Archive for the ‘Public Speaking’ Category

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Audience engagement

Monday, June 7th, 2010
audience-engagement

Coffee with my friend Lesley Moffatt is always stimulating. Last year she recommended this excellent book: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. I have been suggesting it to anyone who asks about audience engagement. 

Made to Stick

The authors are brothers.  Chip is a Stanford professor who researched and taught what made ideas stick.   Dan worked in the field of educational publishing and thus need to find out what makes great teachers great.  They realised they had both been focused on the same question: Why do some ideas succeed while others fail?

The result of their work is their book ‘Made to Stick’ and the ideas are enormously useful for presenting as well as many other fields. They have a blog at: Heath Brothers

They pin down six key principles of ’stickability’ and every single one is relevant to making your presentation engaging:

  1. Simplicity: We need ideas that are simple but also profound – this is why the Tui ‘Yeah Right’ ads caught on so well.
  2. Unexpectedness: We need to generate interest and curiosity: The Air New Zealand body paint ads are a case in point!
  3. Concreteness:Ideas need to be conveyed in very concrete terms so they mean the same thing to everyone.  The concreteness gives us a hook to hang the ideas on. Years ago I was very thrilled that my son’s general knowledge when I discovered he knew the capitals of nearly all the states in the US.  It was only later I realised that actually he knew all the ones that had good basketball teams, but  none of the others! The concrete fact of basketball enabled him to easily memorise the city names.
  4. Credibility: People must believe the idea. Sticky ideas are credible, but people don’t like lots of facts.  Something that appeals to our idea of common sense seems to work well, even if  it is wrong!  Fears about the risks of vaccination fall into this category.
  5. Emotions: We must get people to care about our ideas.Obama’s presidential nomination speech tapped into an emotional surge of hope with the famous lines: ‘Yes we can!’
  6. Stories: We need to get people to act on our ideas. Stories get us prepared to respond quickly and effectively. Stories are a major source of motivation for people in every walk of life. Stories can do 1-5 above as well as #6!

By the way, if you are on a school board, Lesley Moffatt provides excellent training and consultation for people working on school and other community boards. She has a blog at: Onboard with Lesley Moffatt

Posted in Communication Tips, Leadership, Personal Presence, Presentation skills, Public Speaking, Speeches | No Comments »

Presenting without using PowerPoint

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010
presenting-without-using-powerpoint

People sometimes ask me if it is possible to present effectively without using slides. Of course the answer is:’Absolutely yes!’ If you want to look at an excellent example of ‘Absolutely yes’ that has interesting content as well, look at the video I have included below. Simon Sinek’s presentation is titled: How Great Leaders Inspire’. As you watch keep in mind that he would have practised this presentation many times before.

I found this link via Ellen Finklestein’s useful PowerPoint Tips blog

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Presenting amidst the Twitter

Sunday, May 16th, 2010
presenting-amidst-the-twitter

Audience atwitter?

Recently several people have been talking about the impact of Twitter on presentations.  I haven’t actually experienced it; or perhaps I just haven’t been conscious of it!  Mostly it appears to be used in IT conferences, but it seems to be spreading wider than this. If it is becoming more common, it is worth thinking about how to manage its impact.

If you think of Twitter as being the expression of  extraneous thoughts, related or not to the presentation, to some extent it has just brought to the surface what has always gone on for audiences anyway.

In ’self-help speak’, I wonder if it is useful to think about the challenge  from a position of  either scarcity or abundance?

Using the scarcity response, you would ask people to switch off their mobile phones while you are speaking. That would probably work okay with obedient audiences. I did see one speaker who announced that he would be so riveting we would discover that we wouldn’t be interested in our mobile phones – he wasn’t!  One person I talked to had been part of a negatively twittering audience.  He thought in that situation, the negativity was in danger of becoming a group-think response.  Certainlysuch spreading  criticism  could easily lead a presenter to react from scarcity.

Using abundance could mean deciding that Twitter is a valuable opportunity for dialogue with the audience. You could decide that the people twittering are at least thinking about your content.  You could respond to the tweets using a gatekeeper colleague, rather like the chair of a panel discussion. The colleague could monitor the tweets, looking for  lines of discussion and suggesting some threads for your commentary.  If you had lots of practice and could think quickly, you could even  perhaps manage this dialogue yourself.

 There’s an interesting post on Pistachio: Micro Sharing Macro Results.  Have any of you experienced the Twittering audience?

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Public speaking vs.the real thing

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010
public-speaking-vs-the-real-thing

How often do we hear someone saying they are uncomfortable about public speaking?
In reality how often do you talk to the ‘public’ without knowing them?

Presentations or speaking to groups is something most of you do everyday at work. In meetings ,presenting ideas, or more formally giving proposals etc. The people you are talkiing to are not ‘public’ , unless you are a politician and thats another whole new ball game!

You will prbably be known to your audience, if not you will have been introduced.Yet some people call it public speaking.
This is not a toastmasters exercise, most of you will be presenting in work environments where the opportunity to speak is quite different.

Here are some tips for presenting (not public speaking!)

Always put yourself in the shoes of your audience-talk their talk
Know what you want to achieve with your presentation-what do you want your take home message to be? e.g “I’m excited about the changes and understand how they will affect me”.
Use as many live examples as you can
and be real-it is important you come through as authentic and not a clone.

Posted in Effective Meetings, Presentation skills, Public Speaking, Speeches | No Comments »

Presentation skills in ordinary life

Thursday, October 29th, 2009
presentation-skills-in-ordinary-life

A lot of work conversations seem casual but are important.  They will often start something like: ‘ How’s the project going?’

How do you usually answer? – ‘Oh, fine thanks’?  This response could waste a good opportunity. With a bit of planning, you could use the question to raise your profile with the questioner, or gain their useful insight into a problem.

Claudyne Wilder’s latest newsletter in Wilder Presentations covers using the elevator speech to handle these situations.CB050469

In the low-key New Zealand environment, if the elevator speech seems a bit forced, think about planning a soundbite. The system is similar.

For your important projects, you could adapt Claudyne’s suggestion to:

1. Progress: We have surveyed the range of best software solutions

2. Results: It looks like the most applicable one was developed in South Korea

3. Interesting fact: It costs way less than any of the competing systems and looks really good, but for some reason it hasn’t been taken up in any other New Zealand organisations before.

4. Next step: We’re being careful to check that out further

5. Question for the listener: Have you any past experience of this type of gap in adoption of a good software solution?

I am always surprised how challenging it is to work out an elevator speech.  If you need some help, there is a very practical open thread on developing an elevator speech at: Freelance Folder

In case you’re wondering, the guy in the picture is racing from your brilliant elevator speech to organise you a promotion.

Posted in Communication Tips, Personal Presence, Presentation skills, Public Speaking, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Facing your fears and doing it anyway

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
facing-your-fears-and-doing-it-anyway

Many of us are terrified of speaking out when we know we should or we have real fears of facing a difficult boss or we are scared of spiders and other creepy crawlies.  We all face fears of different things at different times and we must face those fears to be successful.

As Winston Churchill said: ‘Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen”

I have been Googling courage and reading stories about courage lately, including the wonderful book by Susan Jeffers: ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’ as I am about to embark on what for me will be a ‘face your fears’ experience. I am part of the crew of ‘Soulmate’. We leave at the end of May to sail to Tonga for 2 months. The yacht is certainly seaworthy and the captain (my husband) competent, but  it will be the first time I have been so far off shore and for so long.

Friends say things like “Do you get sea sick?” The answer is yes. “Are you scared” The answer is yes. “Well why do it?”  Now that answer is more complicated.

How many of us do our daily job mostly quite comfortably?  Yet we all know that when we step outside the comfort zone and face a challenge, it is such an adrenalin rush it can keep us buzzing for a long time. As a result we grow.

So I am off to Tonga. I’m sure there will be moments that I will wonder what on earth I’m doing this for.  I will keep in mind however, as Ambrose Redmoon said: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear”

I’m looking forward to being back.

Posted in Communication Tips, Personal Presence, Public Speaking, Speeches, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Presenting to different types of people

Monday, May 11th, 2009
presenting-to-different-types-of-people

When planning a presentation, make sure you think about the mindset of the main group in your audience. Don’t present as you would be presented to; your audience might not like that!

A simple form of four quadrant behavioural style is a very practical way to look at four key different types of needs in an audience. There is a good summary of a four quadrant framework at: What planet is my audience from? .

1. Work out roughly which of the four types fits you. Whilst you no doubt have a wonderfully subtle personality, this main style is how you instinctively communicate – it is your default option. Unless you stop and think about it, you will use that main style.

So the solution is clear – stop and think about it!
2. Think about the most common type in your audience and prepare your presentation on the basis of their needs, not yours. Sometimes you will know the personalities of the key decision makers and can use the right approach for them. On other occasions, certain types dominate in particular jobs – IT attracts analysis driven people, social work attracts people who are very focused on how people feel and so on.

Some occupational groups attract certain types. If you are presenting to a group of farmers, many in the audience will be very task-focused and interested in the end point, not the journey along the way. Of course, not all of them will be like this, but this type will cover a fair proportion of the group. With such groups, give them the facts, get to the point quickly and give them room to make up their own minds.

Catering for some of the various types may require you to get creative. However, we can all communicate in a way that suits the other types, but for some of the styles we need to really consciously think about it.  The key is to present in the way the audience wants.
Try it out and enjoy the increase in audience engagement.

Posted in Communication Tips, Conflict Resolution, Customer Service, Leadership, Personal Presence, Presentation skills, Public Speaking, Relationship Management, Speeches, Uncategorized | No Comments »

What’s in for presentations

Monday, April 27th, 2009
whats-in-for-presentations

At a course during the week, we discussed fashions in presentation. We wondered who gets to decide what’s in and what’s out. Perhaps it is as nebulous as whoever gets to decide what colour is ‘in’ each season?   (Purple, this winter, I believe.)

A chart of ‘What’s in and what’s out’ arrived in my inbox from Carole Sheppard at The Complete Trainer.  Her source of ‘in’s is the result of her survey of just 80 trainers, but the list fits with our experience of what is happening out there.  Some of the ‘ins’ are the result of changing technology and the impact on audience expectations.  Others have really been there in good presentations all along , but I guess they can still be ‘in’.

I wonder if you agree with Carole’s list of ins and outs?

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