Episode #334: Getting From "Me" To "You" When Presenting

“Man, it feels hot in here. My throat is parched. My hands are sweating and butterflies have taken over my stomach”. These are some typical symptoms of nervousness about getting up in front of hundreds of sceptical, beady eyed people looking up and boring a hole into us as the speaker at the event. We are concerned about whether what we are going to say is going to be well received or not. Our voice may waver a bit when we first start because of that nervousness and now we feel even added pressure, because this isn’t going so well.

What we are doing is digging a hole for ourselves to bury this speech, as an example of one of the dismal efforts by speakers who have little idea of what they are doing. The focus is on us. I saw this speaker from the USA, at a Chamber of Commerce event just have a meltdown because she was so nervous. Tall, well-coiffed, suited and booted, she looked the money. She was using slides and she started well. However, it soon became obvious that she had tried to memorise what she wanted to say, as she went through the slides.

Memorisation puts enormous additional pressure on the speaker, in fact, way too much pressure and sure enough she cracked. Suddenly she announced, “I need to take a breath”. Okay, we forgave her that one. But two minutes later she stopped again for another breath. Her credibility along with her message, just sailed out the window.

The whole affair was her focused on her. This is the issue with nervousness – we are the focus and not the audience. So many conversations are going on in our head, all centered on ourselves and what we are doing and how we are doing it. This is natural and nothing unusual. The point is to get beyond that self-focus. How do we do that?

A good starting point is to not try and memorise what you are going to say. Our American lady could have just spoken to the slides. You have to know your material, so this isn’t a big demand really. You know what you need to say, so just say it as each slide comes up.

The other key is rehearsal. She was giving this talk for the first time. She was practising on us, the audience and that is an extremely bad idea. We don’t rehearse because we have sucked up all the preparation time on getting the slides together. If she had rehearsed, she would have been more comfortable with the content for each slide and she could have switched the focus from herself to the audience.

The other key point is only we know what we are going to say. If we depart from our rehearsal content regarding comments on a certain slide, only we know that. If we carry on regardless, no one will notice and they will just accept this is what we wanted to say. Telling the audience “I need to take a breath” is an admission of defeat, lack of preparation and the self-induced collapse of professionalism.

I was giving a closing talk at the end of a convention and even though I had practiced this talk fifteen times, I still had trouble. For some unknown reason, in the moment of delivery I decided to go to point four and skipped point three. Now I kicked myself and had a short internal conversation, “you idiot, you skipped three”. I didn’t declare this to the audience. I just placed point three after point four and charged on as if it was all part of the grand plan and there was nothing amiss, nothing to see here. Only I knew I had mixed up the order and that is the important part. If things awry, keep it to yourself, because there is a microscopically slim chance the audience will ever notice.

Once we can get over our self-focus, we can really start working on our audience. We bring the big three to bear in them – our voice, eyes and gestures. Voice modulation keeps people with us. It also allows us to select certain key words for more emphasis, by either adding or subtracting volume – both work. A secret whisper is just as effective as a stentorian outburst.

When we add to the voice with our eye contact with members of the audience, that makes the message so much more individual and powerful. I don’t mean trying to take in the whole audience at one time with eye contact. I mean to zoom in on one person at a time, for about six seconds. They idea is to use both of our eyes to focus on just one point of concentration and that is only one of the eyes of that audience member. If we keep this single gaze for too long, the pressure is too great, so after around six seconds we need to move our eye contact to another audience member. Here is a funny thing. In a big crowd, the twenty people down the back sitting around that one person we have selected, will all feel we are talking directly to them.

So we are using our voice and eye contact for bolstering our message and then we add in gestures. We don’t point our finger at people, as that is too aggressive and seems almost accusatory. We open the hand up and turn the palm upward, as we indicate to that person sitting there in the audience quietly minding their own business. Why palm up? This is an indicator from prehistoric days of “I come bearing no hidden weapons. I come in peace and you can relax”. When we hit them with voice, eye contact and a gesture like this we have their undivided attention for our message.

We have moved the focus off ourselves and how nervous we are feeling, to actively engage with the whole audience – one person at a time. We transport ourselves from a focus on “me” to “you” and we will be so much more effective as a communicator when we make that transition.