Communication Skills

Are you better than the average driver?

… or any other skill?

Answer?  Deliberate practice.

Take driving as an example.  Recent research shows that most drivers believe they are better drivers than the average!  Well of course!  We have so much experience.

Yes.  We do,  but how much driving ‘practice’ do we put in?  If we were going to deliberately practise, we would:

• Raise our  awareness of HOW we are driving – maybe focusing our attention on one particular aspect of the skill until we perfected it, then move on to another.
• We would also really listen to and possibly even act on driving advice!!

Hmm…! How many of us could do that?  I certainly remember putting a stop to my four year old son’s habit of giving  me driving advice from his car seat!

• We would do even better if we sought regular feedback on our driving from a good instructor and then put the advice into action?  Think of the lives that might be saved!

An interesting article in Fortune Magazine shows that across a huge range of fields, the top people are the ones who devote the most time to deliberate practice.  The rule of thumb holds that experts need ten years of very intensive practice to be extremely successful in their chosen field.

On a recent long flight back from the UK to New Zealand, I watched a fascinating series of BBC programmes on child musical prodigies.  The programme speculated on which ones would make it to greatness as adults.  Once you are up there in prodigy- land, the long-run greats are the ones who have maintained intensive practice for at least ten years. Mozart was practising three hours a day by the time he was three years old.  By six, he had clocked up 3,500 hours practice – apparently over three times more than anyone else his age!

I am not sure how they know that, but back to us normal mortals and our presentation skills:  Whilst we may have plenty of presentation ‘experience’, how many of us use deliberate practice?  Do we take the time to reflect on a particularly demanding piece of presenting, seek feedback on our effectiveness and then work on the suggested changes?

So to become a good presenter:

1. Work out what aspect you need to focus on.  Each time you present, concentrate on getting that aspect right.  Keep going until the required behaviour becomes a habit, then get to work on the next bit.
2. Get feedback from a reliable observer and act on the feedback.
3. Watch what other presenters do and see if you can learn from them – good or bad.  But then make sure you practise what you have learnt.
4. International Toastmasters is a great way to get practice and to obtain supportive, constructive feedback.

Now while you are about it, about that right hand turn you just made….!

Ever wondered how to get rid of the habit of fillers? They clutter up your communication and demonstrate all too noticeably just how nervous you are feeling.

While people often comment negatively on presenters who use too many fillers, we use them in lots of other situations and they generally have a negative impact.Fillers sometimes serve a useful function in casual speech, but in more formal communication they are a dead giveaway of nervousness.

To eradicate your fillers, you have to know to acknowledge that you are a filler sinner. A presentation is a good opportunity to work on the problem because it involves a finite time during which you can focus on them. The next time you present, get a brave person to count the number of fillers and let you know the total. Next time, aim to reduce the number, get the countback and repeat the dose until you are reformed!

Ellen Finklestein’s excellent PowerPoint newsletter had a good tip last week that got me thinking about this common problem. She suggest you tape your prepared speech, then go through and mark every filler on your notes. Then re-tape, cutting as many out as you can. Keep doing this until you have removed them all.

Once you have achieved filler awareness, a positive cure is to simply take a breath each time you feel a filler coming on. The technique turns the negative of a filler into valuable pause. Most presenters can enhance their communication by increasing the number and length of their pauses. So at the very least you will gain a more dramatic effect.

Good luck with this. It really pays to …um work.. on this problem, because basically it like matters?