I am terrible. I procrastinate about starting the assembly of my presentation. Invariably, by holding off starting, I create time tension, which forces me to elevate the priority of the presentation and lift its urgency above all the other competing demands on my time. I should start earlier and take some of that tension out of my life. So, everyone do what I say, don’t do what I do! Start early.
The first point of departure must be working on the clarity needed around the key message. What is the point we want to get across? There are always a multitude of these and it is quite challenging sometimes to pick out the one we want to work on. Part of my problem is perfectionism immobilising me. So let’s all suspend perfectionism and just be happy to get started, knowing we can finesse what we are doing later.
Once we have settled on the key message, we need to make sure that anyone would care about that message. It might be intoxicating for us, but it may not motivate anyone else to get excited. A reality check is in order before we move forward. Will there be enough traction with the audience we are going to be presenting to? We should have a fairly clear idea about who will be interested in our topic and what some of their expectations will be.
After the reality check, we start to construct the talk. Counterintuitively, we start with the end. We settle on the actual words we need for our conclusion, because this is a succinct summary of what we will talk about. Getting that down to a few sentences is no easy feat. It is simple to waffle on, but it requires skill to be brief and totally on point.
Next, we plan out the chapters of the talk to deliver the goods to prove what we are saying in our conclusion is true. In a forty-minute speech, we can usually get through five or six chapters. Here is a critical piece of the puzzle. We need to rehearse the talk and carefully watch the time. It is very difficult to predict accurately the required time until you run through the talk. We may find we are short on the content or too long and we need to make adjustments. We certainly don’t want to discover that on stage in front of an audience. We all feel cheated when the presenter start rushing at the end and the slides go up and come down in seconds. You simply can’t follow what they are showing to the audience and that leaves a very negative impression at the end of the talk.
Now we plan our start. This is the first impression of our talk. Well, that is not quite true. The audience will be making critical judgements as to how we command the stage and how we get underway. Juggling slides on the deck is a bad look at the start. That should definitely be left to someone else, so we can get straight into our opening. Don’t thank the organisers at this point, we can do that in a moment. We don’t want to waste the opening with a bunch of generic bumf. We need to grab hold of our audience at this point and then never let go of them.
The audience may be seated in front of us, but they are a thousand miles away with their collective consciousness floating above the clouds. They are focused on everything else but us and we have to induct them into our orbit and command their complete attention. So, we need to plan this first sentence extremely well, because it will set the tone for the rest of the event. Remember that fear of loss is greater than greed for gain, so we hit them with how they can avoid losses.
We might say something along these lines, “it is shocking how much the change in the market is going to cost us all and we are talking about serious money here”. That start fits just about any talk subject and is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife of starters. The market is always changing and invariably some will gain and others will lose. Our job is to point the audience in the direction of how to avoid losing money.
The cadence of the talk is we need to tell a story every five minutes to keep our audience with us. Storytelling is like superglue and will bind the listeners to us until the end of our presentation. That means we need at least five or six good stories which make the point we are selling. Including people they know or know of, is always good because that technique is a great equaliser and connector with the audience.
We need to prepare two closes – one for our formal end to the talk and another for the final close after the Q&A has ended. We need to brief the organisers that after the Q&A we will wrap it up and then they can bring the proceedings to a formal end. If we don’t do that, they will just end the talk before we have a chance to drive in our key message for the last time.
We will know if the talk has succeeded by the faces we see in the audience. If they are paying attention right through, that is a good sign. If they are nodding in agreement, that is an even better sign and if they are engaged through their questions, then there is real interest.
A sea of bored faces is not what we want to be looking out at. If that happens, we really need to raise our energy and start getting the listeners physically involved. We can do this by getting them to raise their hands in answer to a question from us. We can’t overdo this or it quickly becomes manipulative and, it is obvious to everyone what we are doing. But we need to raise our energy and their energy to keep them with us.
So don’t be like me and instead start the prep early!
