The Presentations Japan Series

Bland Is Bad When Presenting

Smart, capable people amaze me when I see them presenting. This recent speaker was someone I had met in business a few times previously and this was my first time to see him present. In our earlier conversations, he was knowledgeable, intelligent and professional. He was an experienced person in his industry and had substantial international work exposure. He was tall, broad shouldered, square jawed, handsome and personally well presented. His presentation itself was a dud. He had great information, probably some of the best available. He had good perspective to put that data in context. The delivery though was lifeless and it was killing the quality of the content.

This is a big mistake we can easily make. We add too many slides because we think the audience will really benefit from this additional information. Now we are rushing to get through it all in the allotted time and this detracts from our professionalism as presenters. Or we want to put too much comparative information on the one slide. The two or three graphs we are showing are complex and because at a reduced scale to fit on the slide, they are hard to read, so we lose our audience. We might really go crazy and start putting up whole spreadsheets of figures on the slide and just wipe our audience out completely.

Another problem with delivery can be too much jargon, which forces large swaths of the audience to drop out and go searching for their internet connection on their phone. They want to spend their time doing something more useful, like checking Facebook or Instagram, rather than listening to us. We may be speaking at a rapid rate of knots, because our nerves and corresponding adrenalin release are driving up the speaking speed. We are like the surf, with each successive wave wiping out the one before it. In this metaphor, the content of the previous wave is usurped by the next wave, such that the audience cannot retain the previous point we made. They soon lose touch with the direction of the talk.

In our speaker's case, his voice loudness was such that with the microphone, we could clearly hear him in the room. His speaking speed was actually, if anything, a little on the slow side. The real killer though was his speaking intensity. What do I mean by intensity? It was very, very low key. This can often be the deep pit that technical speakers fall into. They are numbers, rather than words, people and so they deliver their talk with a detached, "I am not really here" presence. If this was a paper they had written and they weren't there then this is fine. The problem is as if it were an academic or technical paper and the difference between us reading it for ourselves and them giving the presentation is abysmally tiny.

Intensity comes from within and from our mental attitude to the talk. Are we there to be supremely grey and just inform the audience of the content? If this is the idea then this presenter was totally successful. Is this enough though. In this modern, fast paced, highly competitive world how can we choose to come in last? If we get a chance to showcase our organisation and ourselves we have to make every post a winner. We need to better understand the full potential of the situation. If we can present information in a way that really makes the audience sit up and take notice, then they will think highly of our firm and of us.

He was grey, bland, forgettable, uninteresting, uninspiring, nice but boring – a speaker wall flower type, disappearing into the background, while standing in the foreground of the venue stage.

There was no tonal variation in his delivery. He didn't punch out key words to drive home their importance. His face was wooden and rather neutral, deadpan looking throughout, rather than excited and passionate about his subject. He had no crescendos and just settled for lulls all the way throughout the 40 minutes of audience torture. His body language and gestures had been put away for storage, waiting for a rainy day perhaps, because he didn't bring them to the hall. Now when you are a big guy like him, being dynamic is relatively easy, because you have mass and when put in motion, it can have a strong impact on your audience.

He also chose to follow the arrangements by the event staff, none of whom have ever given a public presentation in their entire life and who are completely ignorant of professional presentation requirements. Following their direction, he stood behind the podium obscuring his body language potential, had the lights dimmed to accommodate the screen and what was being displayed. He was already grey in delivery terms but his stage positioning and lighting had him almost disappear from plain sight.

He is a great teacher of presentations. In the Japanese language there is an expression called "hanmen kyoshi" or teacher by negative example. This is the role he played superbly on this occasion. We can learn a lot by doing the opposite of what he was doing. It also makes us realize that being tall, broad and handsome doesn't mean much, if you don't know what you are doing as a presenter. Having great data and information will not retain the attention of our increasingly attention deficit modern audiences, because we cannot keep them riveted to us and off their mobile phones. The minimum requirement is a clear understanding of the importance of solid delivery skills, on top of which we pour on our unsurpassed content. Not only do we have to understand these points, we have to deliver the delivery!

Don't Get A Grip When Presenting

Good posture never goes out of fashion. Standing up straight shows confidence, allows good breath control and projects energy. Given this is pretty simple, then why is it we get this so wrong when presenting? The problem is temptations aplenty in the presenting environment. The various acting awards or music performance awards are broadcast all around the world, to celebrate people making their living as professional presenters. Acting is presenting and so is singing, although we do not often think of the performances in that way, but fundamentally that is what these artists are doing.

Now this is one group you would expect to do this well. Yet, we see award recipients murdering their acceptance speeches. They stand there shoulders curved, hunched over the stand microphone, bending low from the waist to accommodate the tech, rather than the other way around. These are people who spend an inordinate amount of their time around microphone technology as users. Yet they seem incapable of mastering this sound dispersal device. We get a terrific view of the top of their heads, which when we have a bald or balding pate on display, makes the whole experience even more memorable.

If you are ever in a position like that, where the height of the microphone stand makes the distance from the top of the mounted microphone to your mouth seem too far, then change the scenario. Actually, hopefully you will have arrived early and will have checked the equipment beforehand so will know if the microphone thus mounted will do the trick or not. You should have already alerted the organisers to your preferred tech arrangements and because it is going to be an extended presentation, you have requested a hand microphone or a lavalier microphone.

Let's presume you have not had that chance, because it is an award ceremony and your remarks will be brief. Don't worry because the solution is devastatingly simple. Remove the microphone from the stand holder completely and bring it closer to your mouth when you want to speak. If the microphone is wedged in there and is not relenting or responding to your efforts to remove it, then go for more radical measures. Pick the whole damn thing up holus-bolus and speak into the microphone, so that you can be heard by everyone. Don't be bossed around by the tech – show it who is boss around here.

The other great good posture denier is the podium. I always recommend dispensing with the podium entirely, if you can do that. These days we can have our slides there to help us navigate our way through the speech. The ubiquitous slide advance clickers free us from being trapped behind the podium and having to hit the arrow keys to move through the slide deck. We can advance the slide show from anywhere on the stage and thus be able to access our full body language, to add to our communication piece.

What we often see though, is the speaker, usually male, applying a vice like grip on the outer edges of the podium, in an effort to stop it escaping from the stage at any moment. Male speakers also love it because they don't know what to do with their hands, so choking the life out of the podium takes care of that problem completely. This double grip arrangement eliminates the possibility of using gestures, to back up the words, because the podium has now become a function of the speaker's balance. This is because the speaker is standing back from the podium and leaning forward, head down, shoulders hunched over the microphone attached to the low flying microphone stand. When your weight is back like that, you tend to get stuck in that position and wind up delivering the whole speech with that poor posture.

If for some sad reason you are using a podium as a notes bench or are even worse, using your laptop screen as your notes bench, then stand up straight and slightly back and away from the podium. From here, you can' t easily grip the furniture and this frees you up to use your gestures.

Good posture shows the mark of the professional, who is in control of their environment, the furniture and the tech. Now all they have to do is concentrate on their audience and that is why we are there in the first place, isn't it.

Go Broad, But Also Go Deep When Presenting

When you hear an excellent presentation, it is easy to be well satisfied. When you are giving such a presentation and the audience are wolfing down your information, it is also easy to be self satisfied. The good is the enemy of the great we say, don't we. The difficulty is when things are going so well, to know exactly how to take them to a higher level.

I was attending such a presentation recently and the speaker was very, very good. The content was right on topic, for an area which has real attention grabbing power for audiences. The room was a sell out. That is always a good thing isn't it. The information itself was new, well designed and cleverly arranged in terms of the cadence of the argument. The actual delivery was probably one of the best that that particular business audience will see in a long, long time. All good, so how to make something already working extremely well even better?

This is not easy, but I did notice one thing which I thought could have been added and it may be something that we can all consider when we are constructing our own presentations. When we are delivering an "inform style" of presentation, of course we need to be clear, concise and on topic. We also need to have fresh information that is new to the audience, so that they feel they were in the box seats for a very value deep presentation. This presentation knocked it out of the park in that regard.

When we are doing that inform type of presentation, we can be spending quite a big chunk of our time on the broad brush strokes of industry direction, the shape of the trend, the predictions for the future. This is great because as audience members, we are getting treated to a business equivalent of a massive star show of the outer galaxies, like we will see in a Planetarium .

Future direction is good, but to really take our talk to the highest possible level, we need to do one more thing. We need to connect this broad and scale based projection analysis to the day to day reality of our punters in the audience. The talk I attended could have gone one more step and have reached out to the audience, with some steps they could take to connect the information with their daily challenges. It didn't have to morph into a complete "how to" presentation, but the inclusion of a few takeaways would have been the super icing on the cake.

The problem is that usually we are so wrapped up in the macro scale of what we are talking about, particularly when we are involved in discussing broad directional changes in an industry, that it is easy to get stuck at that general direction level. We are fully focused on the big picture.

We need to pick up around five things the audience can walk out with, which they can put into immediate action, to link the macro with the micro. There are bound to be things that our audience can do, as a result of hearing this speech, which will better prepare them and their companies for the coming changes. Everyone wants to know what is coming down the pike and what they need to do be ready for it.

The addition of these concrete steps brings the talk even more alive and makes it more relevant for our audience. Why five? Of course, we could probably list ten or twenty items, but the smaller number is easier for the audience to apply, without feeling overwhelmed. Trying to make too many changes too quickly, usually results in nothing getting done. Five is also good as a quantity because it has volume, which gives the talk a greater feeling of worth and credibility. These five points are sufficiently significant, without being off putting.

So the next time you are giving a presentation of the "inform" variety, look carefully at your macro points and try and pull out some practical steps, some juicy takeaways, that the audience can feast on and integrate into their own businesses straight away. If you do this, they will leave the room with a sense of they have seen the future and they are better prepared with some practical steps to deal with it.

Vacuum Up Cool Stuff for Your Presentations

Do you have one of those diaries that includes a daily quotation on the page? Or maybe you subscribe to a service that sends you uplifting quotes? I have noticed that social media is also a great hunting ground for cool quotations too, as people share them around. We probably note these and then move on with our lives. For the presenter though, these are gold. We need to be collecting these sound bites to lob into our presentations.

We might kick off the talk with a pithy quote or perhaps end with one. This is a great way to start proceedings by setting the intellectual frame of reference for the audience. Get them thinking and pondering about what we are saying. Ending with a great quote is like an excellent desert after a great meal, we leave feeling better.

Conveniently there are books of quotations in general and then there are collections of quotes from leading individuals. If Winston Churchill had received a buck for every time he has been quoted, the sum would dwarf the wealth of the robber barons from Silicon Valley. The point is, there is no shortage of material, only a shortage of imagination and awareness about using it.

The daily news is usually a tedious and depressing rendition of distant disasters, deadly deeds and dirty tricks being orchestrated somewhere on the planet. It is also a good source of interesting tidbits we can inject into our talks to assist us in making a key point in our argument. Instead of just using it for the wrapping up of the vegetable peelings and fish bones, scan the pages for more gold. I find using a pen to mark an article helps me to locate it later and then cut out the piece that attracted my interest. Then it is peelings bound, as it heads off to the trash.

We need to be looking for evergreen tidbits, because news rapidly becomes irrelevant. We may not have a convenient speaking spot looming on the horizon to coordinate with our little explosive. Capture them for later use. You might be thinking, I don't fancy trying to store all these random bits of newsprint, getting dusty and tatty somewhere in the house. These days we can take a photo with our phone, upload that to a cloud corral like Evernote and store it there. Usually we are after short bits of fierce and fiery additions to our text, to illustrate a point we are making, so we don't need the whole article.

Other speakers are also occasionally a good source of quotes and stories. Let me give an example of one I heard recently. Mr Nagato, the head of Japan Post was relating a tale about former Prime Minister Mori. Prime Minister Mori probably spent more time playing rugby than studying English when he was a lad, so his linguistic challenges were many.

Japan was hosting a G7 meeting and he had to greet all the heavy hitters as they arrived. His minders had been working him over, to be able to get out a couple of simple phrases without the aid of interpreters. You can sense impending disaster already can't you! So the phrases were "How are you" to which most people would say "I am well thank you" or something similar and Mori would then reply "me too". This is the normal give and take and nothing too exotic or overly ambitious.

So Bill Clinton rolls into town and rather than following the script Mori says "Who are you" by mistake, to which Bill says "Hilary's Husband" and without missing a beat, Mori says "Me too". Bill carries on with "Good luck" and moves on inside.

Now that was a great story and Nagato san had very cleverly worked that into his topic, which had nothing to do with that G7 episode. We all laughed and felt good about Nagato san and his talk. This was no accident. He had calculated this as a way to relax his audience and win them over to his side. It worked like a charm.

My point is, we are all swimming through a daily storm tide of quotes, tidbits, curiosities and stories which we can purloin and insert into our presentations. This will make us more memorable and spice up our talks. All we have to do is open our eyes, start looking for them, then reach out and nail them down for future insertion.

How To Liven Up A Speech You Have To Read

Watching a friend of mine deliver his speech to my Rotary Club reminded me of the perils of reading speeches. In his case, he was giving the speech in Japanese and so he chose the route of linguistic perfection over audience engagement. We do this in our own language too when the speech content is complex or of high sensitivity. Politicians have learnt they usually get themselves into trouble when they are adlibbing, compared to when they are reading from a carefully prepared and fully vetted speech.

Do I recommend reading the speech? No, but sometimes the stakes are too high or the situation demands you read the whole thing. My Japanese is not perfect, but I prefer to engage my audience than lose them by having to look down to read the content. Depending on the formality of the situation though, I might choose to read it. How can we liven this process up though?

What could my friend do when he was reading his speech to make it more engaging for his audience. He could have departed from the text and just spoken directly to the audience, while maintaining full eye contact for some of the sentences. Looking down at our speech means we have to break eye contact and this creates a barrier between us and the audience. By having a few sections where we replace sentences in the text with bullet points, to which we can speak will give us that chance to make continuous eye contact with members of the audience. His Japanese ability was sufficient for him to do that. For most people, they will be operating in their native language anyway.

We can do a similar thing with slides. We might show a picture, a graph or some key words and just talk to them, rather than read from the notes. The visual aspect supports what we are saying, so we lessen the burden on our words to sell the message. If we are doing it in a foreign language like my friend, we can have the perfect grammatical clarity needed up on screen to describe what we want to say and then just deliver the same key message in our own more natural if imperfect language.

He could also have used stories more in his speech. Stories engage our audience and we can transport them to specific locations, seasons of the year or times of the day through telling our stories. They key thing with stories is to tell something about locations or people with which the audience will be familiar. I heard a great one the other day from the head of Japan Post Mr. Masatsugu Nagato. He was speaking to the Economist Conference Network in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and doing so in English. He told an amusing story about when previous Japanese Prime Minister Mori met US President Bill Clinton when japan was hosting a G7 meeting in Okinawa. The point I want to make here is his audience were familiar with Mori, Bill and Okinawa. We should do the same. Try to get your audience seeing the scene in their mind's eye.

Rhetorical questions are also great for getting engagement. When we ask a question of our audience, we are forcing them to concentrate on what we are saying and think of the answer. Depending on the occasion, sometimes it is hard to know if the speaker really expects an answer or not. That is the ideal situation. We want to create some tension in the room because that creates connectivity between the speaker and the listeners. By throwing out questions we get everyone on the same wave length, at the same time and that builds our connection with our audience. We don't need twenty of these, just a few will do the trick. For example, in a twenty minute speech, probably one every five minutes or so would work well. Remember, we need to step it up in our speech about every five minutes to keep everyone attentive. This might be using questions, employing the slide deck or telling a story.

So we don't have to become captives to the text and lose our engagement with our listeners. These have been some simple ideas we can use to keep the talk interesting and engaging. It doesn't matter if you are speaking in a foreign language or your native tongue. These ideas will work a treat.

The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance

The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over. We pack our stuff up and get back to work. Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention. The memory of having done the presentation quickly fades and we find we have lost the opportunity to build on our experience. We usually don't get all that much frequency with our business presentations and so every shot we get is a great chance to grab lessons from it and improve. But we don't.

We don't because it wasn't factored into the planning at the start. If it is an afterthought, it will get overcome by all the other pressing matters requiring our attention the moment we hit the door of the office. So as part of the planning process we should include a review of what we did, compared to what we planned to do. We need to gauge how it went and which parts we thought resonated more with the audience.

When is the best time to do that? Immediately the presentation is over. Don't organize your schedule so that you have to go into client or internal meetings straight after the presentation. Head for a coffee shop, sit down, relax a bit and start making some notes. If you are a high energy presenter like me, you will be drained at the end of the presentation anyway and a brief rest is a good idea. I leave nothing on the table when I present, I try to put it all out there and give every ounce of energy and passion I possess. It is exhausting.

So go back to the presentation in your mind. Were you able to get there early, check out the venue and meet audience members as they filed in, getting to know about their interest, why they came, gauging their level of expertise on the subject? Did the MC quote from your carefully crafted introduction or did you have to fill in the missing bits yourself. How was the opening? Did it go as planned? How was your speaking speed – did you speed up or were you able to keep it at an even, easy to follow pace? Were you using voice modulation to keep the audience interested or was it all the same strength from beginning to end?

Were you consistently making six second eye contact with members of your audience, so you could connect with them, sell them on your key points and judge their reaction to what you were saying? Were you able to use your gestures to emphasise your argument? Were you able to keep the order of your key points after the opening? If you were using a slide deck, were you dominating the screen or was it dominating you.

Were you controlling the proceedings well, marshaling the various stages of the presentation. For example, did you go into your first close, receive the applause and then call for questions, nominating how many minutes there were for questions? Were you remembering to paraphrase the questions, so that everyone could hear them. Did you control the final impression by adding your second close, so that the last thing the audience heard was what you wanted them to hear? Did you come down off the podium and mix with your audience at the end to extend your personal brand?

Having done this checklist of how it was supposed to flow, then think about how it went. Were people nodding to your points, were the questions hostile or more on point wanting more detail? How many people stayed to talk with you? How many compliments did you receive which were genuine as opposed to flattery? How did you feel it went?

Now ask yourself, what did I do that was good? Then after listing these up start asking yourself, how could I make this better for next time. This will include general points which will be relevant for any topic and any occasion. Do not get into beating yourself up over what you perceived went wrong. Keep the momentum going forward, keep it focused on the positive.

If you were able to record your talk, then certainly play it back and have a close listen to it. If you were able to video it, even better. Seeing and hearing yourself is a great antidote to the paucity of presentations you may be able to give in a year. These records help to keep you focused on improvement.

Don't bother asking what people thought. You will get a whole bunch of uninformed opinions from people who hardly ever give presentations. If you want to get expert opinion, then invite an expert to attend and have them give you professional level advice. The average punter will only give you critique and work on destroying your confidence.

This whole exercise will probably take about 40 minutes. Time enough to relax over a coffee or a tea and reflect on where you can improve. Make sure you write it down and keep it as a record, which you can consult before your next presentation. Keep doing this and you will definitely improve.

How To Speak To 5000 People Audiences

The chances of this happening and happening regularly are remote for most of us. The happening regularly part is the key, because when you are dealing at this scale, you need to get practice to really master the big stage. Nevertheless, in case you find yourself in front of a very large audience, here are a few hints on how to adjust to the increased size of the event.

Get there early and go and sit in some of the most far flung locations. It might be the last row at the back or the rear seats on the elevated third tier of the venue. What you will notice, is that anyone on stage is quite small at that distance. You realize you will seem like a peanut to audience members seated at the far extremes and so you need to "big up" your presentation to suit the tyranny of distance.

The stage area is usually quite long and wide in big venues, but you need to be investigating the front of the stage. Often there is an orchestra pit or a defined space between the front row of seats and the stage itself. You will be standing very close to the apron of the stage, so that you can be more easily seen by your audience. The thing is to try not to fall off the stage when you are presenting. That is why you need to check it out beforehand, so that you know how far is far enough forward. You may laugh, but once you are into it and your eyes are searching for faces up on the third tier at the back, you are not looking down where you are walking anymore. Often those stages are curved and not in a straight line and so it is easy to forget that and down you go.

Definitely go for the pin microphone, so that your hands will be left free for gestures. These gestures will have to become much larger than anything you have been used to before. Remember you are a peanut waving your arms around to those in the cheap seats at the back. This means go for double handed gestures as much as possible, to fill up more of the stage with your presence.

Normally when we hold our hands out, palm up toward an audience in a sign that says "you can trust what I am saying", the arms will be within the bounds of the sides of our body. On the big stage those hands will be almost drawing a straight line across your body so the hands are super widely spread. If you are raising your hand to indicate something high, like a number, usually it would be slightly above head height. Not this time. You need to raise your hand as high as possible above your head to have any impact.

Don't overdo it, but get your audience involved by asking them to raise their hands if they have had this or that experience. Pick something which is fairly common, so as many hands will go up as possible. This is using crowd dynamics and crowd psychology. When a huge number of people do that same thing, at the same time, it infects the entire audience with that energy and agreement. You will also get a huge energy boost as their energy connects with you on stage. That is a serious high. Trust me, when any audience leans in toward you, it is electric and at scale. What an incredible feeling. It is like a drug and you want more of it. I don't know how rock stars calm down after having hours of that amount of monster energy directed at them.

The other thing is having your ki or chi marshaled for the task. Ki or chi is the intrinsic energy we possess and it is most famously seen in martial arts like aikido and taichi. When you are on stage, you have to try and push your energy, your ki, to the very back wall of the hall. You have to mentally project your energy that distance. Your voice helps with this task. You have to be directing your voice all the way to the last rows of seats. I don't mean yelling, because you are set up with a microphone and if you start yelling you will only distort the sound. What it means is push your voice strength to the back walls.

Your eyes also come into play here. You need to be breaking the audience up into a baseball diamond. Left, center, right field, inner field and outer field. These six sectors have to be worked hard by your eye contact to be picking out individuals and looking straight at their faces. Now if your eyesight isn't up to the task, don't worry. Only you will know that the person you are directing your gaze to is a blurry outline in the crowd. The act of looking straight into the eyes of audience members means that at a certain distance, the twenty people seated around that person, all believe it is them you are looking at. In this way, you can engage with many more people, no matter how far away they are seated.

Normally I am not keen on having speakers wandering around the stage when presenting. You have seen this I am sure. The speaker is nervous and they are going up and down, up and down, up and down, the whole time they are speaking, totally detracting and distracting from their key message.

I want you to use the left, center and right sides of the stage. However walk slowly to the extreme edges, stop, settle and talk to the audience on that side. Walk back to the center and talk to those located in the center seating, then walk to the right and do the same for that side of the venue. Keep repeating this walk and stop, settle process throughout your talk. For those in the front row, definitely don't forget to look at them, because you are so close and can have the greatest impact with that group because they feel your presence most immediately. Don't fall off the stage unless you want to make it a really memorable speech.

Presentation Practice Frequency

The usual frequency for most people for giving formal presentations is once in a blue moon. In other words, we don't do so many in a year. This presents a problem, because as we know, repetition is key to learning and improvement. If we were giving formal presentations 50 weeks a year, we would see remarkable improvements as we honed our craft. In business though, this rarely presents itself as an opportunity. We may be lucky to give two or three presentations in a 12 month period. In this case, how can we improve our skills?

The obvious method is to proactively increase the frequency. Instead of hanging around waiting for someone to invite you to speak, you need to get out there and beat the bushes for opportunities to present. There are many organizations who are constantly on the look out for speakers. Rotary Clubs need speakers every week. Chambers of Commerce need a constant flow of speakers as well. There are innumerable interest groups who would love to have someone come and speak on an interesting and relevant topic.

This throws up the issue of what to speak about. There will be a natural alignment between your own areas of experience, expertise and knowledge and popular demand, which will determine the types of subjects you will be able to speak upon. If these areas are such that there is a common interest in this subject, you will find there will be groups who will be interested in having you speak. The trick is to let them know you exist as a speaker.

This is where you need to be strategic. Investigate what sorts of groups exist in your area who regularly feature speakers. Make a matrix between the subject areas they cover and your own range of interests and capabilities. If there is a match, then contact them and ask if they are looking for future speakers. The person tasked with finding speakers will be very happy to hear from you, because they have a difficult job finding good speakers.

If you are an unknown quantity, then there may be some hesitancy about taking a punt on you as their designated speaker. A simple way to demonstrate your ability is to do speeches on relevant subjects, video them and out them up on YouTube and your website. You don't need a live audience for these speeches and it is quite sufficient enough for people to see if you have the goods or not, when they are considering you as their potential speaker. The videos don't have to be "War and Peace" either. Short videos will suffice to demonstrate your expertise.

Once you get a chance to do a formal presentation, to a live audience, make sure you get it on video. The audience laughing at some humour during the speech, applauding, asking questions, etc., all adds to the atmosphere and makes the video a type of show reel for yourself, to demonstrate your goods. You can point the event organizers to the videos, to give them an idea of your ability. Remember your main competition are the totally hopeless and those devoid of any clue whatsoever about public speaking to business audiences.

When the speech is set, then use your social media to blast out information about the speech. The number of people who see the posting and the number who can turn up are going to be vastly different. Don't worry, the fact that many people see you are a public speaker, talking on these various subjects, will alert people to the fact that they can ask you to speak for them.

After the speech you post the video to a link to your website so that people can see you in action. If you have the technical capability, you can turn a 30 minute speech into 5 or 6 videos through editing of the original. A speech has a number of points you cover and each of these can be lifted out into a separate video.

So you finish up with the complete speech and then a video for each of the sections of the speech. Again blast all of these out on social media and on to your website for maximum exposure. With all of this content floating around you start to become a known face and people will start contacting you. We get into a virtuous cycle here where success breeds success. Consequently, our frequency of practice goes right up and we solidify our learnings and improvements. In short order, we will be joining the ranks of those in the most professional speaker groups. This is really great for personal and company brands and that is what we want.

How To Get Self-Belief As A Presenter When You Don't Have Any

We don't get the chance to do so many public presentations in business, so it becomes a hard skill set to build or maintain. The internal presentations we give at work tend to be very mundane. Often we are just reporting on the numbers and why they aren't where they are supposed to be or where we to date are with the project. These are normally rather informal affairs and we are not in highly persuade mode when we give them. We should be clear and concise, but we probably don't really get out of first gear as a presenter.

Obviously, giving public talks is a lot more pressure than the internal weekly team meeting report. We need to be operating at a much higher level and the complexity index is much, much higher. This translates into pressure and often comes with a big dose of self-doubt. This is called the imposter syndrome. Should I be the one talking on this subject? What if they have questions I can't answer? What if they don't like it or me? What if I underperform as a presenter? What if I white out and forget what I want to say? The scenes of potential disasters are played out in our minds, as we talk ourselves into a panic.

How do we stop that negative self-talk and get a more positive view on our potential to do a really first class, impressive, professional job? It is not a level playing field. We need to realize that the world of business presenters is full of people who are quite hopeless and boring, so the audience has been trained to expect very, very little. We don't have to be a super star, we just need to be competent and we will automatically stand out from the crowd of losers murdering their presentations out there everyday.

What does competent look like? It means we are well prepared. This doesn't mean we have 50 slides in the slide deck ready to rumble. It means we have thought about our talk in the context of who will be in the audience and what level of expert knowledge they have of the subject, so that we know at what level to pitch our talk.

It means we have designed it by starting from the key punch line we will deliver in the initial close and then we have worked backwards to select the "chapters" that will bring home that point we have selected. We have seized upon an opening that will grab the attention of our increasingly attention deficit audience They are all armed with their mobile phones, ready to escape from the speaker at any hint of unprofessionalism or potential boredom.

It means we will have rehearsed the talk at least three times, to make sure it flows well and fits the time slot we have been allocated. We will make sure the slides are supporting us, not hogging all the attention and upstaging us. They will be so clear that our audience can deduce the key point of each slide in two seconds, because of how we are presenting the information. The slides provide us with the navigation of the speech, so we don't have to worry about what comes next. We also have our talking points in front of us, if we need to refer to them as a backup, reducing our stress levels.

It means we are not head down the whole time, reading from the printout or the laptop screen. We are eyes up and looking at some of the members of our audience. We are looking precisely at those who are either nodding approvingly or at least have a neutral expression on their face. This builds our confidence on the way through the speech. We are avoiding anyone who looks obstreperous, negative, hostile or angry. We do this to keep our mental equilibrium under control and positive throughout the talk. We keep all of our doubts, fears, insecurities and worries to ourselves as a secret. We definitely don't show any of these to our audience. We are fully committed to the idea that the "show must go on", no matter what unexpected things may occur during our speaking time.

Those whom we have chosen to look at, are getting about six seconds of total eye contact concentration each time, as we make our points. We then move on to the next person and keep repeating this as we build a one-to-one feeling with members of our audience. They feel we are speaking directly to them and this is powerful. We are backing up our eye contact with our gestures, voice modulation and pauses. This helps to drive home the key points we want to make. We are purposely asking rhetorical questions to keep everyone engaged. In terms of pure volume, we are speaking about 40% louder than normal. This projects our voice for clarity and at the same time our confidence. Audiences buy speaker confidence and we are keeping ourselves busy selling it to them.

We are using our first close we developed as we go into Q & A and we are confidently prepared for their questions. We are confident because we have built up reserve power through our study of the subject. We have kicked off Q & A, by publically stating how many minutes we have for questions. We do this to give ourselves a dignified retreat, a smooth way of departing the talk if we need to, in case things get out of control and a bit too hot.

We know how to cushion any salvos, thinly disguised as questions, that might come our way. A cushion is a general statement that doesn't agree with or disagree with, what has been mentioned in the question. This cushion buys us crucial thinking time before we have to respond. We end the talk with our final close, to make sure our key message is resonating with the audience. This is purposely designed to be the last thing they hear, as they walk out the door.

"We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan" is an old saw and still true. The key to success in building self-belief as a speaker is to be really well prepared and thoroughly rehearsed. When you make the time to fully prepare before the talk, to become ready, you head off all potential disasters and meltdowns that might otherwise occur. This is how to build self-belief – hard work, detailed preparation and lots of practice before you give the talk.