presentation coach

Accountability...

Throughout Europe and the Mediterranean is enduring evidence of an ancient Roman empire.

Remnants of impregnable fortifications. Immense arenas and amphitheaters. Vast public plazas and imposing temples.

Then there are the great aqueducts; mammoth public works spanning broad valleys to bring water across terrific distances to thirsty towns and cities.

This is a big Wow. After two millennia of wars and natural upheavals, many of these works — built without structural steel or similar “modern” technologies — continue to stand. Some still carry water to this day. They are remarkable monuments to design, engineering and building skill.

How have these aqueducts — like so many other Roman structures — survived when most later generations of buildings long ago crumpled into rubble?

My guess is the unequivocal way Roman builders were held accountable for their efforts. Legend has it that as the supporting scaffoldings and other temporary buttressing were removed for the first time, the designers and chief engineers would be required to stand beneath the arches. It was their code, their standard of professional performance, to be the first proof of their respective talents; the ultimate show of confidence that the job was done right and the resulting product indeed was ready to present to the world.

Now fast forward two thousand years… Just imagine for a moment how much better our contemporary speeches and presentations might be if the people making them were required to listen to them first. What if the presenter had to perform the equivalent task of standing under the arch as its capacity to withstand gravity was tested?

I’d like to think those of us in the audience would enjoy a vastly improved performance. We would hear content expressed cogently, crisply, with passion and interest, stripped of extraneous detail, flabby language, confusing digressions.

We would be spared meaningless PowerPoint exhibitions.

We would witness a speaker visibly interested in expressing an idea rather than simply enduring a speaking requirement.

It can be done. For instance, most public speaking self-help books suggest the presenter rehearse with a tape recorder of some sort. This is good advice. Hear yourself as others would and you will realize where you can improve.

Many coaches — myself included — rely on video to capture a rehearsal so the presenter can both see and hear herself before an audience does. The impact can be astonishing.

Take for instance some of these reactions:

“I had no idea I did that with my arms!”

“I don’t look like I believe what I’m saying, do I?”

“Wow, do I really talk that fast?”

“You know, I could have sworn I was speaking in complete sentences.”

“Wait a minute, what was my point with that last part?”

“Oh, dear.”

These are folks who stood under the arch. Full marks for them. They invested the time and realized there was a bit more engineering that needed to be done before they were truly ready to unveil their presentation to the world.

Their reward: A presentation that was complete, cogent, cohesive…able to stand on its own merits, with a delivery that was confident, practiced, well-paced.

As for the audience, rather than endure a fragmented assembly of words, jerky body motions, and half-formed ideas, they enjoyed a meaningful and worthwhile journey, clear of detours. They could focus on the value of the message rather than be distracted by the clumsiness of the messenger.

As you plan your next presentation, consider standing under the arch. Think not about yourself, or even the details of what you have to say. Think first about your audience and their expectations for a program that satisfies their need for information clearly, concisely and confidently expressed.

Craft your presentation with the means to endure. Give your audience reason to remember its message. It’s absolutely worth the extra time and effort.

Gettysburg...

As a speechwriter — whether you deliver the remarks yourself or ghost them for someone else — you command enormous power.

You can change the world.

Lincoln did it. His remarks dedicating a new national cemetery at Gettysburg, for instance, are widely credited with not only redefining the rationale of our Civil War, but re-framing the very nature and destiny of our nation.

And he did it in 263 words.

Consider this:

There are people in our society — in every society — we classify as opinion leaders.

Are they necessarily smarter than the rest of us? No.

Are they wealthier or taller or cooler than anyone else? Nah.

But they can articulate their thinking with words carefully chosen and themes carefully crafted.

Their power lies in their ability to influence how the rest of us view the world and interpret events.

Pick your topic: Civil rights. Abortion. War and peace. The words opinion leaders use to make their respective case — whether for or against — come from somewhere. They are not casual or arbitrary, but deliberate. Their language is crafted and shaped and honed so that each sentence, each phrase, says precisely the correct thing, triggers precisely the desired response, evokes precisely the intended imagery, invokes precisely the necessary action.

Your message may be weighty, life-changing, monumental … or not. Regardless, the mechanics of good speechcraft remain constant.

Abraham Lincoln knew that, intuitively, from a lifetime of studying the classic orators.

Franklin Roosevelt knew it, too. So did Martin Luther King. And Ronald Reagan.

We know of these people, what they believed and what they expected of us because of the words they used to talk to us. By the structure of their arguments that led us to intended conclusions. By the stories that converted abstract concepts like freedom or justice or national identity into meaningful examples each of us could feel and appreciate and assimilate.

Your words make a difference when you want them to. Whether advocating for global peace or an increase in your department’s budget, what you say and how you say it matters.

Just remember, it’s never a function of how many words you use, but of how you use the words — of the stories you tell, the images you evoke, the confidence you show in your own message and its meaning.

No matter how large or small your world, you have the power to change it.

Monday morning...

Two office co-workers meet while getting a fresh cup of coffee down the hall.

“Hey, how was your weekend?” asks one.

“Optimum,” replies the other. “Our family’s agenda commenced at 6:36 a.m. Saturday when we awoke from our overnight slumber. We then performed acts of personal hygiene, dressed and proceeded to consume foods of varying nutritional value with which to stimulate our energy levels for the as-yet undetermined but anticipated tasks to come.

“We then deliberated our options for how to utilize the remainder of the day and by consensus determined our time would be best occupied with a journey to the river, where we would attempt to capture a water-residing, gilled creature at the end of a filament line…”

Silliness? Yes, of course. It’s a Monday-morning conversation over coffee, after all.

So let’s try it again:

“How was your weekend?”

“Really great! We got up early Saturday and decided we needed to head down to the river to get in some fishing. Fantastic day!”

Same story. Same conclusion. Significantly different character, however.

The first version is pompous, passionless and inaccessible; the second answers a simple question simply, with obvious delight and enthusiasm.

The first reflects the speaker’s concerns with a process of presentation rather than its purpose. The other tells a story.

Which works better for the listener, do you think?

Presenters too often get all caught up in stuffy formalities. They fall into the darkness of thinking the act of public speaking means they must strip themselves of personality, of authenticity, of directness. Perfectly clear, wonderfully appropriate conversational language gets edited out of their remarks and replaced with colorless, passionless, stupefying memo-speak.

These folks approach their remarks in the flawed belief the more bland they are, the more seriously their message will be taken.

They figure, why not be safe by being boring?

Because boring doesn’t work.

Boredom gets in the way of understanding. What enables and encourages understanding, on the other hand, is style. Style engages the audience. It delights them. It speaks to them on a human level.

Style casts your message in a context that means something to most people.

Now, some folks use boring as a shield, an insulator, to protect them from their own fears of vulnerability. They reckon if they don’t reveal their emotions in any way, if they retreat behind the barrier of memo-speak, then any rejection by the audience will be directed at their remarks and not at them.

They’re mistaken, of course. When you bore an audience, you can expect their rejection to be very personal. After all, it’s you who made that 15-minute presentation seem like an hour. It’s you who made the message unnecessarily complex, the ideas unnecessarily difficult to grasp.

A presentation is not a data stream. It is one human speaking to other humans. Getting a message across is already enough of a challenge; don’t make it more difficult. Tell a story. Tell it simply. Tell it as if it’s worth telling.

And, please, try to enjoy yourself in the telling.

Speaking ahead...

Ever had to endure someone’s slide show of how they spent their summer vacation?

“(click) And here I am in front of Old Faithful… (click) And, oh, yes, here we are in front of the visitor’s center near Old Faithful… (click) And here we are with the park ranger… (click) And here’s a little deer that walked up to our car; isn’t she cute?… (click) And here I am putting a bandage on Frank’s hand from where the deer bit it… (click)”

It’s the stuff of nightmares: an endless rotation through the eternal slide carousel, with the happy traveler droning on in witless description of countless (boring) photos.

We laugh at the cliché it’s become, yet somehow we continue to tolerate it — indeed, perhaps perpetuate it — when the scene shifts from Aunt Molly’s living room to the corporate conference room or hotel meeting room.

Picture this: The presenter clicking through one image after another, waiting for the picture or diagram to appear on the screen, then describing it to the audience:

“(click) Here’s a graph that shows last month’s sales… (click) And here’s a photo of our latest product… (click) And here’s a table that lists the features of this product… (click) And, uh, um, here’s a graph that shows a projection for next month’s sales… Uh, you can’t read that from the back of the room, I know, so let me read it for you…”

Aaargh!

Here’s the question: Are you presenting information? Or simply narrating a slide show?

The images you use in a presentation have one job: to illustrate your remarks. They serve you, not the other way around.

Rather than tediously narrate your slide show (i.e, waiting for each slide to appear before describing it), let your slides support your narrative.

Set up your images with commentary, give them context, before you reveal them. Enable them to punctuate your narrative rather than dominate it. For example…

“Our sales last month were 22 percent above projections…” (click, show sales graph)

“We have good reason to be proud of our new product design. It’s really sweet…” (click, show product photo)

“Research tells us the customer is looking for five things in our product. With the new model, we deliver those and six more…” (click, show the table of features)

Lead into the images. Set them up. Speak to what they represent rather than describe what the audience can see for themselves.

Remain in charge of your presentation and let the images do their job — their only job — of illustrating your remarks.

Your audience isn’t there for a slide show, after all. They’re there to listen to what you have to say.

Grace under pressure...

We make mistakes.

We lose our train of thought, or our place in our notes.

We stumble over words.

We stumble over our feet on the way to the microphone.

It happens.

So what?

Here’s what you don’t want to have happen: You don’t want your awkward moment to be the most memorable part of your presentation. You don’t want to make a bigger deal out of it than it deserves.

I was emceeing an awards ceremony many years back and was to introduce a local venerable who would present one of the evening’s most coveted honors. He had an easy, one-syllable name, so naturally I managed to mispronounce it. But I just didn’t correct myself. I made a big deal about correcting myself, and how I should have known better, etcetera, etcetera. Meanwhile, the gentleman approached the stage gracefully, smiled at me graciously, then stepped to the microphone, gave his full attention to the audience and proceeded with his remarks.

I should have left it there. But I didn’t, of course. In my embarrassment for having made such a silly mistake, I kept referring to the gaffe as the evening wore on. These were intended as witty little asides, you understand; shining moments of my clever, self-deprecating humor. But the audience didn’t laugh. Why should they? It wasn’t funny. It was awkward and tiresome. I wasn’t letting them forget my mistake. From that point, events sort of cascaded into a dark place inside of me. My performance — and authority — as the emcee was compromised.

We learn from our mistakes. What I learned from that one was to give myself permission to goof up. And, more importantly, if and when I do goof, contain the damage briskly and move on.

Mangle someone’s name in an introduction? Stop. Say “I beg your pardon” or “Excuse me,” say the name correctly (if you can; if you can’t, don’t compound the error), then keep going.

Lose your place? Stop. Look at the audience, smile and say, “Excuse me, but it seems my mouth just got ahead of my brain,” or words to that effect. Then take a moment to find your place and continue. No need to panic. No need to rush. No need to make dramatic excuses or apologies.

Lose your train of thought and forget where you were going with your last comment? Stop. Look at the audience, smile and say, “My brain was so involved with what I was just saying that it pushed my other thoughts out of the way. Can someone help me find them again? Where was I?”

Trust me, someone will help you.

Then move on.

A simple, declarative acknowledgement. Then continue.

What’s important to the audience isn’t that you made a mistake, but that you continued delivering your message.

Audiences are very forgiving. They want you to succeed. And if you goof up, your audience may become as uncomfortable over it as you. You see, what they fear is not that you may stumble but that you will melt before their eyes, creating an awkward moment for everyone and diminishing the value of the presentation.

So make it easy for them. When you realize a mistake, just smile, correct the error, regain your composure, then complete your presentation.

By so doing, you will be informing your audience that your message is more important than the messenger. That you accept you’re only human. That you’re grown-up enough to get back up from your stumble, dust yourself off and return to the game.

Isn’t that a more pleasant outcome than the memory of a speaker (or thin-skinned, self-conscious emcee) who cannot accept that he or she isn’t perfect and proceeds to jabber incessantly about it?

Dependencies…

It was the big presentation of the national conference. The speaker was widely known for his provocative views and keen insights, all delivered with refreshing, iconoclastic frankness.

The hotel auditorium was at capacity for what promised to be quite a ride.

Armed with nothing more than an overhead projector and a small pile of transparencies, he opened with confidence and high energy. He established his premise cleanly, slapping on the first couple of overheads to illustrate his points. Then he moved to his problem statement, accompanied by another few transparencies.

His movements were fluid, practiced, a compelling display of passion and assertiveness. He was Lord of the Room, and with confident flings of his wrist, overhead after overhead would slide onto the projector’s glass stage to reveal clever illustrations and telling graphs that punctuated his remarks.

It was turning out to be quite a ride, after all.

Then the projector’s bulb burned out.

The screen went blank.

The speaker stopped abruptly, surprised by the interruption. He glared at the projector, glanced at the audience, smiled painfully, then proceeded to crash all that he had accomplished up to this point.

He fiddled with the projector. He started apologizing to the audience. He called out for someone from the hotel staff; there was no one there to answer.

He escalated a minor mechanical inconvenience into the central feature of his show.

The audience became visibly uneasy. All the momentum of a great presentation had been brutally arrested and replaced by the awkwardness of a speaker floundering vainly over a piece of disabled equipment.

Although this event happened a decade ago, I remember it vividly for the simple lessons it taught:

First, a single spare bulb could have fixed the problem (and saved the program) in less than two minutes. So could a spare projector.

It quickly became obvious that the speaker had thought of neither.

He had put his faith entirely in the presumed capacities of the hotel’s audio-visual “technician” (in this situation, regrettably, a bellhop handed a bundle of microphones and cables and told, “You are now today’s A-V tech.”), who was nowhere to be found.

The presenter did not anticipate mechanical failure as part of his presentation, so naturally, mechanical failure happened.

Second, he made his presentation, and by extension, his audience, a victim of his problem. It now became clear that he had so tightly integrated his remarks with his visuals that when the projector failed he didn’t know how to finish. And since there would be no fix for the projector (the hotel staff never did show up), his presentation essentially ended there, frustratingly incomplete.

From what I witnessed, however, it didn’t need to conclude this way. This speaker could have recovered. He could have continued without his visuals to complete the program.

True, several of his graphs did good work illustrating complex data points, but the content still could have been explained verbally. As for the other overheads, they were clever cartoons and photos that helped keep the narrative structured but were not essential.

The story itself was good enough, important enough, strong enough to be told without illustrations and cartoons.

The speaker would have had to adapt his remarks a bit, put more emphasis on explanation and context, but it could be done.

He clearly hadn’t prepared for that.

The irony, of course, is that the audience wanted to hear this speaker because of his message, not because he had clever overheads.

The speaker thus failed his audience because he had become overly dependent on his overheads to tell his story.

For the sake of a projector bulb, an opportunity to tell an important story was lost.

For want of preparation, the lingering memory of this presentation was not a thought-provoking message that could change minds, but of a speaker helpless in the throes of an otherwise minor and entirely preventable glitch.

post script: Witnessing this experience taught me to make sure I have two projectors— a primary (usually my own) and a stand-by (the hotel’s or meeting center’s)— on hand whenever I teach or present. If a second projector isn’t available, then by all means I make sure there is a spare bulb in my kit. It’s cheap insurance.

Who are these people? (continued)…

A presentation is a gift.

Your audience is giving you their time and attention. In return, they hope to realize some form of benefit, some value from the information you provide.

So here’s one rule for success when speaking to an audience:

Have something to say that can make a difference in their lives.

Make your talk about them and their agenda, not you and yours.

Consider the case of the sales rep from the seed company. He gets the chance to talk to a room full of new homeowners, potential customers for a new grass seed product. With energy and enthusiasm, he talks about the new seed. He tells how much money the company invested in its research, describes the convenient packaging, relates how the company is poised to dominate the market.

The audience remains impassive to his remarks.

Finally, a hand appears in the back of the room.

“Yes?” acknowledges the salesman, pausing in his carefully crafted narrative.

The homeowner stands.

“Excuse me,” he begins, “I'm glad your product's such a success but I didn't come tonight to hear about your lawn seed. I want to hear about my lawn and what you can do to make it better.”

What’s your topic?

Is it grass seed? Or how it can improve lawns?

Is it a new software product? Or improvements in productivity?

An investment opportunity? Or creating and protecting wealth?

Perhaps it’s advocacy for a social cause. Or why helping feed the hungry or house the homeless can benefit the entire community.

No matter what your topic the principle still applies: Know your audience. Recognize why they are there, what’s important to them, what might stimulate a choice or decision or action on their part.

Then craft your message and engineer your remarks accordingly.

Now you don’t want to push your audience. You don’t want to pull them, either. You want them to journey with you to your destination. You want them to want to go, with willingness and open minds.

How to do this?

It’s not complicated.

Give them a compelling reason. Show how the journey benefits them, meets their needs, solves their problems.

Demonstrate you know the difference between your agenda and the audience’s.

You’ll end up selling a lot more grass seed.

Who are these people, anyway?

When the books you read about public speaking, or your presentation skills coach or trainer, tell you to “Know your audience,” just what are they talking about?

Are they expecting you to memorize everyone’s name and the names of their children and pets?

No, it’s not about that, or about knowing their birthdays or what kind of car they drive (unless, of course, your topic is about their car).

It’s more elemental.

It’s about understanding the relationships in the room. Being aware of common frames of reference. Respecting the audience’s history, values and traditions. Then using that knowledge as a tool to sculpt your message so it has relevance and resonance for them.

Knowing your audience can spell the difference between a powerful presentation and a forgettable one… between fulfilling your objective as a speaker and squandering an opportunity.

Here’s an illustration:

The publisher and editor of a statewide business magazine came to town one day to promote a new editorial product. As they previously had done in other cities and towns across the state, the pair hosted a breakfast meeting at a downtown hotel and invited what their publication’s data base suggested was the “A” list of local business and community leaders.

There were about 75 people in the room that morning. As the guests sipped their coffee and nibbled on melon balls and croissants, the magazine’s editor stepped up to the lectern, thanked everybody for attending and motioned for her assistant to flash the first in a series of slick PowerPoint slides onto a screen.

With a practiced eloquence, she proceeded to position her new product by lecturing the audience about themselves: Who they were. What was important to them. What sort of choices they were facing in the marketplace.

Then to burnish her own company’s credentials, she took credit on its behalf for bringing so many opinion leaders to this one place so they could get to know one another better.

That was the moment when she lost traction with the audience.

She was from the big city up north. This wasn’t the big city. It was a much smaller town, in a rural corner of the state.

The people in this room knew one another. They had a collective history. They didn’t just do business with each other. They had grown up together. Many had attended local schools together as kids and now their own children played on the same school athletic teams. They sat together on numerous civic and business committees, boards and commissions. They belonged to the same Rotary and Kiwanis and Lions and Soroptimist clubs.

It would not be unusual for them to encounter one another — socially as well as professionally — two, three, even four times in a given business day.

So when the speaker commended them for coming together like this to talk business, she was telling them she did not know her audience.

When she failed to observe, let alone acknowledge, the connections that existed among the people in this room, she no longer was having a conversation with them, she was talking at them.

What made the situation more astonishing was that this was no drive-by sales pitch by lightweights. She and her colleague were people of experience, intelligence and influence. A great deal of time and thought and expense had gone into hosting this presentation.

Yet, they were sending a clear signal they hadn’t done their homework.

Such neglect is a signal of disrespect.

Her audience disengaged. They were courteous, of course, and sat politely through to the end of the program. Mentally and emotionally, however, they already had left the room.

Another outsider coming down here to tell us what to do and think.

And that made her all too familiar to them.

Know your audience.

That doesn’t mean learning people’s names and birthdays and favorite movies before you speak to them.

It means investing the time to determine how the people in your audience relate to one another. What commonalities exist? What burning issues might they be facing?

For an audience to be willing to let you enter their world, you first must demonstrate the thoughtfulness of a good guest. Make inquiries. Do your homework. Then acknowledge who they are and what they value as a community of people.

Neglect to do so, and you may be left knocking at their door, your message unheard, your objective unfulfilled, your opportunity lost.

Keeping faith…

If your audience has been told you will be speaking for 15 minutes (or 10 minutes, or 20), honor that expectation. Doing so may be the most influential element of your presentation.

To go beyond your allotted time breaks faith with the audience. It reveals a lack of respect for their time, which can imply a lack of respect for them, and that’s a place you absolutely do not want to go.

And let us not forget that going over your time may pose a cascading hardship on other speakers who are due to follow you, perhaps compressing the entire program.

Is that what you want people to remember most about your appearance?

Panel presentations are particularly susceptible to time breaches. These are situations where two or more speakers take turns commenting on some topic or another, usually with each person having a brief time to make opening remarks. Often these sessions are moderated, so there is a referee to monitor each speaker’s time. On the other hand, moderators at these kinds of events typically are volunteers who are helping stage a conference break-out or community forum. They may not be especially experienced or skilled in these sorts of things and may not know of discreet or tactful ways to rein in the speaker who’s failed to watch the clock.

Regardless, the burden remains with you as the speaker to mind the time, and graciously respect the limits that have been imposed on you.

Okay, say you initially were told you would have 20 minutes to speak, and prepared your remarks accordingly. But, once the program got underway, you were informed that your time slot had to be reduced to 10 minutes. What to do?

Edit like crazy. Swallow hard, grimace if necessary, then trim your content to 10 minutes. Don’t be petulant by insisting on more time. Such a response is unprofessional and accomplishes nothing (except create an unfavorable impression among others affected by your behavior).

Cut your carefully crafted remarks in half? Yes. It can be done, and in these situations, it must be done. If you structured your remarks as a function of the Big Idea, then your central point should only take a short time to express. Everything else is supporting information. You may have to do without a few examples that help you make your case, but your alternative is to betray the compact you have with your audience to stick to a time limit.

Besides, if people are glancing at their watches and wondering why you haven’t finished, you’ve effectively lost their primary attention to your remarks, haven’t you?

Respect your audience by remaining faithful to them. The importance you place on your remarks cannot measure up to the importance the audience — or other speakers — place on their own time and attention.

Passenger comfort...

When you design your presentation, remember you’re taking your audience on a journey.

Help them understand why they’re there listening to you, where you’re going to go with your topic, and how you’re going to take them there.

They want to go along for the ride without having to work too hard. Challenge them, certainly, but entertain them, too.

Make your line of reasoning easy to follow.

Give them room to breathe, to absorb and to ponder by pacing your main points.

Use clear transitions from one subject to the next so your audience will have a sense of where they are in your presentation (“First, some background information…,” “Now, let’s move to our main points…”).

Remember, your audience won’t have a roadmap handy; only you know your destination. If you want people to travel comfortably with you as your build your case, don’t let them feel lost or adrift as you move through a topic. Keep them posted on where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going.

And warn them as you approach your conclusion (“Here’s my final point…,” “Before I take your questions, allow me to summarize…”). You’ll be surprised at how much more attentive people can be when they know a program is close to finishing.