use a pin mic rather than a stand mic so you can move around a little bit. If you can, move the lectern get rid of it. If the lectern is just a platform to put your laptop on, fine. But move it out of the way; put it to the side so that yes, you can have the laptop there if you need to look at the screen. If you are not particularly tall, then you should definitely be very careful about being trapped behind a lectern because often the lectern is a bit high and all we can see is your head, and it’s just framed above the lectern. Again, not a good look. If you have to use a lectern, then get organized, get something to stand on so you are going to be higher above the lectern. If you can get rid of the lectern then get rid of the lectern because that way we can see your whole body, we’ve got all the body language available to us. Great for getting messages across. If you’ve got a mic stand then take the mic out from the mic stand and try and move away from the lectern. Even if you can’t move the lectern then try and stand in front of the lectern-in between the audience and the lectern. Or stand to the side of it if you can.
Definitely check out the room. Room layout is very critical. Often people layout rooms the wrong way. Crazy things happen. I’ve been to venues where the organizers obviously never give presentations. They set up my position right in front of the projector. Right in front of the projector. I’m now going to become the screen. Just crazy stuff so get there early if you could. Actually, go the day before, even better, then you can check out how it’s going to look. What’s the room like? Make any adjustments. But certainly day before is best. If that’s not the case then definitely get there early and check it out because crazy stuff happens and people who don’t know about presenting are often given the task of setting it up. And often they won’t set it up correctly. With the room, if you can, always try and stand on the left of the screen. That means the audience left. We read from left to right so what we want is the audience looking at us and then they read what is on the screen. Look at our face, read the screen. Look at us, read the screen. It often happens that the people putting the presentation together or hosting it will set it up so that you are on the right side of the screen. They’ll have the laptop stand there, they’ll have the mic set up there. Again if you can get there early, move it. Now I can have that on the other side if possible. If you can’t, ok. You have to present from the right side to the audience but better if you can present to the left side of the audience side. So read left to right. Look at you, read. Look at you, read is much better if you can organize it like that. But also check where you are standing in terms of audience lines of sight. Because sometimes if you are on the same level as the audience and you are standing to the left or to the right, doesn’t matter. You might actually be blocking people on the far extremes of the seating. So be careful that you’re not standing in front of the screen. Now sometimes you have a platform and huge screen and you might stand in front of the entire presentation so you are actually blocking part of the screen. That’s ok. Again, power position is at the center. But then don’t stay there, move. Walk across the stage from the left and talk from there. Come back to the center. Move across to the right. Then come back to the center. So you are not entirely blocking what’s on screen all the time for every slide. And sometimes with the slides it won’t matter. But be careful about not blocking your audience from their seated position to the screen.
Microphones. If you have a big venue or if you have a reasonably large audience size, say more than 30 people, microphones are good to use. But if it is a small venue, only a small audience, you don’t need a microphone. It all depends. Sometimes some ladies have a soft voice, they can’t get their voice to carry. A microphone is definitely recommended. I personally don’t use a microphone in a small audience because then it leaves both hands free for gesturing and I am not restricted. But if it’s a big venue then yes, definitely use a microphone. And one hint with microphones and you are nervous, there is nothing worse than seeing a microphone vibrating in your hand through the shaking of your hands. So a good sort of way of getting around that problem is grip the microphone with both hands and then hold your hands on your chest, physically bring both hands, you’ve got the microphone, and bring both hands to your physical chest. And tuck your elbows in. So now the microphone will not sway and vibrate and show you are nervous. It’s not the greatest thing for lack of gestures but it’s much better than the audience fixated on,“Oh look at that, that person is totally nervous. Look at that vibrating microphone. Wow they look really scared.” No don’t have that. If you’ve got the calmness to hold it in one hand, great. Swap hands so you can use both hands for gesturing. And don’t hold it right up to your mouth. Now this is sometimes funny with things like the Academy Awards. You know you see so called professionals and they’ve got the stand mic on the dais on the lectern and they’ll lean down. They’ll actually physically lean down so they are leaning right over to speak in this little mic. Microphones are so sophisticated today, they catch the sound. You don’t have to lean down. You should be talking across the top of the microphone not jamming it up in front of your mouth. Hold it away from you and speak across the top. It will catch you just fine.
With the projector, sometimes you don’t need to have things on screen. Just hit B. Go to your laptop or your keyboard, hit B. Then the whole screen will go black and there is nothing to distract your audience. They’ve just got to listen to you and look at you. And you come back to hit the space bar and the screen will come back on again. If you want to go to an all-white you can just hit I think W for memory and that will give you an all-white screen if you want an all-white screen for some reason. It might be a dark room. Hit W for white and up it comes, and B for black, just black it out, which again cuts down the distractions.
Be careful about waving your hands around with the screen behind you. Then we start feeling like shadow puppets. People get distracted by the shadow of you hand on the screen so be careful about that. That’s something you don’t want to have happening. Be careful about the positioning of your hand relative to a screen. With things in your hand, don’t hold notes in your hand. It’s amazing that when we are teaching people how to give presentations we’ll sometimes have people wanting to hold the actual document they’ve prepared in their hand. They don’t even look at it. They don’t need it. Leave it on your desk or leave it somewhere close. You can look at the notes but don’t hold it in your hand. But if you do have an exhibit or something that you want to show the audience, that’s great. Pick it up, then use it, and then put it down again. You don’t have to hold it the whole time. And don’t have things in your pocket. You might have things in your pockets, bring it out, show the audience because you are handling it, and then just put it away so it’s not distracting. And one thing with the clickers, the slide clickers, they can also be a distraction but then again you’ve got them there, you’ve got to use them.
Visuals can be a distraction from your message. Make sure they are relevant. Make sure they are not overpowering you. Think of it on the big screen. Make sure that the audience is looking at you, not currently what’s on the screen. Design it so they got two seconds they can get it then they come back to you. Power is also a tricky thing because the power supply can go down. This can happen. Suddenly you lose the screen. You loselights depending on the venue. Soldier on. You might have your laptop not connected to the power supply and then your laptop battery dies. Check all these things so that you are on track to have power. If you lose power, charge on. Keep going. Don’t worry about it unless you have to evacuate the building for some reason. But keep going. If power fails, be prepared. Be prepared to keep going. Have notes or have it in your mind what you are going to talk about. Be prepared to wrap it up. Don’t look stuck. Don’t look lost. Keep going. Test everything before you start presenting, of course. Now this mysteriously happens. I was at a presentation recently. I got there early, fortunately. I went through. I checked my visuals. It was all working. And then suddenly, suddenly the visuals were not working. I could not get the computer to work. I do not know to this day what was wrong. But I had to get out, reboot it, reset it. You know go through the whole process. It takes time. Test everything and give yourself time margin. And in that particular case, with about two minutes to spare I got it up again and we were away. I could have presented without the visuals, it wasn’t a big deal. I could have done it without the visuals but it would have been a little bit more powerful with the visuals, give some extra buzz to what I was talking about. But these things happen, so check, check, check.
Sometimes remotes are useful for clicking through. I’ve a bit of a love/hate thing with visual remotes because it is in my hand so I try to hold it in my hand in a way that it is not obvious that I’ve got it. I still try and use that hand for gesturing. I’ll try and put it down if I don’t need it. Laser pointers-some people go nuts with the laser pointer. Worst thing is they point the laser at the audience. I’ve seen that. Let’s zap a few eyeballs with that laser beam. No, don’t do that, or they are whizzing the thing around all over the place. It’s like they’ve forgotten that the laser is on so the laser is doing some sort of laser show in the venue because they are waving their arms around with the laser. The laser’s still on. No. Or they try to use the laser beam to indicate something on the screen and they are whipping it around at a very rapid pace all over the place. No. You’ve got to understand that if you are going to use the laser, go to the word or the section and use the beam slowly. Move it very slowly if you are going to circle something or across something that you want to underline. Very very slow is the key.
Focus is important. As I said earlier with the eye power, if it’s in a big venue and the screen takes up the whole background, again, I like to use the front, left, right, side for a bit of variation. And I try to stand as far to the front, the apron, as I can. I try not to fall into the audience. I’ve come close to that a few times by getting a bit too close. But it’s good. It’s good to be close because then you are physically close to your audience and you can have more impact, more body language power when you are up close. That’s always a good position to be in. Sometimes you’ll have something on screen. Use your arms to reach back to what’s on screen but keep looking at your audience. Your arm actually indicates where you want your audience to look. That’s very good so they see they need to look at the screen now. Or, I need to look at this part of the screen now. Use that gesture to very effectively to make focus. And again use it for focus-don’t use it all the time, just to direct their attention to particular things.
And again, tell people where you are going with your presentation. Set it up so people are aware what’s coming. “Now we are going to talk about so and so.” The next screen comes up and they know what to expect, rather than being surprised all the time about what’s coming up. This keeps them focused. And your bridges or your transitions in your talk about your key points, you bring them visually into the next section of your talk works very well. And I said before about keeping the lights on - worst thing in the world is you are in light and the audience is in darkness and you can’t see. I work in Japan, live in Japan and I’ve noticed that Japanese audiences, if you turn the lights out, they are very quick to lose focus. I think it’s probably true around the world, but because I do a lot of presenting here I probably notice it more in Japan. Don’t turn the lights off the audience. Keep the lights on the audience and allow yourself to read the reaction to your voice and what you are saying. Look at their faces-how many are nodding? How many are just looking dead bored? How many are now on their iPhone checking email because you have lost them. You need to be able to see them to be able to keep the focus on your audience to then switch gears. Now if you need to get your audience back in the room, ask a question, a rhetorical question. They don’t know though whether it’s a rhetorical question or real question. But by answering a question, you get their attention back in the room. Or come back from wherever they are and you’ve got them again and keep going.
The way we present conversational language is very good. Storytelling is very good. We all relate to storytelling. It takes into the context, the why of what you are talking about very quickly. And congruency between what you are presenting and how you are presenting it is very important. Remember, I can’t remember the comedian. This is going back 50 years ago now, 40 or 50 years ago. I remember I heard some American comedian and he was talking about being a graduate of so and so school of speed reading. But he spoke in this really slow voice. “My. Name. Is… I. am. A. Graduate. Of.The.So and so.School.Of.Speed.Reading.” Speaking like this as a graduate of the school of speed reading. It’s for ajoke. It was comedy. But there is no congruency because he is not matching the way of delivering the words with the message. Same thing. If it’s a very serious point then you shouldn’t be laughing, you shouldn’t be smiling. You should look serious. If it’s a lighthearted point, if it’s something that’s good news, don’t look unhappy. Don’t look serious, look happy. So we need to make sure that the content is matched by the delivery.
Speed is something that we use for variation in our voice. Speeding things up, slowing them down for emphasis. Putting the power in! Taking the power out. These are all controls we can use for variation so we have modulation in our voice where we are going up and down as well which gives us power, gives us variation. We can have gestures and about 15 seconds is max that you want to hold a gesture because after that the power of the gesture is dead and it just becomes annoying. So you turn the gestures on, turn them off. Using our face, as I said before, for highlighting. Like something surprising, show a surprised face. If it’s a very great piece of news, show a really happy face. If it’s something very serious, show a serious face. The voice or the face or the body language-everything matches up with the message. And body language too, using the energy. In Japanese we talk about the “ki” in Aikido. The energy, the power we have inside us just by projecting that power, energy out to the audience. You give the audience energy, you give them power. You bring their energy level up, they are more receptive to your message. So if your energy levels start dropping through the process of giving your presentations, you’ll notice that your audience level will start to drop too and they’ll start to get distracted. So be prepared to keep your energy levels high. But don’t have it maximum high all the time. That just wears an audience out and wears you out too, by the way. So you need to have some variation. Very strong and then sometimes very soft. And drop it down. Remember to have that in the voice. Sometimes in a whisper.
I remember once I gave a presentation, it was in Kobe. It was at a university. It was for summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. And I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country. It was powerful, a very powerful presentation I gave. The speaker after me was a Korean professor and maybe because of the way I presented, I don’t know, but he spoke very quietly; he spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation. And it really forced you to lean in and listen to him because you had to really work a little bit harder to listen to him. So he got peoples’ attention by having a softer voice and I thought at the time, wow look at that. That was very effective and I realized, ah, just being one power all the time is not going to work. I need to have variety in my voice so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft. So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong. Variety is the key.
I said before gestures are very important. Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things. If you are saying one thing, hold up one finger, or two things, hold up two fingers. And if you are holding up things up like that, hold it up around head height. Don’t hold gestures around about your waist height. It’s too low, people struggle to see it. Get your gestures up and then band right around chest, from chest height up to around head height. That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures. You want to show a big point, open your hands right out. Don’t be afraid of big gestures. Use gestures that are congruent. Be careful about waving your fist at people, at your audience. It looks aggressive, it looks combative. Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don’t hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh. That becomes distracting. Just use the gestures by themselves. As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the max you want. And you can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, pacing up and down. That makes you look a bit nervous. Try and hold the main point and move because you’ve got a reason to move.
Again, names of people in your audience is a great thing to use. If you get there early, meet some of your audience. Have a conversation with someone. It’s nice in the presentation to refer to that person and say,“I was just chatting with Jim. Jim jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about giving presentations. In fact Mary made an addition to that point, Mary Smith. Made an addition to that point blah blah…” Suddenly you’ve got both people very much proud and involved. You know, they’ve been recognized by the speaker. The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with the audience. Just simple things like this. Refer to people by name. Very very very effective. Try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience.
As I said before, what’s the point of your presentation? Who’s your audience? What’s the point? And then being conversational and customizing the delivery to your listeners. Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that’s custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making. Don’t just bring out a set off the shelf that’s a pack for a presentation. You might have the basis of a presentation but think about who am I talking to? What is my key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up. I’ve given now close to about 500 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan. I have never given the same presentation twice, ever. Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation but certainly the way I present it will be different every time. Keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker. And it also keeps it fresh for an audience. So if I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then chances are that’s how the audience will feel about it too. They will feel stimulated and interested as well. Do not receive a pack, and you know often you’ll see the president’s had some munchkins out the back preparing his presentation for him or her, and often it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation and it’s obvious that it’s the first time they’ve seen the presentation. They don’t know what’s coming next and they struggle through it. It’s really killing the brand. It’s killing the brand, the organization. Its killing the president’s or the presenter’s personal brand. You don’t want that. Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it.
So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which is based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures. Really cover all the major structures you need for an audience. How to isolate out the content you want. How to deliver it. How to do things like Q&A very effectively. How to deal with pressure, really intense pressure situations. How to present complex information. How to be persuasive. How to inspire people to take action. How to create a great first impression. There’s a whole raft of things in that two-day course. It’s really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills. This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912, teaching people how to be persuasive. If ever you have a chance after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven’t done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course. It’s a game changer of a training course. In two days, everything is videoed. You have two trainers so you have coaching while watching yourself on screen. It’s a phenomenal course. I’ve taken it myself and I strongly recommend it. So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials. They are secondary to you. But when you do construct your materials, take my advice, what I’ve given you today, what we’ve talked about. Use those ideas, use those hints and you will give a much much better presentation. Good luck and I hope that we can see you one day in a high-impact presentations class for Dale Carnegie somewhere in the 90 plus countries and the 30 plus languages we deliver around the world.
Closing: Thank you for joining THE Leadership Japan Series. If you found the program useful then you might consider subscribing on iTunes. Remember, to access your Dale Carnegie training free white-papers, guidebooks, training videos, blogs, course information plus much much more then go to japan.dalecarnegie.com.
