Episode #324: Ideas For Advanced Presentations

There are some fundamental mechanics of the presentation delivery. I would call these hygiene factors for presenting. Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics. Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills. This despite all of the training available, all of the free information being plastered all over the internet. “Content Marketing” experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free. What an age we live in, yet we still have presentation train wrecks.

Let’s presume some have mastered the basics, so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.

1. Clear Meaning

When we ask our presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent. However, what is required to be clear? The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction the speaker is taking everyone. I attended a talk by the President of a huge global organisation here in Tokyo and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.

The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in. We need a pattern interrupt every five minutes of the talk, to keep the interest of the listeners. We will ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery, so that it is not all delivered at the same pace. This is a very common mistake amongst business speakers – they have only one speed setting from start to finish. We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, it lulls and crescendos. Certain critical key words are culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer. We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, conspiratorial whisper, for which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.

2. Message Appeal

If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying. Storytelling in business is one of the dark arts. It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application. Presenting statistics for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping. Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems.

Delve into what are the ramifications of their findings. Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded? When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know and all of this located in their mind’s eye. We take the audience with us to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.

3. Passion and Engagement

Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience. Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners. They feel no connection and no interest, because the speaker themselves doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.

Enthusiasm is contagious and we hunger for a speaker with fire in the belly. Instead we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers – those armies of the grey, gaunt, forgettable and dull. We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.

Your energy sets up a vibration. it transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room. When we speak, we employ our “ki” (気), our intrinsic energy and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence. I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room, they literally fill it with their presence. That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters – to dominate that meeting room space with our power and “ki”. The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up, restraining it.

We specifically want to engage that entire audience and connect with them all. We use our eye contact power to make that connection. We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select one of the eyes of each audience member. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul. Well delve for only about six seconds however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive. The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous. They feel they are the only one in the room and we are talking directly to them. That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands

The basics platform allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels. We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. Therefore, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white noise wayside. Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.