Episode #140: Avoiding Flat Presentations

“The good is the enemy of the great” is a clever saying and very true. In presenting terms we can have people who are competent but not even close to maximising their potential. They are sitting there in the lukewarm bath, never experiencing or understanding the joys of an extra ten degrees of heat. In presenting terms, turning your inner thermometer up ten degrees when facing an audience has a tremendous impact.

Our presenter was intelligent, well read, well researched and had good content. The presentation was workman like. It got done. The content was covered. The points were made, the slides were run through, the questions got handled. And then….

This is the point. There was nothing. It wasn’t retained in the audience’s mind. There wasn’t that feeling of WOW. It just dribbled out and ended, disappearing into the void with all of mankind’s other mediocre speeches. What was missing? Where was that ten degrees of heat which was never applied?

The opening was flat. It just started. The level of voice strength of the speaker, chatting with the attendees before the talk and the start of their actual talk, was at the same strength. The body language was at the same calibration for before and after the start. It was if the speech was just a continuation of the dialogue that had been going on prior to the kick off.

Everyone has a full brain when they walk in to hear us talk. We have to get out the crow bar and jemmy our way in there to be heard. That means the first words out of our mouth have to signal the talk has now begun, pay attention, listen up, cease and desist what you have been doing prior. We have to clearly draw a line for the audience to get them to concentrate on what we are saying. We only have a few seconds to capture their attention so they will grant us their permission allow us to hold their attention.

We cannot leave such a vital intervention to chance. We must design it carefully. The words have to be laden with hooks to keep them interested and with us. We might lure the audience into our story, using word pictures to capture their imagination. We want them to mentally see the scene we are painting. We could hit them with a stunning statistic that baffles the brain and make it sit up and take note. It might be a quotation from a famous person to add credibility to the point we are making. We need to plan for cut through.

Part of that planning needs to involve how we are going to marshal our physical resources particularly our eyes, voice, gestures, posture and positioning. Voice is where we start, because that is a powerful tool to break into the consciousness of the audience. By lifting the volume up, we force people to stop whatever it is they are doing and listen to us. When we add in a gesture to back up the voice the overall impact is strong. We cannot use eye power with the whole audience at the same time and have any impact so we select one person around the middle, then we give them both barrels of eye contact, for around six seconds. We just keep repeating this as we work our way through the whole audience. If it is a huge crowd we keep doing the same thing and at a certain distance, everyone sitting around the intended recipient of our eye power thinks we are looking at them anyway. We can physically move closer to our audience. When we do that, we use our standing height above a seated audience, to tower over them and add more power to our physical presence.

If we can get the start going well, then all we have to do is maintain that throughout the talk. We will add in vocal range when we are talking, to keep our audience in Japan from going to sleep. We can uses pauses for emphasis and to build anticipation. The key is to get a good start and then maintain the energy. Our speaker started small, stayed small and finished small. The whole thing was muted, flat, unremarkable and infinitely forgettable. Don’t be one of those speakers.

Action Steps:

1. Understand that the audience is almost comatose when you get up to speak

2. Remember we are competing with miniscule attention spans and lots of distraction today

3. Look for a WOW opening to grab the attention of the audience

4. Marshall all our weapons – eyes, voice, body language, gestures, posture, positioning

5. A good start is easier to continue than trying to build up the power gradually