Episode #345: Remove Your Distracting Presentation Habits

TikTok, Reels and all of the other super short form visual media are creating a nightmare for presenters. Twitter started things off with the very limited number of words allowed per tweet, forcing people into tiny corners of the mind. The trend toward short form rather than long form has meant that audiences are getting trained to absorb information in tiny little blocks.

What happens though when we have a forty-minute presentation? The audience become restless and their minds start to wander, because they are not getting mini-hits every minute. The ubiquitous mobile phone with that drug like mainliner effect straight to the internet enables them to escape from us immediately. They leave us for the lure and charm of something more interesting to pay attention to.

Is this going to get better? “No” is the answer, so what can we do about it? One thing I notice when teaching our High Impact Presentations Course is that presenters make things more difficult for themselves by offering up additional distractions to the audience. There are a range of these, so let’s go through some of them.

1. A soft voice

Speaking to a colleague or a friend up close and personal doesn’t require a lot of voice projection, so we tend not to raise our voice when speaking in these situations. Presenting though is a different occasion. It requires us to engage our audience to keep their attention. Adding volume to our voice sends out a strong vibration which commands attention to what we are saying. We sound more confident and credible to the listener. Coaching class participants to up the ante on voice projection often bothers them, because they feel they are screaming at their audience. When we play back their video of their presentation they realise it isn’t too loud and in fact they see they are coming across as capable and competent.

2. Pointless gestures

Any gesture maintained for longer than 15 seconds immediately becomes irrelevant and annoying to the audience. This is a simple enough guideline, but we sometimes find the class participants may be using one hand to gesture, but they have completely forgotten about the other hand. They have parked it somewhere across their body, adding zero value to the proceedings. We want our gestures to help us highlight words and ideas, such that they rise above the noise and register with the listener in support of our message. If the hand is floating around somewhere and not being used, just “turn it off” and let it hang by your side, out of trouble.

3. Wooden faces

Professor Albert Mehrabian’s research has helped us to understand the importance of congruency when we speak. His central thesis is that what we are saying has to match up with the way we are saying it. For example, how many times have you seen the speaker maintain the one facial expression throughout their talk? In that talk though there were probably areas of good and bad news. Good results, disappointing results, opportunities, challenges are all being reported, yet their face doesn’t reflect any of that. Congruency would mean a smile or a happy face for good results and opportunities and a serious face for bad results and challenges. Mehrabian found that when we are not congruent, the audience gets distracted by how we look and sound and they are only hearing the message 7% of the time. That means 93% of the time what we are saying is not connecting. That type of poor result should definitely warrant a “serious” face.

4. Twitching and swaying around

When the body starts swaying around, we are setting up visual competition for our message. The knees and hips are circling around as if to some soul music groove. Our eyes are drawn to the movement and we tune out the message from the presenter.

In addition, many participants will wander around on stage moving forward and then moving back to the same spot. What was the point of the movement? Actually it had no point and all they are doing is distracting us from their message.

Sometimes the speaker will adjust their feet to face one side of the room and then do a little soft shoe shuffle, to move around and face the other direction. All of this is competing with the words coming out of their mouth. We have this wonderful thing called the neck and it can rotate enough degrees to allow us to plant our feet in one spot and yet be able to look at the audience members to our extreme left and right sides with no difficulty whatsoever.

5. Rambling and using filler words

Puzzling audiences with the point of what you are saying is guaranteed to lose them in a split second. I was listening to a podcast the other day and the guest was rambling away and for the life of me I couldn’t get the point of the message and I lost interest immediately. Ums and Ahs and other filler words are another turn off as the speaker struggles to string two words together. We abandon ship and desert the messenger.

The presenter’s job is only going to become more fraught and we need to lift our game as communicators, if we are going to have any hope of getting our message through. Let’s purge ourselves of these distracting habits we have accumulated and clean up our act. The good news is all of the other presenters out there will change nothing and we will look like rock stars by comparison.