Episode #363: Get The Full Package When Presenting

I had an interesting collision of presenting styles recently. We were conducting one of our High Impact Presentations Courses and I was one of the two instructors for this programme. On Day One, a very important pivot takes place. They do three presentations that day and during the third one, they stop focusing on themselves. In the first two, they are consumed with nerves and trying to remember all of the things they are supposed to be doing.

One participant publicly mentioned that she hates having a room full of people staring up at her when she presents. It makes her feel tremendously nervous and she feels great fear as a result. Sure enough, she looked totally nervous and very uncomfortable during that first presentation. We have two instructors, so that one can review the video of the presentation with them, immediately after they finish in the main room. What a change, when I got to review her third presentation with her that first day.

Like all class participants, she was looking for all the things which were imperfect. In Dale Carnegie, we don’t dwell on what isn’t working, because we are too busy looking for what is working and for what can work even better. I said to her, “Look at this person on screen. She looks very confident and not at all nervous”. Sure enough, by the third presentation, she had made that important pivot to stop focusing on her nerves and to try to start engaging with the audience in the room. Everyone assembled in the room was directing their eyes to her, watching her, staring up at her. The very thing which she had noted made her supremely nervous, yet by number three, she had forgotten all about that. She was totally focused on others and not on herself. Now she was concentrating on engaging her audience with her message.

After the two days of teaching the main modules, I attended an event the next evening for a major luxury brand. The Japan CEO gave a brief presentation. He was bilingual, handsome, and full of confidence. He gave a very good presentation, but it wasn’t the full package. Why? The missing vital ingredient was that he wasn’t engaging his audience and using that framework to drive his message home. Like most public speakers you will see, he was lacking that engagement factor. Check it the next time you see someone present. Are they talking “at” their audience or “with” their audience?

His voice was clear and at a good volume, he used humour well, the slides were acceptable, his energy was great, but he wasn’t getting his message through. He was spraying his message to those assembled that evening. Everyone was getting the message at the same time, in the same way, so it meant that no one was actually getting a personalised message. It was a shotgun approach, and he needed to be a sniper instead.

If he had directed his eye contact for six seconds each, with each person gathered there, he could cover ten people a minute. That is a very powerful personal connection – one on one, rather than en masse. In his fifteen minute talk, he could have easily made a direct connection with one hundred and fifty people. There were only about fifty people, so he could have covered every single person in that room multiple times.

The next morning, I attended another networking event and here was another bilingual, handsome, confident CEO presenter. He had a good voice, good phrasing, displayed lots of energy. The slides could have been simpler, though. Unlike the presenter the evening before, he was spending a lot of time wandering around when speaking. The movement added no value to the talk and in fact, was distracting. By the way, next time you have a chance, take note of presenters who wander around and ask yourself – is their movement habit adding any value to their message? Back to this speaker. He almost had the full package, but again that same vital ingredient of audience engagement was missing. He was another shotgun speaker. He was spraying his message across the entire room to everyone, at the same time and so to no one in particular.

There were about 60 people sitting there and he spoke for forty minutes. That means he could make direct six second eye contact with four hundred people, so again a chance for at least six multiple direct touches with each person in that size of crowd. Engaging the listeners is how we get our message to sink in. Just speaking at them doesn’t do it. it is like being bathed in a morning mist and you feel a little damp, but soon that evaporates and you move on. His message mist evaporated and was not retained by his audience. If we asked those assembled what they remember from the talk, I will guess not much and probably not the key points he wanted them to keep.

Just making that one switch in eye contact in the training made a total difference to how well the class participants got their message across. These two CEOs also need to get their message across too and yet they are falling short at the finish line. The takeaway here is don’t spray your audience. Instead, engage them, one by one, and keep engaging them right through the talk. If the object is to get them to accept your message, then this is the secret of how to achieve that goal.