The Winning Presentation Mindset
Mindset is a big deal in sports. We understand that it is important in business too, but we sometimes miss the point that it also applies to how we approach public speaking. We can exude confidence or terror. Either way the audience will buy what we are selling. How do we exude confidence? This comes back to our basic beliefs about ourselves as a speaker, which then determine the mindsets of “I can do this really well and be successful” or “I hate doing this and I am not very good at it”. Confidence doesn’t arrive from wishing. We need to work hard to build that feeling of confidence in our presentation capability. Proper preparation and ample rehearsal practice build belief an that determines a positive winning mindset. Great, but how do we do all of that?
The Abe cabinet is pushing hard to bring in foreign workers to Japan but not everyone is for this idea. There was a protest march through the Ginza area recently organized by Japan First, waving Japanese Imperial flags and urging the plans withdrawl. Mikio Okamura head of Japan First in Tokyo said, “Before you let in foreigners, you should deal with Japan’s unemployed. Then we would have Japanese people looking after the elderly. That would be the happiest result for the Japanese”. The Japan Trade Union Confederation known as Rengo, questioned the lack of a public debate on the subject and said that foreign workers shouldn’t be accepted without careful consideration. On the other side the Japan Chamber f Commerce and Industry noted in June that two thirds of companies said they were short of workers. The number of companies folding because of a lack of workers jumped by forty percent in the first half of the financial year, compared to the same period last year, according to the Teikoku Databank. In other news, at the Beijing International Book Fair in August, a Chinese translation robot, the Yudao AI Translator translated Srinivas Mahankali’s one hundred thousand words or roughly a three hundred page non-fiction book into Chinese in thirty seconds, with ninety five percent accuracy. A professional editor spent two weeks cleaning it up for publication and this compares with the normal six months required to do the same tasks. Also In China, the Xinhua News Agency launched a world first with an English AI Anchor debuting at the World Internet conference in Zhejiang province. The robot was developed together with the Chinese search engine company Sogou with the robot physically modeled on the Xinhua agency’s presenter Zhang Zhao. According to Xinhua, the robot learns from live broadcasting videos by himself and can read texts as naturally as a professional news anchor. Watching the video, the voice was eerily real, as was the robot resemblance to the actual Zhang Zhao. Looks like news anchors and translators had better start retraining for other professions.
Our mental approach to our activities determines our success. We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point. In fact, when it comes to presenting in front of other people we often have a negative mindset about the activity. We may be reliving humiliations from elementary school or high school, when we had to make a presentation and were teased about it. Perhaps without even actually remembering any particular incident, we manage to maintain a dread for speaking in public and carry that into adulthood. This was absolutely me by the way. I avoided public speaking pretty successfully, until I was around 29 years of age. I was really fearful of it and there must have been something in my darkest memory, which was driving that fear, even if I can’t nominate any particular trigger.
Here is the rub. As we get older and advance in our careers, we cannot avoid public speaking and giving presentations, whether we like doing them or not. We know we have to make a presentation, the date has been set and there is no escape. How do we approach it? We usually get straight into the nitty gritty details, the mechanics and logistics, without spending even a moment on our proper mindset for the activity. This is a bit of a crazy allocation of priorities though. We are putting our personal and professional brand out there for all to see, so we should recognise this as a fairly important opportunity to get it right. If you think reputation has significance then we are putting ourselves in the danger zone. That is probably why I avoided public speaking for so long.
The mindset game is a critical one, especially if we are nervous about giving presentations. Confidence is firmly paired with credibility in the presentation game and we have to exude both. We may be very unsure, nervous, even petrified but we must never ever show that side to our audience. Hesitation kills the message delivery and therefore the message impact.
I saw a speaker recently and I felt he was impressive. Thinking back about it, why did I feel he was a good speaker? On closer inspection, I realized he wasn’t saying anything breakthrough or particularly valuable. He wasn’t bringing much in the way of new information or insights to his audience. What he was bringing though, was a tremendous amount of confidence to be standing there, in front of all those quizzical eyes, looking back at him. We in the audience were buying his confidence, more than anything else. There is a powerful insight right there and if you can combine that confidence with really good content, then that will be an unbeatable combination
Often when we are anticipating the presentation, we imagine that our wondrous content on its own will carry the day. We justify our ineptitude by presuming that we can be hopeless presenters, but somehow because of the quality of our material, it won't matter in the end. Be in no hesitation, this is completely delusional and it is total folly. There are very few subjects in business where we are the font of all knowledge and therefore everyone else has to put up with our lack of professionalism as a speaker.
Normally, we are competing for the attention of our audience. Social media is a modern scourge in many ways from mindlessly wasting people’s valuable time, to having to joust with scammers, to cyber bullying. It has made a hell for presenters. Nowadays, within two seconds, our audience can vanish and escape to any number of other more interesting worlds. People are becoming more used to multi-tasking. They are reading their Facebook feed, searching for things on Google, checking out Instagram, replying to emails and scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter all the while they are doing something else quite important, like supposedly listening to us. What can we do about this?
We need to have a powerful presentation and speaking faculty to compete with the idle wonders of the Internet. A big part of our appeal is our message’s worth and the potent delivery of that worth. We need to understand that both are required. To get the right combination, we need to sell that we are confident in what we're saying and that our content is valuable. This means we are able to deliver the talk without having to read the text. We can talk to key points in front of us in our notes or up on the screen. This is quite different from burying our heads in the text, looking down the whole time reading the content and not engaging with our audience. To have the confidence to work the room while speaking, means you have to know the content. You can do it, because you created it or you adjusted what someone else had put together for you. Regardless, you will know much better than your audience what it is you are going to say, so you are in total control.
Start with a powerful opening, including the key message later captured in your conclusion. Isolate out 3-5 key points so make your argument and support them with evidence. Design both your first close and your second close for after the Q&A.
You have managed your schedule well, so that there has been ample opportunity to practice the delivery. This is how you build a powerful, positive mindset about public speaking. People who are spending all their time on the making the slides forget they have to rehearse the delivery for an audience. They usually prefer to practice on their audiences, then wonder why the whole thing was very flat with no engagement of their audience. After this near death experience, they retreat back into their foxhole and have to be pried out to make any further presentations.
In the weeks leading up to the talk we are the thinking about what we want to say and how we might say it, we are combing the media and books for juicy quotes and examples to back up what we are saying. We are playing it out in our mind's eye. During this mental imagining, we see ourselves as very confident and successful - we are predicting our success by seeing it before we even do it. We are seeing the audience nodding and agreeing with what we say. We can see ourselves enjoying the moment and feel in full control. This is what the top athletes do before their matches. They see themselves being successful, they see the details of how that success is being built up throughout the match, they see the elation of victory at the end. We should be doing the same.
When we have rehearsed, we know the timing, the cadence of the talk. We know where to pause, which words to hit harder than other to emphasize our key points. We are confident on the flow of our talk and with this knowledge we can now relax and enjoy the process rather than dreading it. We be successful have to work on our mindset toward what we are doing. We have to change our self-talk around how we approach the talk. We have to focus on the benefits of building our personal and professional brands. We have to look for every opportunity to talk, because that is how we become better and better. If we can change our mindset, we can change our starting point and that will bring the results we know we need to generate. Mindset matters. We will have one either way, so why not make it a winning mindset.
Action Steps
- Decide you will have the right mindset for your talk
- Understand your delivery is what makes your content work, not the other way around
- Don’t read the text – speak to your points or use the screen for your prompts
- Carefully design your opening, your key points (3 to 5) and your two closes
- Use mental imaging to see yourself being successful giving the talk
- Rehearse – don’t practice on your audience