Q: What is possibly the worst feedback you can get about your presentation?

A: Audience members get up and leave before you’ve closed.

I just attended an NSA New England event. It’s a great organization, and I’ve personally benefited from their speakers.  The first two presenters of the day delivered a great deal of value within a little time. Fran Goldstein enlightened us about the power of virtual assistants; and Steve Lishansky gave us a great framework for value-based pricing.

The main speaker, however, inadvertently taught us a invaluable lesson on exactly how to lose your audience.

The session was supposed to have delivered a great deal of content, but after the first two hours, attendees at my table were all looking at one another with puzzled faces.  The speaker spent a majority of this time on SELLING THE BENEFITS of what he was “about to cover”.  WOW!

Indeed, five minutes up front to extol the virtues of the upcoming content would have been great, but the presenter was incessantly preaching to the already converted.

About ninety minutes into the presentation, an attendee from another group stood up and said “with all due respect, you said you were going to cover all this material, and I have my concerns of how you are now going to fit it all in.”  The presenter responded that it was a fair concern, but nothing really changed.

During the second part of the session, I walked out.  It wasn’t the skipping around through unpaginated notes that drove me crazy;  it was the excruciatingly poor time/value ratio.  As a fellow professional presenter, I felt badly about walking out, but I needed to leave so I could blog the experience.

Shortly thereafter, others began to leave (before the close).  I let them share their opinions with me first, and the consensus was that they just couldn’t sit through any more.

What happened?  What can we learn from this?

I’ve seen this occur to a lesser degree when a presenter either has too much or (more often the case) too little content to fit the time slot.  Couple this with poor organization of notes and it’s all over before it ever begins.

When we present we need to keep in mind that many people are gifting us two precious resources: time and attention.  In the case the audience was also paying to attend.

Here are some tips on how to lose your audience:

1) Extend your introduction by over-selling your content.

2) Stretch your time by over-using anecdotes.

3) Bounce around your unpaginated notes.  If they ask where you are, simply respond: “a few pages from the back”; they’ll eventually find you.

If you don’t want to lose your audience:

Subscribe to the philosophy that every minute of your presentation is of vital importance.  If you waste 2 minutes before a fifty-person audience; you’ve lost over an hour and a half of people’s time. A couple of years back at a NSA New England event, Susan Keane Baker executed one of the best presentations I’d ever witnessed.  She made every minute count, she delivered in a way that everyone present received far more value than expected.  She inspired all of us to be better.

Driven by that philosophy, you can proceed with confidence that you will avoid the dreaded fate of losing your audience while public speaking.

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Regardless of how we feel inside, we all want to at least APPEAR confident when we speak.  After studying thousands of presenters at various skill levels, I found this common denominator among confident speakers:  They tend to move to a spot and STAY there for a while.  Then, they will move to another spot, and remain there for a while.  This is to say, they neither pace nor stay in one place.  The movement is purposeful, captures attention and exudes confidence.

Sounds easy?  It’s not.  The challenge is that when you are before an audience, it FEELS a bit awkward to move say 15 feet to your right and stop to make a few points.  Not only does it feel odd, it also tends to temporarily consume a large part of your  ”thinking capacity” - almost like a computer slowing when it multitasks.

It sounds funny that we might have a hard time “walking and talking” at the same time, but my experience in training people is just that.  There can be so much self analysis going on in a presenters mind, that it is hard to focus on delivery.  You can see presenters losing their train of thought when they attempt purposeful movement.  Most end up not moving or pacing - neither of which consume much  ”thinking capacity”, and both of which detract from the presentation.

What’s the solution?

1) In your  notes, write an arrow with a stop sign at at least one or two points in your presentation.  Now you won’t have to “remember” anything extra.  Your notes will guide you to the left and right; so that your entire audience benefits from your physical presence.

2) When you  rehearse - make sure to move to a few different spots.

3) When using props and handouts put them in the different locations from which you wish to present.  You will naturally walk to that location, then you can stay there and make a few points.

Public speaking and purposeful movement go hand-in-hand.  Very few techniques show such great confidence as meaningful movement.  Using these suggestions, not only will you appear more composed, but you will also connect more effectively with your audience.

Give these tips a whirl and let us know how they worked by commenting on this blog.

Happy Speaking!

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When you are making a presentation, how important is the pace at which you speak?

While some people tend to talk more slowly when nervous, most people will speak much more rapidly. Why is this?  As your adrenaline flows, you become far more energetic, and a faster pace of speaking is a natural outcome.

If you are telling a story or speaking conversationally, a faster pace is not necessarily bad.  It can convey enthusiasm and help you build to a climax.  A faster pace becomes a problem when you are delivering content including tactics, facts, details, numbers, etc.  Your audience can be quickly overwhelmed and tune out.

For ten years, I was an economics teacher. Sometimes I would do a short presentation on current affairs and other times I would have students do a current events presentation. As the presenter delivered, I would make a simple three-question quiz.  The quiz would immediately follow the presentation.  Here is what I learned:  When I presented a current events topic, the students typically aced it.  When students presented a topic, their classmates earned poor grades.

After studying this, I concluded that it simply came down to the speed factor.  My five-minute presentations contained about half the information as compared to their presentations.  However, students retained far more of my information.  Even though my students did not read their presentations, they delivered them about the same speed as one would read.

Most of your audiences cannot comprehend information on an auditory level as quickly as they can by reading it.  That is to say we can absorb information more quickly by reading it than by hearing it.  This means that when you deliver content in your presentation, you  may wish to do so at a pace SLOWER than a typical reading pace; so that your audience can “digest” your meaning.  In this way you will not overwhelm your audience.  Remember, once you lose them, it is very challenging to get them back.

Keep in mind that both a slow pace and a fast pace can be equally boring.  The key is to VARY the pace, tone, inflection and use pauses after completing a thought.  If you are enthusiastic it will shine through; if you are apathetic, it is very difficult to fake it. 

Simply keeping the speed factor in mind when presenting will help your audience stay with you.  

Happy presenting!

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Oh, all I have to do to excel at public speaking is just be myself?  Wonderful, now I know the secret.  Certain speaking coaches warn against trying to use gestures and practicing movements.  Their assertion is that the presenter could look fake, forced, robotic, plastic, and so on.  They extol the virtue of simply being yourself before the audience.  In theory they have a point.  Rehearsing every gesture could make the presenter look very odd indeed.  In reality, however, the overwhelming majority of presenters appear petrified (in the fossil sense of the word).  Most remain standing in one place and avoid any type of gestures.  Even somewhat forced movement is better than no movement.

Also, a small yet meaningful percentage of people are rude, asocial, short-tempered, obnoxious or simply flat.  I would not encourage a person like this to just be himself before an audience.

I think better advice is don’t try to imitate someone else’s presentational style when that person is very unlike you.  For example, if you are not a particularly funny person, trying to deliver your presentation like your favorite comedian would likely result in disaster.  You may admire the way your coworker delivers her presentation with resounding authority, but you may be of a softer, more diplomatic nature.

The best advice may be: just be a super version of yourself.  That is to say, on a great day, at your best moment with respect to mood, character, humor, confidence, affinity to the audience, what would you look like?  If you absolutely loved your topic, you felt a great connection with the audience, you were well prepared and you were comfortable, how would that look?

Not all variables are in our control, but we can certainly be well prepared by rehearsing. Perhaps not every move and gesture, but SOME movement and gestures, to jump start us into using our bodies, posture and hands to communicate more naturally.  Contrary to other experts’ warnings, the more we rehearse, the more comfortable we feel.  Knowing we have a solid structure enables us to take chances in the “here and now” and improvise because we know we have a safety net.

Some of my readers may know that I am also a professional close-up magician.  One of the secrets of magic is to know exactly what you are going to say, when you are going to say it and how you will deliver it.  Only by having the details rehearsed can you free up your brain to think and react to a spectator’s extemporaneous comment.  The safety net allows you to be the super version of yourself.

As odd as it sounds, to “just be yourself” takes a great deal of thought, practice and rehearsal.  The work, however will pay rich dividends.

Please leave a comment on your thoughts.  Thanks.

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Do the math.  When you belong to a networking org, you might spend two or three hours to get one or two minutes of air time to educate your group about what you do.  In this sense, air time is an expensive investment; yet it is often squandered.  Why?  Most people speak at a D+/C- level. 

Starting an elevator pitch with “Yeah, hi, I’m Bob and uh, um, we do insurance for anyone who owns a home . . .” and ending with ” . . . that’s about it, thanks” is simply squandering opportunity.

Why does this happen so often?  1) Most people do it; so  poor presentation appears normal and acceptable. 2) Cultivating the skills to be a dynamic presenter who commands attention and calls people to action requires effort and creativity. The payoff, though, is huge.

Let’s start here.  Your greatest loss when you present your value proposition to a group of networkers is that many are not listening.  Even a brilliant value is worthless if your audience is thinking or whispering about something else.

Before you launch into your value prop, how can you be sure that they are paying attention?

Here are some tips:

1) Avoid sitting when you speak; even if everyone before you has not stood up.

2) Stand up and PAUSE before you launch into your presentation.  Scan your audience. This may feel awkward; so what?

3) Ask, for a show of hands . . . (example: “show of hands, how many people here dislike cold calling?”) Make sure your question will apply to most; so many hands go up.  Anyone not listening will immediately snap back into the presentation to avoid looking foolishly oblivious.

The Pause, Scan, and Question = attentive audience.  You’re paying a great deal in time and money for them to hear you.  Now that they’re listening . . . 

/Tune in soon for the continuation of this topic discussion; and feel free to add your comments/

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