The Presentations Japan Series

Dealing With Feedback When Presenting

We can receive feedback in the rehearsal stage and after the actual presentation itself. Both can be very dangerous. Asking your loved ones at home for feedback is tricky. They may love you, but they may not know much about the subject itself, the subject of presenting and techniques for giving feedback. Pretty toxic cocktail right there, with potential to create domestic issues at home, if you don't have enough already.

"What do you think?" is a bad move in the feedback game. When you are practicing, you cover many aspects of presenting and asking such a broad and unfocused question, invites in irrelevant comment which is unhelpful. Rather than asking such a combustible question, start by sitting down and creating your own checklist.

You can break this up into a few categories. You might nominate the structure of the talk. In this way, you can isolate out the sections of the talk, looking at the potency of the evidence you presented in each section to back up your point. You can nominate other areas, such as the transitions between sections, the opening, the first close before Q&A, the second close after Q&A, Q&A itself. In this way you are dissecting your speech. You are breaking it down for the person listening, to consider before they give a comment. You might have them score you on a simple scale, just to get an idea of what resonated with them. Remember though, this is an audience of one and you have to consider how expert they are and how representative they are of your audience.

In another section of the review sheet you are creating, you can include aspects of the delivery of the speech. How was your posture, speaking speed, degree of clarity, pauses, eye contact, gestures, vocal variety. They can score on each of these to give you a guide on how you were doing.

By having various people observe your speech you can get a variety of viewpoints. One big problem in Japan is no one here wants to give you critical feedback or even constructive feedback. They will just try to flatter you and are fairly useless when it comes to the feedback game. This is especially the case if you are their boss. They won't be so willing to tell it like it is. If you are giving the talk in English then there is the additional curve ball of their ability in English to fully understand the nuances of language you might be using.

Feedback can also be fear producing. This is especially the case when all you are getting is what was wrong with your talk. This is the natural flow for people giving feedback. They want to tell you what was wrong and so your confidence gets killed as a result of all this tough love. Actually, you don't want critique. What you want is for the feedback to focus on only two things – what was good and how can you make it better. If you start to get critique, stop them right there and redirect them by asking for good/better feedback.

During the actual presentation, you can gauge how the audience is reacting to your talk. If they are falling asleep that is a bad sign, although in Japan that is fairly common behaviour, so don't beat yourself up too much. That is why we never let the organisers turn the lights down to see the screen more easily. Within one minute, you will lose a big chunk of your Japanese audience. Keep the lights up so you can see their faces and check how they are reacting to your talk. If you get people nodding to your points take that as a win. The more of those the better obviously.

If you get mild or vicious questions, then you can interpret these results as good or bad depending on the purpose of your talk. You might want to be provocative and want to outrage some in the crowd. Or you want to win everyone to your way of thinking, so you are looking for questions that enable you to convince others, to adopt your preferred position on the topic.

Asking people you know or your staff, "How do did it go" is just a waste of time. You want your feedback sheet selectively distributed before the talk, so that you can get additional feedback to what your eyes are telling you during the talk. I would count people coming up to you after the speech and saying how great you are as flattery and of doubtful value, unless they are an expert in the topic or on the subject of giving speeches. I know it sounds a bit harsh, but almost no one is going to approach you and feedback to you that you were crap. So be wary of praise and look long and hard at who it is coming from.

For both rehearsal and for the talk itself, video is the best method of evaluating how you went. You have your checklist so you can be very diagnostic on the video review component. If you have your coach there during the practice, that is ideal and also important to have them in the audience as well, to give you the good/better feedback. If you don't have a coach, what are you thinking? You should get one, because this speaking lark is a brand builder or a brand killer. It is never neutral. You are either winning or losing and don't kid yourself otherwise.

How To Prepare With Your Coach For Your Big Speech

There is a major event looming on your schedule and as President, you will be expected to deliver the keynote address to a very important audience. This was the situation recently when I was coaching a major corporation's President for his speech. I realised that the people around the President, don't have a clear idea of what is needed to properly prepare for the big occasion. The time allotted is also never enough. It is made worse by the flunkies around the President, trying to cram other superfluous information into the briefing for the speech. Superfluous from my point of view anyway. The President's time is at a premium and the key need is to focus on delivery practice with video review and massive coaching.

Here are some ideas to make the whole process more effective for the busy Presidents who are called upon to present in high stakes occasions.

Before getting to the session with the coach, go through the speech. I recommend not reading it to your audience, if possible. Having key points to hit in your own words is enough, especially when it is going to be interpreted into another language. All that crafty crafting of words and wrangling with semantics of expression in English gets lost the minute the interpreters get hold of it.

If it is a speech you need to read, there is a strong possibility a speech writer will have been employed to work on it together with the munchkins in your organisation. Don't use this for the delivery practice sessions. Get hold of it before hand and start reworking it. What you are looking to do is add more of your authentic voice to the content. Get things expressed the way you would normally express them. This process will cause you to own the words and they will be much easier to recall and deliver as a result.

I was looking at the speech provided in this coaching occasion and it was average. The biggest weakness was the start. It was totally mundane and boring. Nothing to grab your attention. Nothing to smash through all the detritus of the day up until that point. We all have so many things on our mind today, the speaker really has to work hard to break into that mental flow and grab our attention as a member of the audience.

Craft a powerful statement or use a great quote to start the proceedings. Then you can introduce who you are and the name of your company. It is a simple thing, but the impact is entirely different. For example, I could introduce my speech like this, "Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan". Or I could start like this, "Corporate education is going to change more in the next five years than it has in the last fifty. Thank you for coming today, we are very happy you could join us, my name is Greg Story, I am the CEO of Dale Carnegie Training Japan". In the second case, I have grabbed the attention of the listeners and they are wondering about what these miraculous changes are going to be. They are concentrating on what I am saying so that they don't miss anything.

If you are using a teleprompter, with the see through glass type mounted on a stand on the podium in front of you, this presents a few challenges. This was the situation recently during the coaching session. One problem is that you don't want to have your hands anywhere near the podium, as the vibration will make the teleprompter images shake and the words become harder to read. Also the position of the teleprompter to the left or right drags your gaze to that side of the audience the whole time. If you have had the opportunity to craft the speech you can divert from the script or remember parts of it, so that you can engage with other sections of the audience.

Ideally, you will have two of these teleprompters, one on the left and one on the right mounted on stands in front of the podium. That improves the audience engagement quite a bit, but the danger becomes you forget to talk to the people seated in the middle of the venue. Your head is constantly swiveling from left to right and back like a puppet.

Watching the playback on video does take time to do and as mentioned time is always at a premium in these situations. However, the video review and coaching from the instructor are very helpful here. You can see the way you were doing it before and then after the coaching you can see with your own eyes how big a difference it makes. This makes it easier to stop your old, bad habits and create new, better habits. Seeing is believing.

Give lots of vocal and gesture energy to key words or phrases in the speech. This becomes especially important if you are having your talk translated. The audience sees you deliver it and then hears the words in their own language. Your gestures and energy though need no interpretation, so in that sense, you can appeal directly to the audience, without any intervention from someone else. If the words refer to something with scale, then show big arm movements to match. If a target was achieved that was high, show "high" by pushing up one arm as high as possible, to make an imaginary measure. If it was a good result, then have a big smile and a lot of gesture strength to back that up.

The idea is to take this coaching and then project it further with additional practice. You can do this on your own, using video or have people there to give you good/better feedback. Running through the speech numerous times will be so beneficial and will create the momentum to make this speech a triumph. I saw one of those quotes you get in diaries attributed to a Japanese proverb, which said "More sweat in training, less blood in battle". I have never been able to find the Japanese original of that saying, by the way, nevertheless the idea is perfect for speech preparation. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Designing Your Presentation On The Head Of A Pin

The head of a pin isn't much real estate is it. The metaphor for presenting is to have pin point accuracy around what you are presenting. Going straight to the slide deck production component takes us too broad. This should be the last element, rather than the first. The temptation though is to get into thinking about different visuals, graphs, statistics, etc., we can show, to back up our argument. There is the rub. Just what exactly is our argument? What is the one key message we want to get across to the audience. Often we have a number of things we want to get across and we go too broad in our approach. We want to think about getting that one thing on the head of that pin.

A good way to start is to brainstorm all of the elements of that subject area which are most relevant to the audience. There is a dilemma here between what we want to say and knowing what interests our audience. Starting with the audience in mind though is a good discipline. This is because designing something for ourselves runs the risk of alienating our listeners and delivering a talk to a totally bored bunch of faces. This experience is plain painful.

Get the ideas out, taking the audience perspective. Get them out visually and then start to rank them by priority order. This ranking process forces us to make judgments about which elements are considered more important than others. Is this easy? Absolutely not. Does it have to be perfect. Not really, because the audience themselves are not united on agreeing what they think are the most important items. As long as we can isolate out what we believe will be of the most interest to the audience and we address those, then we are in a good place as a presenter.

Before we start assembling the argument, we need to write down in one sentence, what is the key point we want to get across. This type of wordsmithing is important to help us get clarity around where we need to go with our supporting arguments. Getting the key point into one sentence then allows us to drag in evidence to back up what we are saying. We have a limited amount of time in which to speak, so we need to pare down the possibilities we can cover to only the most rich and powerful arguments. This paring process is like choosing between your children. I am often hopeless at it, because I tend to fall in love with too much material for the time allotted. It is painful, but I have to toss stuff out and sometimes that process kills me to do so.

Once we have selected the most convincing evidence to back up our case, we need to arrange those points into chapters of the talk. This is the main body of the presentation. We have already created our conclusion when we were refining our key point. We need to elaborate a bit more on that and work on Conclusion 1. Following that we design Conclusion 2 which will be what we will use for after the Q&A. We don't want to lose control of the talk, so we decide how the presentation will end and what will be the last words ringing in the ears of the audience. Our words.

Now we are ready to design the opening. We need to achieve two things in the opening: grab the attention of the audience and introduce our conclusion. The grabbing attention part might be a famous quote like "when you are going through hell, keep going" or "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country" or "the teacher appears when the student is ready". These are recognisable quotes that gives the talk some credibility and smoothly allows us to transition into the key point we want to make.

We might start by telling a story on the basis that we are all designed from childhood to identify with storytelling. It gets us in and we want to hear what is the point of the story. For example, "It was early Sunday morning and the doctor attached the portable x-ray machine to my chest. I was barely conscious, fighting for every breath coming through the plastic tubes delivering the oxygen. The results showed the lungs were down from three quarters filled with fluids to two third full. I knew at that moment that I would live". Hearing that you want to know why I was in hospital in that condition. This is the power of storytelling.

We might use a surprising statistic. "Power harassment claims in Japan have increased by 320% over the last ten years". Our audience will want to know why that is and what does it mean for them. We can move into our main point for this talk now that we have their full attention.

The success of our talk comes from having a clear focus on what the audience is interested in, combined with a very clear "write it on the head of a pin" statement about what is the take away we are going to deliver during our presentation. The rest is mechanics around the Conclusions and the Opening. The slide deck is the heavy artillery we bring into back up what we are saying with visuals to get the message across concisely and quickly. The discipline required to start well will carry us forward to the end of the talk and we will be successful with our presentation. This builds our personal brand and our reputation.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Seven

We continue with part seven concluding session of Presentation Visuals Mastery.

Last week we talked about when presenting, you need to transfer your energy to the audience. However don't have your energy levels at the maximum volume all the time. That just wears an audience out and wears you out too. Instead, you need to have some variation. Very strong and then sometimes very soft. And I mean drop it right down. Remember to have that in the voice range. Sometimes say your point in an audible whisper.

I remember when I gave a presentation in Kobe. It was at a university summer school for students who had graduated and were going back to their home countries. I was giving this uplifting talk about how they could use the experience they had in Japan back in their home country. It was powerful, a very powerful presentation. It was an urging my comrades to "man the barricades" type of speech. The speaker after me was a Korean professor. Maybe because of the way I presented, I don't know, but he spoke very quietly. He spoke in a very soft voice throughout the whole presentation. It really forced you to lean in and listen to him, because you had to work a little bit harder to listen to him. So he got peoples' attention by having a softer voice. At the time, I thought, "wow look at that". That was very effective and I realized, ah, just operating at one power level all the time is not going to work. I need to have variety in my voice, so I should have times when I am very powerful and other times when I am very soft. So just watch yourself that you are not getting into too much soft or too much strong mode. Variety is the key.

I said before gestures are very important. Be careful about getting your hands tied up with things. If you are saying one thing is important, hold up one finger. If it is the second thing, hold up two fingers. This is important. When you hold up your fingers like that, hold them up around head height. Don't hold gestures around waist height. It is too low and people struggle to see it. Get your gestures up high in a band from chest height up to around head height. That zone is the key height you want for showing gestures.

When you want to show a big point, open your hands right out. Don't be afraid of big gestures. Use gestures that are congruent. Be careful about waving your fist at your audience though. It looks aggressive. It looks unfriendly and combative. Use the open hand rather than a closed fist. And don't hit your hands together, slap them together or slap them on your thigh. That activity creating noise becomes distracting. Just use the gestures by themselves. As I said before, 15 seconds is probably at the maximum you want. You can walk around on the stage, but be careful about walking around too much, especially pacing up and down. That makes you look nervous and either lacking in confidence about your message or lacking control over what you are doing. Try and hold the main center point of the stage and move because you have got a good reason to move.

Using the names of people in your audience is a great thing to do. If you get there early, meet some of your audience. Have a conversation with someone. It is a nice connector with the audience to refer to that person and say, "I was just chatting with Jim Jones over there before and he made a very interesting point about current consumer trends. In fact, Mary Smith made an addition to that point, when she said "blah, blah, blah…" Suddenly you have both people very much proud of being recognized and involved in your talk. They have been recognized by the speaker and they like it. The audience now feels that you have a stronger connection with those listening. Refer to people by name. It is very, very effective. Don't leave it to chance, try and look for those opportunities to engage with your audience.

Let's concentrate on the basics. What is the point of your presentation? Who is your audience? What is the point? Be conversational and customize the delivery to your listeners. Have exhibits or have demonstrations or whatever that are custom-made to match that audience or match the point that you are making. Don't just bring out a set off the shelf points you recycle for every presentation.

You might have an existing basis for a presentation, but think about who are you talking to? What is the key point and then take it and re-work it, re-package it up, customize it. I have given 530 presentations in the last 20 years here in Japan. I have never given the same presentation twice, ever. Even with the slides, I will always have some small variation. Certainly the way I present it will be different every time. This keeps it fresh for me, as a speaker. And it also keeps it fresh for an audience.

If I feel stimulated and interested in what I am talking about, then the chances are that is how the audience will feel about it too. They will feel stimulated and interested as well. Be wary of receiving the presentation pack. You often see the CEO had some munchkins out the back preparing the presentation for him or her. Often, it will be the first time that they have even seen the presentation. Sadly, it is obvious that it is the first time they have seen the presentation. They don't know what's coming next and they struggle through it. This is really killing the brand. It is killing the brand and the organization. It is killing the presenter's personal brand. You don't want that. Get it, customize it, make it yours, then present it.

So there we have some ideas on how to present your visuals when you are giving your presentations which are based on our training called High Impact Presentations, where we teach people over two days how to become a high impact presenter and how to learn a number of different structures. It's really the Rolls-Royce of the presentation skills. This is where Dale Carnegie started in 1912,teaching people how to be persuasive. If ever you have a chance, after listening to this, to do that particular course if you haven't done it before, grab that opportunity because it is a powerhouse course. It's a game changer of a training course. I have taken it myself and I strongly recommend it.

So best of luck and remember, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. Do not be consumed by the construction of the materials. They are secondary to you. But when you do construct your materials use these ideas, these hints and you will give a much, much better presentation.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Six

We continue with part six of Presentation Visuals Mastery.

Where we stand is important. But as a presenter where should we stand? If it is a big venue and the screen takes up the whole background, I like to use the front, left and right side of the stage for a bit of variation. I try to stand as far to the front as I can, on the very apron of the stage. I try not to fall into the audience. Although I have come close to that a few times, by getting a bit too close. Often the stage is curved at the very front and if you walk in a straight line across the stage, you can find yourself in the orchestra pit, if you are not careful. It's good to be close, because then you are physically close to your audience. You can have more impact and more body language power when you are up close and personal. That's always a good position to be in.

Sometimes you'll have something on screen you want to refer to. Use your arms to reach back to what's on screen pointing there, but keep looking at your audience. Your arm actually indicates where you want your audience to look. That's very good so they see they need to look at the screen now. Or, we need to look at this part of the screen now. Use that gesture to very effectively to make the audience focus on the thing you have selected. Use it for audience focus but don't keep using it all the time. Be sparing with this technique

Tell people where you are going with your presentation. Set it up so people are aware of what is coming up. "Now we are going to talk about so and so." The next screen comes up and they know what to expect, rather than being surprised all the time about what is coming up. This keeps them focused. Using your bridges or your transitions in your talk about your key points, you bring them visually into the next section of your talk. This works very well.

As I said before, the worst thing in the world is you are in light and the audience is in darkness and you can't see their faces to gauge their reactions to what you are saying. In Japan I've noticed that Japanese audiences, if you turn the lights out, are very quick to lose focus. I think it's probably true around the world, but because I do a lot of presenting here, I probably notice it more in Japan. Don't turn the lights off the audience. Keep the lights on the audience and allow yourself to read the reaction to your voice and what you are saying. Look at their faces. How many are nodding? How many are just looking dead bored? How many are now on their iPhone checking email because you have lost them. You need to be able to see them to be able to keep the focus on your audience, to then switch gears.

Now if you need to get your audience back in the room, ask a question, a rhetorical question. They don't know though whether it's a rhetorical question or a real question. But by asking a question, you get their attention back in the room. You have to get them back from wherever they have escaped and you have got them again and you can keep going.

In the majority of cases, the way we present should be in conversational language. Storytelling is very good. We all relate to storytelling. It takes us into the context, the why of what you are talking about very quickly. And congruency between what you are presenting and how you are presenting it is very important.

I can't remember the comedian. This is going back 50 years ago now. I remember I heard some American comedian and he was talking about being a graduate of the so and so school of speed reading. But he spoke in this really slow voice. "My. Name. Is… I. am. A. Graduate. Of.The.So and so.School.Of.Speed.Reading." Speaking like this as a graduate of the school of speed reading was funny because it was so contradictory. It was for a joke. It was comedy. But it worked because there was no congruency. He was not matching the way of delivering the words with the message.

The same thing for us. If it is a very serious point, then you shouldn't be laughing, you shouldn't be smiling. Your face should look serious. If it is a lighthearted point, if it is something that is good news, don't look unhappy. Don't look serious, look happy. Use our faces for highlighting. Something surprising, requires a surprised face. If it is a very great piece of news, show a really happy face. The voice, the face, the body language, everything matches up with the message. So we need to make sure that the content is matched by the way we deliver the message. We must be congruent.

Speed is something that we use for variation in our voice. Speeding things up, or slowing them down for emphasis. Putting the power in! Taking the power out. These are all controls we can use for variation. We have modulation in our voice, where we are going up and down as well, which gives us power, gives us variation as a speaker.

We can add in gestures and about 15 seconds per gesture is about the maximum that you want to hold a gesture. The power of the gesture dies after that and it just becomes annoying. So turn the gestures on, then turn them off. And use your body language too, using your intrinsic energy. In Japanese we talk about the "ki" as in the martial art of Aikido. The energy, the power we have inside us, we use to project that power, that energy out to the audience. You give the audience your energy, you give them your power. In this way, you can bring their energy level up so that they are more receptive to your message. So if your energy levels start dropping through the process of giving your presentations, you'll notice that your audience's attention level will start to drop too and they will start to become distracted. So be prepared to keep your energy levels high.

Next week we will conclude this series with part seven of Presentation Visuals Mastery.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Five

We continue our series on presentation visuals mastery.

Using visuals when presenting helps us to relay the key messages. However, sometimes you don't need to have things up on the screen at all. You can show the visual and then disappear it. You do this because you don't want to have the screen images competing with your verbal message. Just hit B. Then the whole screen will go black and there is nothing to distract your audience. They have got to listen to you and look at you. And you can get the screen back up by just hitting the space bar. If you want to go to an all-white screen, rather than black, you can just hit W. It might be a dark room and you want to have a bit of light. Hit W for white. I you want to black it out then B for black.

Remember, your own visuals can be a distraction from your message. Make sure they are relevant. Make sure they are not overpowering you. Think of how the visuals will look on the big screen when you are creating them. Make sure that the audience is looking at you, not what's on the screen. Design it so in two seconds they can get it, then they can come back to you to hear commentary on what is on the screen.

Be careful about waving your hands around with the projector in front of you and the screen behind you. We can start feeling like shadow puppets. People get easily distracted by the shadow of your hand on the screen, so be careful about that. That's something you don't want happening. You might be speaking in a relatively confined space, so without knowing it, your shoulder is casting a shadow on the screen. Cut these distractions down be being self aware of your body positioning and always try to give yourself some space around you.

Be careful of other distractions. Don't hold your notes in your hand. When we are teaching people how to give presentations, sometimes people want to hold the actual document they've prepared in their hand. The rub is they give their talk and don't even look at it. Actually, we tell them they don't need it. Leave it on your desk or leave it somewhere close. You can look at the notes, but don't hold them in your hand. Waving notes around becomes a competitor for audience attention. We want to eliminate as many distractions as possible from our message.

If you do have an exhibit or something that you want to show the audience, that's great. Pick it up, use it and then put it down again. You don't have to hold it the whole time. After about fifteen seconds, the power of the exhibit dies and it is now restricting you from employing gestures. Also don't have things in your pocket. If you must have them then bring them out, show the audience and then just put them away so it is not distracting.

Power is also a tricky thing because the power supply can go down. This can happen. Suddenly you lose the screen entirely and your whole visual presentation is gone. All those great graphs, photos, key points for you to follow in your talk. Soldier on. Your laptop was not connected to the power supply and then your laptop battery dies, just as you start presenting or part way through. "I was sure I had plenty of battery power", you say, as the panic sets in. Check all these things beforehand so that you are on track to have power. As I said, if you do lose power, charge on. Keep going. Don't worry about it, unless you have to evacuate the building for some reason. But keep going. If power fails, be prepared. Have a Plan B in your mind, about what you are going to talk about. Be prepared to wrap it up a little early if you have to. Don't look stuck, don't look lost. Keep going. Even smart people forget this rule to their peril.

Michael Bay is a top director in Hollywood, famous for the Transformer series of movies. He was presenting for Samsung at a promotional event in Las Vegas. The power to the teleprompters suddenly went down, about ten seconds in. He had no plan B. He was unable to continue. He left the stage with his tail well between his legs, totally humiliated. Look for it on YouTube and see the whole catastrophe. It can happen to you too, so always be ready to carry on with no visuals if something goes hopelessly wrong.

Mysterious things do happens to us too. I was giving a presentation recently. I got there early, fortunately. I went through everything, checked my visuals, it was all working like a charm. And then suddenly, suddenly the visuals were not working. No matter what I did, I could not get the computer to work. I do not know to this day what was wrong.

I had to reboot the computer and reset it. You know it takes time to go through the whole process. Test everything and always give yourself some time margin. In that particular case, with about ninety seconds to spare, I got it back up again and we were away. Here is the key point though. I could have presented without the visuals. It wasn't a big deal, I wasn't stressed, I had my Plan B. I could have done it without the visuals, but it was more powerful with the visuals, giving some extra buzz to what I was talking about. But these things do happen, so get there early and check, check, check.

Remotes are useful for clicking through the presentation slide deck. You can move away from the podium or the laptop and use the stage to your full advantage. I have a bit of a love-hate thing with visual remotes. Often they don't work or stop working. I try to hold it in my hand in a way that it is not obvious to the audience, that I've got it. I want to use my hands for gesturing. I'll try and put it down if I don't need it, so both hands are free for getsures.

Laser pointers are dangerous. Some people go nuts with the laser pointer. The worst thing is when they point the laser at the audience. We have all seen that. Let's zap a few corneas with that laser beam. No, don't do that. They lack self awareness and are whizzing the laser beam around all over the place. It's like they've forgotten that the laser is on, so the laser is doing some sort of laser light show in the venue.

Or they try to use the laser beam to indicate something on the screen and they are whipping it around at a very rapid pace, all over the place. No. If you are going to use the laser, go to the word or the section on screen and use the beam slowly. Move it very slowly, if you are going to circle something or move it across something that you want to underline. Very, very slow movement is the key.

Next week we will continue with Part Six of our series on Presentation Visuals Mastery.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Four

We keep with our theme of dealing with all aspects of the visuals part of your presentation.

I have seen lots of people get lost with their notes. They have copious notes and then they start reading them to us. Don't. That's my advice. Don't. Don't read your notes. Have your points, sure. Have some points, have some notes. That's fine. No one will begrudge you looking at some notes to trigger the next phase of what you going to talk about. But talk about it. You are the expert. Talk to what your topic is about. You have designed the talk. It's your presentation. You know what the purpose is. Talk to the points and don't read the points. It just takes away from what you are doing and what you are trying to achieve. You want to be seen as a professional, an expert, an authority in your field.

I forget where it was, it something I saw, someone actually reading a presentation. They did a reasonable job of reading it, but it would have been so much more impressive if they had not read it, if they'd actually spoken to it. And you can, you know, you've got points you can talk to. That's enough. So try to avoid looking down and reading to us. It's not effective. You are not going to have maximum impact with an audience when you do it that way.

Lecterns or podiums are a bit of a trap. Again, people who set up venues, tend to set them up without thinking. So they'll put the lectern there on the stage with some sort of stand mic. You are now limited in what you can do, because of the positioning of the mic. Try and use a pin mic rather than a stand mic, so you can move around a little bit. If you can, move the lectern out of the way or get rid of it entirely.

If the lectern is just a platform to put your laptop on, fine. But move it out of the way. Put it to the side, so that yes, you can have the laptop there if you need to look at the screen. If you are not particularly tall, then you should definitely be very careful about being trapped behind a lectern. Often the lectern is a bit high and consequently all we can see is your head. It is just framed slightly above the lectern. Not a good look.

If you have to use a lectern, then get organized, get something to stand on, so you are going to be higher above the lectern. That is why we must get there early and correct all the errors the venue set up team have devised to make our presentation fail. If you can get rid of the lectern then do so because that way, we can see your whole body. We now have all your body language available to us. This is great for getting messages across.

If you are stuck with a mic stand, then take the mic out from the stand and try and move away from the lectern. Even if you can't move the lectern then try and stand in front of the lectern, in between the audience and the lectern. Or stand to the side of it if you can.

Definitely check out the room. Room layout is very critical. Often uninformed people lay out rooms the wrong way. Crazy things happen. I've been to venues where the room organizers obviously never give presentations. They set up my speaking position directly in front of the projector. Right in front of the projector. Now I am going to become the screen. Just crazy stuff, so get there early if you can. Actually, go the day before. That is even better. Then you can check out how it is going to look. What is the room like? Make any needed adjustments. Certainly the day before is best because you have more time.

If that is not possible for whatever reason, then definitely get there early on the day and check everything because crazy stuff happens. As I have previously noted, the people who are the most ignorant about presenting, are given the task of setting up for the speaker. In almost 100% of cases, they won't set it up correctly.

With the positioning on stage, if you can, always try and stand on the left of the screen. By that I mean audience left. We read from left to right, so what we want is the audience looking at us and then they read what is on the screen. Look at our face, then read the screen. Look at us, read the screen. It often happens that the people putting the presentation together or hosting it, will set it up so that you are on the audience right side of the screen. There will be power outlets, cables, equipment etc., arranged that way.

They will have the laptop stand there, they will have the mic set up there. Again, if you can get there early enough try and move it. If you can't, well okay. You have to present from the right side to the audience, but it is better if you can present on the left side of the screen.

Also check on where you are standing, in terms of audience lines of sight. Sometimes if you are on the same level as the audience, you might actually be blocking the view of the people on the far extremes of the seating. So be careful that you're not standing in front of the screen, such that they cannot see it.

Now sometimes you may have a stage platform and those huge screens behind you. You might be standing in front of the screens, so you are actually blocking part of the bottom of the screen. That's okay. The power position is at the center of the stage. But don't stay there, move. Walk slowly across the stage from the left and talk from there. Come back to the center. Move slowly across to the right. Then come back to the center. In this way, you are not entirely blocking what is on screen, all the time, for every slide. And with most slides it won't matter.

Microphones seem to scare people. If you have a big venue or if you have a reasonably large audience size, say more than 30 people, microphones are good to use. But if it is a small venue, only a small audience, you don't need a microphone. However, some ladies have a soft voice and they can't get their voice to carry. A microphone is definitely recommended.

I personally don't use a microphone in a small audience, because it leaves both hands free for gesturing and I don't feel restricted. But if it is a big venue then yes, I definitely use a microphone. When you are nervous, there is nothing worse than having a microphone obviously vibrating in your hand when you are speaking. So a good way of getting around that problem is grip the microphone with both hands and then hold your hands to your chest. Tuck your elbows in too. So now your body is anchoring the microphone and it will not sway, vibrate or show you are nervous. It is not the greatest thing because it restricts our gestures, but it's much better than having the audience fixated on, "Oh look at that, that person is totally nervous. Look at that vibrating microphone. Wow they look really scared."

No don't have that. If you have got the calmness to hold it in one hand, great, do that. Swap hands so you can use both hands for gesturing. Also, don't hold the mic right up to your mouth. Now this is sometimes funny at things like the Academy Awards. You see so called professionals dealing with the mic stand on the dais. The stand height is too low. So they bend down, leaning right over to speak into this little mic. Microphones are so sophisticated today, they catch the sound. You don't have to lean down. You should be talking across the top of the microphone not jamming it up in front of your mouth. Hold it away from you and speak across the top. It will catch you just fine. If you can't pull the mic out of the stand, then pick the whole thing up and speak using the mic.

We continue with part five next week.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Three

We are continuing our in depth series on mastering presentation visuals.

When you have a presentation to give, always get to the venue early and run your slides through their projector, on their screen, in that venue. You can spot trouble immediately and make any final adjustments you need to make there and then. Often the environments are different in a way that is not helpful. This happens when you are using different computers. For example, at work I am using a Windows environment but at home I have a Mac environment. When I do things on PowerPoint on my Mac and then I take it to my desktop at work, it looks different on screen to my expectation. Something in the formatting processes changes. It is a mysterious thing to me, as to why it changes, but it changes.

So be very careful when you are shifting formats through using other people's computers. Particularly if you are taking a USB, a disk, etc., and you stick it in the venue's computer and then suddenly, boom! All your formatting has changed and you've got no time to do much about it. So always go early if you are going to use their computer, with your USB or whatever, and check, check, check.

The visuals must have some relevancy to what you are presenting. Make sure it is not surplus or distracting or competing with the message. If you have something that is really exciting on the screen, very interesting, make sure you, the presenter, doesn't get lost in the proceedings. Particularly if you are presenting video, be very careful that the video doesn't overrun what you're doing. Don't allow the video to take over the whole presentation. Use video sparingly.

It's sad for me to see CEO's, of major corporations, get up there and go straight to the video. They always start off their talk very passively, because they know they are just there to introduce the corporate Propaganda Department's efforts. They miss such a huge opportunity to build a dynamic first impression, to connect with their audience, to really put their stamp on the talk. They go straight to the video, because they don't like presenting. Or they're not confident. Or they think somehow, that sort of dross corporate video is going to be so riveting for an audience, that the video alone is going to sell the whole message. No, no, no. You sell the message. That is job number one or the speaker. The video is a slave. The video is a servant to you. Use it as an adjunct, as supplement, not as a substitute for you. There is no substitute for you actually. You are the main thing and make yourself the main thing.

Electronic backup is good. Depending on the event, it is not a bad thing to have a second laptop there, primed and ready to go. Because things do go wrong. Have a back up USB with the presentation there. Things do go wrong. Recently I was at a presentation, and the actual IT guy himself was doing part of the presentation and he couldn't get his presentation equipment to work. So now we audience members, have got a semi sparse balding pate confronting us. His head is crouched down over the keyboard, like a mechanic under the bonnet of a car, trying to fix the engine. His patchy, balding pate is facing us, as he is trying to get the computer to work. Not his best look probably. Things do go wrong, even for IT people who are experts in this area. So don't think it's always going to be perfect. Arrive early and be ready for trouble.

Don't let the visuals capture you. Capture your audience instead. How do we do that? With an audience, there are lots of things we can look at. We can turn around and look at the screen behind us. We can look down at our screen on our laptop in front of us. We can look at our notes on the lecturn. Don't do that. We should not be looking much at any of those things. We should be looking at our audience.

We should be breaking our audience up into pockets of six sectors. Baseball has the answer. You've have left field, center field and right field. So there's three basic brackets that you can break your audience up into. Audience on my left, audience at my center, audience on my right. I've also noticed they have what they call the inner field and the outer field. So that inner field might be the front half of the venue. The back half is my outer field. So now left, center right. I've got front and back. That creates six pockets.

The key is to try and involve the audience members sitting in all six pockets. Don't just look continuously at the left side of your audience. Similarly, don't just look at the right side of your audience. Don't look at the front row and ignore everyone else. We have all seen speakers do this and they are disenfranchising large swathes of their audience as a result.

Take your eye contact and involve every single group throughout your presentation. Try and look at an individual sitting on one of those sectors, for about six seconds. Less than that means it looks like fake eye contact. Too much more than that six seconds and it gets a bit intrusive. So six seconds is a good enough period of time to be making a comment. You have been looking at an audience member in one pocket and then you switch and look to another pocket. Don't do it by numbers like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in order, left to right. Break it up. Look left to right randomly. Look for different sectors so it is not predictable.

Keep that audience eye contact and occasionally glance at the screen, but keep the main contact with your audience. Remember, the audience is the key thing. Your monitor of your laptop will tell you what is on screen, so you can refer to it without having to look backwards at the big screen. Although, sometimes for me, I prefer to present without glasses. I will sometimes use the big screen to just check what is being shown rather than my monitor on my laptop. But I try not to spend too much time looking at the big screen. Just glance at it and talk to my audience.

We will continue on next week with Part Four.

Presentation Visuals Mastery Part Two

Here we are back with Part Two of the exciting journey into how to use visuals when presenting. Given how straight forward this is, you wonder how come so many people make a mess of it? Let's keep going with some guidelines to help us stand out in the crowd, as the special few, who are professional and know what they are doing.

Bar graphs are great. They make it visually easy to compare items. For certain, heavy numbers focused presentations, you want to compare different variables using bars.

Line charts are also clear, quick to understand and show change over time. When you want to compare two or three items over time, it is very easy to see this one is up and that one is down, these are flat. Try to avoid more than three lines though, because it gets very confusing very quickly. Simplicity rules when dealing with numbers.

Pie charts are also fantastic for showing the parts of a whole. What is the share of something? As long as there's not too many slivers, then a pie chart works well. When you have too many slices of the pie, it gets very hard to fathom the relativities between items. For that task bar charts or line graphs are better.

People still manage to get this wrong. The real key is to only show one big graph per slide, if possible or two graphs, if a comparison is needed. As soon as we put up more information on the slide than that, the information becomes very small and the mind is assaulted by too much data at one time. Keep it minimalist and clear.

With lighting, be very careful when the room gets set up. Get there early is the rule. Honestly, I am yet to meet any people who set up the rooms, who also do presenting themselves. They are just told by their boss, "You set up the room. Put the chairs here. Put the lectern there. Put the mic there". Particularly at hotels, I notice that a lot of times hotel staff, very unhelpfully, will turn off all the lights in the room. The whole stage area is black and the screen is the main light source. No, no, no.

You want the lights on that audience. You want to see your audience. You want to be looking at their faces. What is their reaction to what I am saying? Am I boring them? Are they with me? Are they nodding? Are they shaking their head? Are they distracted, looking at their phones? You must see your audience.

So keep the room lights up on the audience. Do not let anyone turn it down. If they do, then stop immediately and request they put them back on again. If you have to turn it down at all, turn it down very, very little. Try and keep the room lit. Around the screen area itself, it's good if you can actually have the lights off just above the screen. Then the screen becomes easier to read. But definitely leave the lights on you. When they shut the lights down, you are now in darkness, so you are invisible to an audience. Just a minor voice in the dark. No, have the lights on you, spotlights on you, so the audience can see your face. Your face has got so much power of persuasion. You can add so much more credibility to the message, through using your face, your gestures, your body language. Don't miss the opportunity, make sure that the audience can see all of that.

I am struggling to think of too many venues that manage to isolate out the lights above a screen. But today with most projectors, the screens are pretty good, even with all the lights on, so it's usually not such a big deal. And again, if you design your visuals with that in mind, you're not going to be too dependent on too much information on the screen. When we have a particularly bright room, there might be a lot of natural light. Then often you have a slide with light background with very dark text as the contrast. That works very well. So the contrast of dark fonts on a light background in a light room can work. Or sometimes in a dark room you might go the other way and have a dark background with white and even white bolded text on a screen to really stand out and have the contrast.

Colors on screen are tricky. You rarely see people using them well. Colors like black, blue, green work very well on a screen. They are the best colors. Stay away from orange, grey and particularly red. Black and blue work together well as a contrast. Green and black also work well together as a contrast. They're good colors to mix and match on the screen: black and blue, green and black. Red can be hard to see. In fact, I was at a presentation not that long ago on marketing. Quite good content and reasonably well delivered, but the screen! Dark blue background, red on dark blue. No one could read it very easily. So avoid red. It is hard to read on a screen.

Also don't go crazy and try and have some sort of rainbow federation going on. Putting all the colors up there. It is too distracting and too confusing. Remember, you are the message. You. Your face, your body, your gestures, your body language, your energy. You are the message, not what is on that screen. The screen must be a slave to you. It is a servant to you. Not the other way around.

So when we are preparing, one of the tricky things is we often sit around in front of a screen. We are at a very close distance when we are preparing the visuals. Then off we go to give the presentation and we are in a big room, a big venue, with a big screen. And somehow it doesn't look like it did when you was preparing it. And you go, "uh oh". Usually that is too late. When you were preparing your computer has a presentation mode function. Go to that and then run your slides through that and see how it looks.

We will continue to go deep with this topic in Part Three next week.

Presentation Visuals Mastery (Part One)

Today we are going to look at the proper use of visuals when we are presenting. Many people ask us at Dale Carnegie, what should I do with preparing my PowerPoint or my key note presentation? What about visuals? What's too much? What's too little? What's the best way to make this work for me? Well there's a couple of things we need to consider at the very beginning.

What about the types of visuals that we need to use? How many visuals are required? Some people have very few. Some people have a lot. I once gave a five minute presentation and I used for that, I think, about 90 visuals. Now you might be thinking, 90 visuals in five minutes? Are you nuts? Well that particular presentation was a warm up to a keynote speaker. We'd sponsored the event and for that we got five minutes of stage time. Now I remember a quote from Abraham Lincoln. Something along the lines of, if you want me to give a three hour speech I can get up and give it right now. But if you want a 20 minute speech it will take me three or four weeks to prepare it. And that's right. To give a very long speech, rambling speech is relatively easy. To give a very concise sharp speech is very tough.

Five minutes is a really tough time period in which to speak, very hard to have impact. So in that particular case, I used 90. I was using a visual every two seconds. As I was speaking, behind me on a big screen, lots of visuals were just hitting the audience because in that five minutes I needed to get something across about Dale Carnegie Training Japan.

I wanted to give some visual stimulation, because I didn't have many words in five minutes to really get in front of that audience with very strong ideas. So I was using that as a technique. For that particular case it worked very well.

Generally speaking, I usually want to use too many visuals, because I am too greedy and I see all these great things I can show people, and I want to show them. But I really have to pair it down. I have to really discipline myself to really cut them out. Oh, I really want to use that graph. Oh that's a great visual. No, no, no, no. Cut it out. Cut it out. Try and keep it in some sort of range that works for you depending on what the purpose of your presentation is. Degree of permanency is something you need to think about. It might be better to use a handout. It might be something that is too complex to put up on the screen.

Unfortunately you often get this. I worked in the financial sector for a number of years and had to sit through countless presentations of spreadsheets up on screens with numbers that were so tiny, the person standing next to the screen giving the presentation had no clue how to read it themselves and they would say crazy things like, "I know you can't see this but…". Well of course we can't see the thing, it's too damn small. Get those sorts of visuals in the hands of the audience, rather than try to see it on the screen.

As for the size of the audience, for a very big audience, the visuals may be more important than a small audience. Think. Does it back up the content of what you are saying? How much time have you got to prepare? Where I think a lot of people make a mistake is they put all the time into the PowerPoint or the key note or whatever it is that they are preparing and no time on the rehearsal.

So the whole balance flips and instead of having a case where you get the presentation structure, content right and then spend time on the rehearsal, delivery practice, it's all sucked up into the visuals preparation, which is the wrong balance. Be very cautious about spending all your time on that and not allowing enough time on the actual physical stand up and deliver and practice. And finally the cost. Sometimes there might be a cost to buying visuals or sourcing visuals. That may not be something you want to do.

Here's some guidelines for using visuals. As it was mentioned before, sometimes less is definitely best. On a screen, try to avoid paragraphs. Try to avoid sentences. If you can, single words, bullet points. Single words can be very, very powerful. Just one word or even just one number can be very very impactful. You can talk to the number, or you can talk to that word. Or just put up a photograph or a simple visual and you talk to the visual. You don't have to crowd the screen with stuff that we can read ourselves.

What you really want is the audience to be focused on you, the presenter and not what's on the screen. This is very critical. We don't want the screen competing with us so the less you have up there the better, because people look at it two seconds, they've got it and then they come back to you. Which is where you want them. And I mention that two seconds because I believe that the two second rule is a key rule.

If you are putting something up on screen and an audience cannot see that and understand that within two seconds, it's probably too complicated. Two seconds-that's not long. But if it's more than two seconds it's probably too complicated. So think about reducing down the volume or breaking it into a couple of parts or maybe just leaving it out and replacing it with something you can talk to. Don't try and have people try and make their way through something very complex on the screen.

Generally, the six by six rule means that again, less is best. Six words on a line. Maybe six lines maximum on a screen is good. Again, keeping it very minimalist. Six lines or less per visual is probably good. And then six words across each line probably max.

With fonts, try to make fonts easy to read. You might use for the title 44 font size, and for the text a 32. Large font so it's easy to read if you are at the back of the hall. In terms of font types, sans serif fonts like Arial are very easy to read. Whereas serif fonts like Times, Times Roman, which has got a lot of additional fancy work done to them, can be a bit distracting. Try to use something like Arial or Sans Serif fonts that make it easy to read. And again, be very very very sparing with all uppercase. It's actually screaming at your audience; it's shouting at your audience when you use strong uppercase like that. You can use it. But use it very, very strategically and very practically to make a strong point. So upper and lowercase is much more balanced. Be very careful about using a lot or too much of all upper case.

For visibility, be careful about the overuse of underline. Yes you can use underline, but use it sparingly. Bold, yes you can use bold, but the same thing, occasionally. Italics, yes, but very rarely with italics because again it's not so easy to read. You can use them but use them very, very modestly.

With things like transitions and animations, sometimes it's good to reveal one concept at a time, because there is only one idea on the screen and then you can talk to that, so you are not competing with a lot of words on the screen. Try and keep it consistent and simple. So if you start like that then maybe continue like that.

Or sometimes maybe have it all up on the screen at one time, but try not to have it jumping around too much because then people get very confused. If you are going to have animation where it might be wipe right for example, as you bring in something, then have it wipe right all the time. Don't have one wipe right then the wipe up and the next one is wipe left, next one is something else. It's very confusing for an audience. And wiping left to right is good because that's how we read. That makes a lot of sense for people.

And if we are going to indent on a visual, do it maybe just once on that page. Don't have a sentence and a couple of words and a whole bunch of indents. Just try and keep it as simple as possible. If you've got that much information, whip that over onto another page.

Pictures are great. Pictures have a lot of visual appeal and as we say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And a nice, nice photograph of something that's relevant, of a book or picture or whatever. Nice and people can look at that. Very simply, they get it. Two seconds, they've got it. Now they're ready for your words to talk about the relevancy of this visual image, this picture, to what your talk is about today.

Next week we continue with Part Two of the correct use of visuals and look at graphs, colours, room lighting and some technical nightmares to avoid.