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More on control

by R. L. Howser on February 23, 2010 · 0 comments

In the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when computers first began to spread through our lives and workplaces, there were some who toyed with the idea of participatory entertainment. The idea was that we would play an active role in selecting the course of the movie, TV program or novel we were enjoying. The choices we made would influence how the drama turned out by steering us toward alternate endings or even completely different plots.

Read any good participatory novels recently? I didn’t think so. It turns out that audiences didn’t want to participate in controlling the plot. They wanted to put themselves in the hands of a skilled dramatist who would structure the experience for them. They wanted to strap into a good story the way they would a monster roller coaster and just hang on for dear life.

Audiences bring that same mindset to your speech or presentation. They want you to lay out your case for their consideration, so they can sit back and see where it takes them. Anything you do that requires participation from your audience strips away some of that experience. That’s not to say that you should never require your audience to do anything, only that you better have a damn good reason for doing it, as well as a firm idea of how they are going to respond.

Oh, and those participatory story experiments? They are called video games now.

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Control

by R. L. Howser on February 22, 2010 · 1 comment

How many of you have seen speakers that open their talk with a question? Anyone? A few? Raise your hands. Anyone else?  Have I lost you yet?

It seems as if every book on speaking recommends starting a speech or presentation with a question, but I’ve seen dozens of people get off on the wrong foot, and sometimes never regain control, because they used the wrong kind of question. It’s not so much that the idea of a question is bad. It is one way to engage your audience. It’s just that by tossing out a question that requires a response of some kind you lose control of the presentation. And control is what it is all about.

I don’t mean that in the sense of controlling the audience or being a controlling, dictatorial ass, but rather that the audience willingly gives up control when they sit down to hear you speak. As soon as you require something from the audience, other than their attention and imagination, you have given up that control.

Even rhetorical questions, ones that don’t require the audience to respond, have their own problems. They invite the audience to disagree with your answer, if only in their own minds, before you have even built your case. Often, the point of your presentation is to persuade, which means the audience is probably already predisposed to disagree with you. Unless you are very careful in the question you ask, and how you present it, you run the risk of the disagreement bubbling to the surface before you are ten seconds into your pitch, and as any salesman could tell you, once they’ve started disagreeing with you, it’s tough to turn them around.

I have always found a good strong statement, particularly an irrefutable fact, to be a far better way to begin.

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Knock them back in their chairs

by R. L. Howser on February 19, 2010 · 0 comments

I talked to a life insurance salesman once who told me he had an interesting and effective way of opening his talks to prospective customers. He said, he steps to the front of the room, waits patiently until he has everyone’s attention and then the first words he says are, “YOU…….. are going to die.”

Needless to say, that knocks them back in their chairs.

We’re all used to a speaker mumbling and bumbling through a self-introduction, thanking the event sponsor and commenting on the weather before they even begin getting to the meat of the matter. It’s become so commonplace that it’s almost expected, but that’s not how an effective speaker begins.

If you need to introduce yourself and your credentials, put it in the program or have the event sponsor tell them before you come out. If you feel it is important to thank the sponsor for inviting or hiring you to speak, do it later. Who says that has to be the first thing out of your mouth? Presumably, they didn’t invite you to bore the audience at their behest.

Your first few words set the stage for everything that follows. Use them to grab the attention of your audience and prepare them for your message. Anything else is useless and distracting fluff.

Knock them back in their chairs. Give them no choice but to engage with you and your message.

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Presentation Zen Design

by R. L. Howser on February 16, 2010 · 0 comments

I went to a presentation by Garr Reynolds, last night. For those of you who don’t know Garr, he is the author of the international bestseller, “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery” . He, along with others like Nancy Duarte and Cliff Atkinson, has been blazing a new approach to designing PowerPoint and Keynote slides for presentation; an approach that banishes lengthy text, data and bullet points from slides and instead uses simplicity, clarity and visual impact to reinforce what the speaker is saying.

Garr’s latest book, “Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations“, expands on the idea of a Zen design approach, marked by balance, harmony, restraint, simplicity and naturalness, and uses it to delve more deeply into the basic elements of design. While both the book and his presentation focus primarily on visual design, it struck me during his talk that all of the same principles apply equally well to the rest of a presentation.

Balance is more than visual. We need to balance the elements of our talk too. To be persuasive, we need to balance support for our opinions with a fair appraisal of their weak points, emotion with reason and abstract ideas with concrete examples.

Harmony refers to more than color or design. A harmonious speech draws on elements such as rhythm, repetition and rhyme to bind its ideas together, while eliminating discordant elements, such as a hectoring tone in a pep talk or praise delivered from a stern, hard face, that detract from the message.

Restraint is critical in slide design, but also in speech writing. One clear, on-point example will often have a stronger impact than three somewhat relevant ones, and ten proposals they will soon forget carry less weight than two or three they will remember and act on.

Simplicity is clarity, not only on the projection screen, but in your script. A simple structure is easy to follow and remember. Simple sentences give the audience’s the mental space to process your argument, rather than puzzle out your meaning. Simple vocabulary, stripped of jargon and buzzwords, forces you to say what you really mean.

Naturalness in design draws on millennia of evolution to create images that are pleasing to the eye and the brain. By the same measure, the presentation as a whole can draw on the ancient tribal traditions of the speaker at the campfire, teaching, spinning stories and laying out plans for the hunt in a conversation with the tribe.

A Zen approach to visual design creates slides that are clear, powerful and memorable. The same principles can guide us in writing and delivering a speech or presentation that is equally clear, powerful and memorable.  For just as Zen is more an approach to life than a religion, Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen is more an approach to presentation than to PowerPoint slide design.

But then, I expect he knows that.

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The power of silence

by R. L. Howser on February 15, 2010 · 0 comments

In my misspent youth, I had a Boy Scout leader with an uncanny knack for managing unruly teenagers. When he needed to bring some order to the chaos of our meetings, he wouldn’t shout or threaten, he would simply stand at the front of the room, calmly looking at us and waiting. One by one, a few boys would notice him and quiet down in anticipation. The decrease in the clamor would then get the attention of a few more boys, reducing the noise even more, until finally everyone noticed and the room would become absolutely silent. It’s a trick I have learned to use effectively with my university students.

Yet how many speakers do we see rushing right into their openings and trying to talk over the noise, hoping to wrest the attention of the audience away from their conversations. Sometimes they can, and usually they can’t, but either way, it costs them the vital impact of a good opener. The opener is where you set the stage for the rest of your talk, where you prepare them to accept your message.

How much more powerful would that opener be, if it had the complete and undivided attention of everyone in the room? Take a moment, before you begin. Force them notice you. Make them wait. Make them lean forward in anticipation of your first words.

And then hit them right between the ears.

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The anticipatory jolt

by R. L. Howser on February 13, 2010 · 0 comments

Remember the last time you were on a big roller coaster? Remember the clunk as the machinery engaged and began to haul the cars up the first incline? Nothing exciting had really happened yet, but you were already nearly wetting your pants. Maybe that’s just me.

That’s the value of a well written and delivered introduction. I hope you are aware by now that you should never trust your host, MC or whoever will introduce you to know what to say about you. At the very least, you should have provided an introduction that gets the basic facts about you and your career right and provides some rationale for why you are there to talk.

Even better than a dry list of facts, you can write an introduction that gives your audience that same tingle of excitement or fear, before you have even opened your mouth.

You don’t need boxing announcer, Michael Buffer’s, “Let’s get ready to rummmmbbbblllllle” to give your audience an anticipatory jolt, but you do need to give them something to look forward to, whether in excitement or dread, and there’s really not that much difference between the two.

Have your introducer end with the teaser that you are going to “show them the secret to building multiple income streams”, or lay out the “nightmare scenario that many experts fear could cost you everything.”

Give them that little shiver that will have them leaning forward before you even say a word.

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What’s your slant?

by R. L. Howser on February 12, 2010 · 0 comments

I recently sat through yet another excruciatingly dull presentation and it puzzled me. The speaker was someone that I knew from Toastmasters. He is a skilled speaker and I have enjoyed listening to him speak before. He was talking about a subject I am interested in and the title sounded provocative. Yet, the presentation nearly put me to sleep.

I was thinking about it on the way home on the train and something popped to mind that an editor told me, a very long time ago in my student days. I was working at the campus newspaper and had just finished a piece on the gymnastics team. While there was nothing earthshaking about the news, one of the gymnasts, a freshman, had qualified for the national championships. I wrote an innocuous piece to go along with my photos.

The newspaper’s advisor, a retired newspaper editor, took a look at what I had written and with a pained look on her face asked me, “So what’s your slant?”

I believe my response at the time was, “Hunh?”

“What does this information mean?” she asked. “Why should I care?”

As she was clearly having a senior moment and couldn’t put the pieces together, I patiently explained to her that after several disappointing seasons, the team was undergoing a changing of the guard. This young freshman, along with some of her equally young and talented teammates, was the face of a brighter future for the team.

“Why the hell didn’t you say so?” she snapped, tossing the pages back on my desk.

That’s what was missing from my friend’s presentation. He had a lot of interesting information to share, but he had no slant; no personal perspective or larger message, no story for me to sink my teeth into, no conclusion he had drawn from it.

That’s the speaker’s job, to show me why I should care.

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Toastmasters

by R. L. Howser on February 11, 2010 · 0 comments

I’m sure I’ll be talking a lot about Toastmasters here at Presentation Dynamics. This blog is not affiliated with Toastmasters in any official capacity, but that’s where I have learned most of what I know about speaking. It may not be the best or the fastest way to improve your skills as a public speaker, but it’s certainly got to be the most cost effective.

Everyone comes in to the club at different levels of talent and experience and with different goals. Some do it for fun, which for many people sounds comparable to going to the dentist for a fun root canal. Others need to improve their presentation skills for their jobs. Some of us are even making speaking our careers.

There are no formal lessons taught at a Toastmasters meeting. We learn by standing up and giving bad speeches, at first. We learn by watching others give speeches, both good and bad, by seeing what worked, and what didn’t, and then applying the lessons we’ve learned. We learn from official evaluations in the meetings and unofficial evaluations at the pub. We learn from books, magazine articles and speeches on YouTube. We learn the hard way, yet the improvement from speech to speech, especially for the newest members, is nothing short of remarkable.

It’s not all sunshine, of course. Meetings can be tedious and some speakers are painful to watch and even more painful to listen to, especially at first. But with the right kind of encouragement, they get better.

Toastmasters International is a bureaucracy, with all of the rigid, dogmatic rules of any other hidebound organization. But as long as Caesar is given his due, the format allows for enough diversity of style, subject and interest to satisfy the needs of almost anyone.

There are other ways to learn public speaking, some of them very good, but I’d argue none that offer the value of a Toastmasters Club. And Toastmasters is almost everywhere. If you’re curious, go to the Toastmasters International website and click on the “Find a Club” button.

Visitors are always welcome.

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Public speaking made difficult

by R. L. Howser on February 7, 2010 · 0 comments

There seem to be dozens of books and products out there that promise to make giving a good presentation or speech easy. They offer a simple formula or some feel good advice and assure you that everything will be fine. Just pay the cashier on your way out. But it won’t be fine.

The famous photojournalist, Eugene Smith, used to teach a photography seminar called, “Photography Made Difficult”. His point, I think, was that to master photography, you have to complicate it first. It’s a complicated process, with dozens of variables, and you need to first understand the implications of the choices you make. In time, if you master the technical aspects, they become second nature. Photography then becomes quite simply a matter of translating your vision to the film, or these days, the CCD screen.

Effective speaking is hard. That doesn’t mean you have to do it the hard way. If you are reading this, you probably know that there are hundreds of books, blogs and training courses that can speed you on your way towards competence, if not mastery. There are training courses like Dale Carnegie that will provide you with training and feedback on the technical aspects. There are groups like Toastmasters that provide a sympathetic audience to practice on.

But you still have to go through the hard process of learning to control your body, eyes and voice. You have to learn how to discover, shape and polish your message. You have to create an experience for your audience that will give you the best possible chance of achieving the purpose behind your presentation.

It’s not easy. If it was, everyone would do it well and I’d be out of a job.

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Create a sacred space

by R. L. Howser on February 6, 2010 · 0 comments

The grand cathedrals of Europe were built to be everything the cities of the time were not; spacious, ornate and peaceful. Joseph Campbell spoke of them as sacred places; ones in which those who entered were drawn into an alternate reality and the concerns and distractions of the outside world fell away. They were gateways to the divine.

A good speaker does the same thing with his presentation. Left to their own devices, most people will bring their concerns into your presentation with them, literally. They’ll have their computer, Blackberry or cell phone on. They’ll have some papers they need to look over as they wait for you to begin. They’ll be chatting with a co-worker about the latest office drama or networking with the people seated around them. If you want to successfully engage their full attention and draw them into your presentation, you need to break through the mental, and physical, clutter.

Some times you can physically shut out the outside world. Auditoriums, like cathedrals, announce themselves as sacred places through grand lobbies, arched entryways and heavy wooden doors, hushed sounds and the way the chairs all face the stage, the most sacred realm of all.

That’s tough to match if you’re presenting in an office with ringing phones, buzzing printers and people traipsing in and out. Yet, as anyone who has ever read a great book in a crowded and noisy place can tell you, it is possible for people to tune out all the distractions around them and focus absolutely, if the story or subject is compelling enough.

Be so compelling that nothing else can compete with you. Be so compelling that your audience will fully enter the sacred space of your presentation, where nothing exists except you and your message.

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