Sticky Learning Lunches #25: Give Your Presentations Oomph

Today's topic, Online Presentations Lack Oomph part 1. Use the 'ONLINE POWER' mnemonic to be a more powerful you online and a great online presenter.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Monday. Welcome to this week's start of sticky learning lunches. We're just waiting for the last couple of people to get into the room. We've got a few more seconds until we start for today. I've just seen a typo on my front screen. So if you can spot the typo. There are no prizes for this, just for entertainment. If you can spot the typo, put it in the questions box. Let me know that you've seen it, 'cause I've just seen it at the 11th hour. Welcome.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome everyone. Make sure we're, as we're doing this, we're just waiting for those last people to arrive. Setting everyone up for success as normal. Should there be audio sound with this as well? Have we started? Yes, there should be sound. Can everyone hear me? 'cause Luke can't right now. Can everyone hear me? Yes. I've got, yeah, Luke, this may just be you. You may have to do a restart. Let's get that in there.

Nathan Simmonds:

So making sure we're setting everyone up for success today. So, phones out. Let's make sure we're seeing the phones live. He says, let's get this on flight mode. Zero distraction, a hundred percent attention on yourselves and your development right now. Let's get into this drinks at the ready, making sure everyone has a drink available. You're gonna stay hydrated. And then making sure you've got a blank page ready to get your keepers down. So you're gonna write keepers at the top of the page.

Give your presentations back their oomph

 

Nathan Simmonds:

And keepers are the things that you want to keep hold of the bits of information that you wanna be reminded of when you go back and reread those notes and come up with new ideas as you start to embed that. Good. Welcome to today's Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter. The home of sticky learning idea of these lunchtime micro learning sessions is to help you be the best version of you right now in this situation.

Nathan Simmonds:

Whether you are working from home or whether you are returning back to the office and also preparing you for the return back to the office as well. Today is all about online power. It's about the power of presentation, it is about the the power of presence when you are delivering online content and you are speaking whether you are presenting or whether you are engaging with your team. We've been doing it for a few weeks now,

Nathan Simmonds:

But that doesn't necessarily mean that we've been doing it to its best or to our best yet. And we may have got either complacent or picked up bad habits along the way. And this session is gonna be about helping to put some new skills in because this is the reality. This is the new state of play. This is part of the toolbox we're gonna be using more often than not to support people's mental health fulfillment and job satisfaction.

Nathan Simmonds:

And that's what this week's these next two sessions today and tomorrow are gonna be about. First of all, last week we did four sessions around the mind coaching model. It's a model that I designed in the MBM lab to help leaders have better, stronger, and more robust mental health conversations. Fully aware, this is Mental Health Awareness Week I believe.

Nathan Simmonds:

Correct me if I'm wrong, last week's tools. Were all about having the right conversations this week and in fact, every week, okay, if you haven't seen last week's training around supporting mental health conversations as a leader or a HR professional, we're gonna share the link to last week's sessions in the chat box so you can go back and watch those later on. Again, to support you and your leaders having the right conversations at the right time with the right people this week. Presentations.

Nathan Simmonds:

How's everyone feeling after doing eight weeks, nine weeks of video conferencing of Zoom calls? How are you all feeling right now as a result of the number of video conferences that are going on in the questions box? Let me know how you're feeling right now about this. One Word answers two word answers. Tired. Yes. Thank you, Susan. Zoomed out. Tracy, if only we could get zoomed out and get a little bit of distance connected. Nice. But Christopher, good to see you again.

Nathan Simmonds:

Darren boring presentations are frigging boring. Yes, agreed. Stuart excited about learning some best practices. Yes. Getting used to it. I'm not sure we're supposed to be getting used to it, but we also need to exhausted and personal and work too much. This is my third today. Yeah. Interest. Tracy, do you know what? Thank you to you, Tracy, for being here for your third one day when you could have quite easily cup of tea back garden.

Nathan Simmonds:

Interested? It's starting to be up and down. Yes, agreed. Colin, do you know what? Last week was the first week that I had had enough, quite frankly, you know, I, I've reached my, my limit and Darren referred to this in a, in a LinkedIn post. My social battery was completely depleted. I I was, I was zoomed out. I really know it's, I'd had enough of the interaction and the contact that way because we're, what we're doing is we're tired eyes, absolutely is. We are attempting to connect, but actually we can't really connect.

Nathan Simmonds:

So there's a, there's a dissonance of what's going on. And part of this presentation and the content today is, is helping you to understand that a little bit more. What we're seeing is we're seeing an image of somebody and our brain, although we can see them, we can't touch them, we can't smell them we can't interact physically with them. And there's a dissonance in your brain that is, is having difficulty computing this. And as a result of that, it's starting to make us feel tired.

Nathan Simmonds:

And we've, we've seen this at the beginning of, of the lockdown process and we're seeing it throughout at different points in the day. And as Tracy said, this is a third zoom meeting or or web conference today. So when your brain is doing this, you're making your brain work at least twice as hard trying to connect with people. The other thing to think about is actually where your eyes going. So getting into the mnemonic that we've got on online power the first one is on my eyes.

Nathan Simmonds:

What we mean by this is as we're presenting or we're presenting to people, it's starting to get really clear on where people are looking at and how we're helping them to relax their eyes and use their eyes in a better way. So the first thing that we can do is, there's a 20 20 20 rule on this. When we are working online and we're working in computers, like this is taking 20 minutes, sorry, every 20 minutes, taking 20 seconds to look at something 20 feet away. So we're adjusting our focus and that's helping just the rest eyes a little bit coming away from the screen.

Nathan Simmonds:

If you've got a window that's overlooking your gun, go and look at green, not blue. And if you know what I mean, when it comes to technology, really helps to replenish and refresh. The other challenge that we've got is when we are presenting online, is if we are working with people, especially in a Zoom environment, how many people can you see at one time? If you are in a zoom, if you've got it in gallery mode, how many people's faces can you see at one time when you are doing it? What's the, what's the most we can see? This is, I mean, this is, it is been a while since 1225. Crikey, 20 to 25.

Nathan Simmonds:

And that's at one time. So the other part of what your brain is doing, and I don't know the age range of the people in the room here, we get people on Zoom and it's like the beginning of the Muppet show. Do you remember the credits on the Muppet Show When it zooms out and you can see all the individual characters no way can you see all those people. So although I'm looking at the screen and I wanna see the person who's talking, if I'm all I'm presenting, I'm trying to gauge everybody's reactions.

Nathan Simmonds:

And so my eyes are going all like this and I'm trying to take on too much data, too much information. And of course as the presenter, it's making it more difficult for me to concentrate on me and to, and to keep my energy up because I'm using that extra brain power. I'm trying to check everyone else's expert expressions. So that's the first part. Number two is not back to back.

Nathan Simmonds:

Talked about this in time management, in, in, in better planning meetings is making sure that your meetings are not back to back. It's absolutely vital that when we're doing any meeting, let alone online meeting and it's, it is more of a trap with online meeting is that we're leaving the space between each of the conversations we're having. Why one, so we can back up this and give our eyeballs the rest of our brains at a decent break.

Nathan Simmonds:

But two, so that we've got chance to decompress mentally from the last conversation, update our notes, update what our actions, and then prepare ourselves for the next conversation. Prime example is these training sessions at 12 o'clock. I make sure that I have a break and I've got everything ready for this conversation. At quarter two quarter to 12, we come online and we make sure that we've got all the right links to share with you.

Nathan Simmonds:

We've got the right actions, I've got the right notes, everything set up in the right places, microphone, all of these elements. But I'm doing that in the first 15 minutes to make sure that the technical stuff is in place so that I don't have to think about anything. If we're doing back to back sessions and the trap is 'cause oh,