Professionally Speaking...

Presentation Tip: The Audience's Gift to You

When someone gives us a gift we generally feel:

• happy
• grateful
• excited
• humbled
• honored
• touched

But this is not how we generally feel when we are standing in front of an audience and delivering a presentation. In this situation we're more likely to feel anxious, resigned, bored or detached.

Perhaps we need to look through a different lens.

In fact, our audiences are giving us one of the most precious gifts of all -- their time. This is thirty minutes, an hour, a half-day of their lives they can never get back.

When you think about your audience from this perspective, a number of things happen:

• It's much harder to be nervous or not fully engaged because you shift your focus away from you and to the audience. Intentional focus on your audience leaves no time or bandwidth to worry about your concerns.

• Receiving a gift generates positive emotions which in turn generates the desire to feel those emotions again. This cycle motivates you to ensure the gift givers (your audience) feel it was worthwhile to give you that gift so they'll do it again. 

• It's human nature to want to thank or repay someone who gives you a gift. The way to manifest your gratitude to your audience is by providing them value, which may be in the form of information; not reading your slides; new ideas; lively dialogue; engaging stories and examples; solutions to their problems or inspiration.

Thinking of your audience as gift givers is a subtle mind shift but one that can make a substantial difference in how you approach a presentation, from preparation to delivery.

Next time you are getting ready for a presentation, set about to make your audience happy they gave you their gift.

Photo Credit:
flickr/asenat29   C.C. 2.0

 

A Letter to Santa

Dear Santa,

I know you are terribly busy at this time of year building and packing all the toys, motivating the elves, polishing the sleigh and grooming the reindeer. But I could really use your help.
 
Business presenters all over the globe need to make better presentations so that the power of their messages will be truly heard and their audiences will be engaged and take action. Here are the gifts I send to presenters everywhere this holiday season. And Santa, any assistance you could provide in getting these presents distributed would be greatly appreciated.
 
Gift #1: Commitment to The Audience: an unshakable belief that an audience deserves your absolute best and an unwavering focus on making each presentation a valuable experience for those listening to you.
 
Gift #2: Minimal Use of PowerPoint Bullets: the time and energy to develop more visually meaningful and helpful slides to support audience comprehension and retention plus the courage to NOT use PowerPoint when you, the presenter, can communicate the message more powerfully.
 
Gift #3: Management of Presentation Nerves and Anxiety: a willingness to invest the time in learning how to manage the fear of speaking in front of a group so your audiences can benefit from the full impact of your message.
 
Gift #4: Acceptance of the Value of Rehearsing: the resolve to commit the necessary time to practicing every presentation so that your audience gets your most competent performance.
 
Thanks, Santa, for helping presenters everywhere to be their best! And do be careful on those slippery roof tops.
 
 
Professionally Speaking... will be on hiatus for the next three weeks, resuming publication the week of January 10, 2011. 
 
May you all have a very happy holiday season, filled with peace and joy, compassion and generosity.

Photo Credit:
Flickr/docjohnboy's photostream  C.C. 2.0

How to Handle Presentation Surprises

There have already been thousands of words written and spoken about the presidential seal falling off the podium during President Obama's speech at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit two days ago. But I feel compelled to add more words because the episode so clearly illustrates one of the things so many presenters fear...disruptive presentation surprises.

And although most of us won't have to worry about misbehaving presidential seals, we will have to worry about power failures, slide projector malfunctions, microphone feedback, tripping on wires and more.

Shock, impatience, blaming others, being thrown off course are all normal human reactions when something goes wrong.

But as a presenter, you don't have the luxury of showing any of those reactions.

Your audience may feel similarly or they may not know what to feel. In either case, they are looking to you to guide them through the situation. If you overreact and seem upset or flustered, your audience will pick that up and assume the "surprise" is a big deal.

Given that your primary objective in the presentation is to ensure a quality experience for your audience, how do your turn those "surprises" into just an inconvenient, perhaps even humorous, blip?

Certainly your first concern is to put the audience at ease. Take a look at how President Obama handled the situation I referenced at the beginning. 

He took a moment to gather his own thoughts as he said, "oh goodness" and then, through humor, put everyone at ease by saying, "That's all right. All of you know who I am." The audience laughed and everything was fine. Contrast this with a different scenario: what if he had appeared upset and called for someone to come and re-affix the seal or pick it up? The flow of his speech would have been quite disrupted and the audience would have been aware of the president's annoyance which, in turn, would have made them uncomfortable.

Humor is an excellent way to diffuse any unexpected snafus, as long as you're comfortable saying something amusing. But what if you're not? Here are some other suggestions:

1. Use a factual statement to allay any concerns the audience might be feeling. For example, "Just hang in there for a minute and we'll be back on track." 

2. Make lemonade out of lemons. "We've been given an unexpected opportunity for some dialogue. Turn to the person next to you and answer this question." [something relevant to your presentation] 

3. If the disruption looks like it will last more than 5 or so minutes or if it will require help from other people [like the A/V crew], consider giving the audience an unplanned break. You could combine this with the point above and ask them to discuss something relevant to your presentation while on break.

Bottom line take-away: don't make a big deal of any disruptive surprises and focus on making your audience comfortable that you're not flustered and confident that you will still deliver value.

What other techniques have you used or seen used when there are unexpected presentation surprises?

Photo Credit:
Flickr/apdk's photostream C.C. 2.0

Fear of Public Speaking

One of the consistent issues that many participants bring to my presentation skills classes is fear of speaking in front of an audience. In some people, this fear may manifest itself as mild anxiety while in others, it shows up as a nearly paralyzing force.

There are a variety of techniques used to help presenters deal with their presentation nerves, but I have just finished reading a book that comes at this fear from a more holistic perspective. I would recommend It's Your Time to Shine: How to Overcome Fear of Public Speaking, Develop Authentic Presence and Speak from Your Heart by Sandra Zimmer as a very useful read to anyone struggling with this problem.

Zimmer's central premise is that "...stage fright comes from the belief that you should be perfect, and not only are you not perfect, you are not even nearly good enough. These feelings set up the devastating expectation that you are going to be judged as lacking or less valuable than others."

My work with people who experience presentation anxiety would absolutely support this. These folks have no tolerance for what they perceive as their shortcomings and they are convinced that no one else is as nervous about speaking to a group as they are. Often, no amount of facts to the contrary, positive reinforcement or actually seeing themselves on videotape doing a reasonably decent job will convince them otherwise. That's why I like Zimmer's approach to dealing with this issue.

She helps the reader re-frame stage fright from something negative to "...a sign of your sensitivity which you can tap to help you speak from passion..." Encouraging people to focus into their fear, she says, gives them permission to feel what they feel without judging that the feelings are bad.

The book is organized into three parts. Part I focuses on the hard, important work of exploring your fear and your feelings and Zimmer provides excellent, easy-to-do exercises on body awareness, grounding and breathing. There is also a useful discussion on self-talk, which I always recommend as a powerful tool in managing presentation anxiety.

Part II focuses on the critical skill of connecting with the audience, an extremely valuable antidote to stage fright, but a behavior that is challenging to those nervous in front of an audience. Zimmer uses what I think is one of the most powerful concepts to describe the presenter's relationship with the audience: "Your presentation is not about you; it is about them, being there for them, to provide information, inspiration and understanding. When you make this shift in your thinking and create a mindset of service, your fear will diminish dramatically."

Part III focuses on how to weave stories into your presentation as a way of reducing stage fright and forging a stronger connection with the audience. There are some great tips on how to pull the lessons from your stories and how to integrate stories into the content of your presentation.

In sum, It's Your Time to Shine is a nice mix of philosophy and practical advice. If you're strongly left-brained [as I am], you may struggle a little with the focus on feelings, but get over it! Fear of presenting is all about feelings that are deep-rooted and generally negative. All the presentation techniques in the world won't be very effective until you can understand, own and move beyond those feelings. Sandra Zimmer's method seems like a very effective way to do that.                                 

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 6

The blogosphere -- fascinating world that it is -- consists of blather, banality and some brilliance. Luckily, when it comes to presentation advice, examples of brilliance aren't hard to find:

KATE PETERS, in Who Let the Frogs Out, shares practical remedies to deal with the voice that tickles, tremors or croaks during a presentation, just when you're about to make your most important point. 

MARION CHAPSAL gives us a fabulous example of how to make a presentation memorable as she blends advice from the great rhetoric master, Cicero, with the metaphor of a cooking recipe in Cooking Recipe: Presentation a la Cicero.

JOHN ZIMMER warns us to Make No Apologies in our presentations for real or perceived shortcomings, a theme I have blogged on before.

SETH GODIN can always be counted on to find a unique way to look at things and in How to Use Cliches, he suggests using cliches to inspire the opposite.

MATT EVENTOFF teaches us 3 ways to use our breath to manage anxiety during a presentation in Fear of Public Speaking, Part II - Breathing Techniques.

Enjoy!

PREVIOUS "DON'T MISS THIS" LISTS

The Don't Miss This List, Edition 5
The Don't Miss This List, Edition 4
The Don't Miss This List, Edition 3
The Don't Miss This List, Edition 2
The Don't Miss This List, Edition 1

PRESENTATION NERVES: UNMASK THOSE PERCEPTIONS

As Mark Twain said, "There are two types of speakers -- those that are nervous and those that are liars."

The panic about having to present or speak in public goes by many names: stage fright, jitters, performance anxiety, nerves. But whatever you call it, this feeling can range from mild anxiety, where you may experience a racing heart and sweaty palms, to downright dread, where flight seems the only viable course of action. If any of that spectrum of emotion is familiar to you, it may (or may not) be comforting to know that you're not alone. Even famous celebrities suffer this kind of anxiety.

FEARFUL CELEBRITIES

For example...the intrepid hero of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford, called speaking in public "a mixed bag of terror and anxiety." Johnny Carson, the king of witty quips and brilliant comic timing, experienced significant nervousness each evening before walking out on stage. Even the great Sir Laurence Olivier, in spite of his many hundreds of appearances and his stellar stage successes, felt terrified before each performance.

WHERE DOES FEAR COME FROM?

When we are faced with something we perceive as stressful or dangerous, our brain responds by initiating a chain reaction which releases the chemicals that cause physical reactions like shortness of breath, sweaty palms and a stomach turning somersaults.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter whether the stressful stimulus is a car careening toward us or the questions we'll get asked in next week's presentation; our brain responds with the same fight or flight response. Anticipating a stressful event can produce the same reaction as actually experiencing it.

HOW CAN WE OVERCOME FEAR?

So how are we to turn a perceived "dangerous" situation, like giving a presentation, into something more sanguine? According to Stephen Maren, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, fear overrules reason every time because the fear circuitry in the brain is more powerful.

Counterintuitive though this sounds, Maren says the solution to overcoming fears is not avoiding them. Rather repeated exposure to perceived fears in safe conditions helps us to realize that these threats are not real dangers. So that means get in front of people and present as often as you can. Don't slide away after the big conference or meeting, content to avoid any more presentations until next year.

IT'S A MIND GAME

In the fight or flight response, the brain is reacting instinctively to a perception, calling the autonomic nervous system into action. The brain, then, is precisely where we need to focus to reframe the perception. Here are some things that can help recast those stressful perceptions of presenting in public to more benign, or even positive, images:

• Visualize. The subconscious doesn't differentiate between fantasy and reality, so create your own "story" about the stressful event. Visualize yourself feeling confident and competent, eager to share your information with your audience. Shifting your perception of the situation allows you to change behavior. This technique, however, is not one that you can employ once and expect miracles. You need to visualize several times a day, particularly in the week or so prior to your presentation, to solidify these images in your subconscious.

• Listen to soothing music (your definition of soothing) before your presentation to trigger your relaxation response.

• Clip a photo of loved ones, your pet or a favorite vacation spot to your notes or put it on the podium or table you are presenting from...this will help you stay grounded and remind you of something pleasant.

• Enlist friends to sit in the audience and then search out those familiar faces once you start to present. Share your anxiety with them ahead of time and they will be sure to offer you big smiles of encouragement every time you look at them.

• Mingle with people in your audience before the presentation and even chat with a few of them, if time permits. This will establish a human connection. It's less likely that you'll perceive the situation as stressful if you've just established a nice rapport with people who are going to listen to you.

• Check out two of my previous posts, 5 Tips to Managing Presentation Nerves, Part I and Part II.

The more you understand the physiological reasons for fearing or dreading a presentation, the easier it will be to stop blaming yourself for shortcomings and move forward with a productive plan of action. With a commitment to overcome your fear and a dedication to present as often as you can, you will be able to unmask your perceptions for what they are and create a new reality.

PRESENTATION NERVES AT A PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL

You may be able to identify with feeling nervous when speaking to a group of people. It's perfectly normal. We all worry, to some degree, about forgetting what we intended to say or stumbling over our words.

Now imagine standing in front of 2 million people (with countless more millions watching on TV and the internet) and blowing your lines.

That is exactly what happened to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and our new President at the swearing-in on Tuesday.

Justice Roberts started to utter the oath that President Obama was supposed to repeat..."I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear..."

But Roberts got only as far as the first four words when the President chimed in and spoke over top of the next three words. This apparently threw the Chief Justice off and he flubbed the following line, getting the next part of the oath woefully confused ("...that I will execute the office of President to the United States faithfully..." instead of "...that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States").

And in that moment, President Obama hesitated and waited for the Chief Justice to offer him the correct line. When Roberts didn't, the President quickly repeated the line that Roberts had given him, even though he knew it wasn't correct.

LESSONS TO BE LEARNED

So what is the point of highlighting this uncomfortable moment in an otherwise flawless ceremony?

It captures three lessons we can all apply:

• It's easy to get nervous in front of an audience...even when we are accustomed to speaking  frequently to large groups.

• It's the sign of a professional to keep calm, even after a mistake. Neither the President nor the Chief Justice appeared shaken or paralyzed by the gaffe (despite the millions of people watching and listening).

• It's helpful to stay focused on what's most comfortable for the audience. Both the President and the Chief Justice realized, in the moment, that the audience would find it awkward for them to belabor the mistake by going back to the beginning and starting again. What their audience wanted was for them to simply keep going.

PRESENTATIONS AND MURPHY'S LAW: HOW TO HANDLE THE UNPREDICTABLE

You arrive for your presentation, flash drive in hand, confident that you are going to be pithy, witty and brilliant. You survey the room, check the equipment and conclude that everything is in order. Your audience arrives and you confidently launch into your presentation, comfortable with your message and your ability to deliver it. And then Murphy shows up.

Murphy's Law is the oft-quoted adage that says, If anything can go wrong, it will. No matter how carefully you have prepared, no matter how well you know your subject, no matter how much research you've done on your audience, there are still things that can and do go wrong in a presentation.

Here are a few common pitfalls and what to do about them:

INTERRUPTIONS ~ Audience members frequently interrupt a presenter with questions, particularly when the speaker has sparked interest or controversy. This can throw a presenter off track, causing him to lose his train of thought and blank on the answer being requested.

A change of mindset is the best way to handle this type of unplanned interruption. Be humbled that your words have generated enough interest in a listener that she is compelled to ask for more of your wisdom. Treat a question as the ultimate compliment.

During your before-the-presentation preparation, anticipating what questions your audience may have will make you more comfortable dealing with these interruptions and easier for you to get back on track.

SHORTENED TIME ~ You have been given an hour for your presentation. You arrive in the Boardroom to find that previous presenters have run over time and you are now asked to cut your presentation to 30 minutes. A sure-fire cause for panic!

Deal with this possibility by modularizing your presentation. When you are initially designing it, create distinct sections that are joined by transition statements. Then if you need to condense your remarks, you can fairly easily skip some of the sections. [Additional hint: if you are using PowerPoint, be sure to mark in your notes which slides go with which sections so you can quickly forward to the right slide.]

EQUIPMENT SNAFUS ~ This might be the most ubiquitous of unpredictables. Best advice: Don't rely on the equipment to work. If it does work, treat it as a pleasant surprise. Now I admit that's a bit tongue-in-cheek, but my point is... If you would be unable to give your presentation if the PowerPoint or the projector failed, shame on you. Your audience didn't come to read slides, they came to hear you. Practice, practice practice your presentation so that you could deliver it, even if the lights went out.

Here is some more great advice for when Murphy shows up.

What are some of your best [worst??] visits from Murphy?

 

5 TIPS TO MANAGING PRESENTATION NERVES (Part 2)

Zig Ziglar, longtime motivational speaker, defines fear as False Evidence Appearing Real. Fear is your body's physical response to something you perceive as stressful...in other words, it's totally subjective. You and I could look at the same situation and one of us could find it exhilarating while the other found it nerve wracking.

Yet for any of us who have been in the throes of presentation anxiety, it sure seems real! Palms sweat, breathing gets shallow, mouth gets dry and words pile up like a chain reaction accident on the Beltway. Here's a brilliantly funny video showing some of the things we worry about.

WHAT TO DO

Just prior to a presentation use these techniques to manage the physical manifestations of your nervousness:

1. BREATHE...it increases oxygen to your brain and minimizes the light-headed, shaky feeling. To see if you're breathing deeply from the diaphragm, do this diagnostic: Put your hand on your chest and breathe. If your chest moves up and down, you are breathing too shallowly. Now put your hand on your abdomen and breathe from there. Your chest shouldn't move.
2. Move around to release nervous energy. Walk up and down some stairs, walk around the block a couple of times, march in place.
3. Open your mouth widely and then close to relax your jaw. Do this several times.
4. If you suffer from a dry mouth, create saliva by lightly biting the inside of your cheek (be sure to do it lightly!), visualize biting into a lemon or press the tip of your tongue into the top of your mouth.
5. Limit caffeine, replace sugar with protein to keep your energy high (ditch the candy bar and substitute some nuts or cheese) and eat at least a couple hours ahead of your presentation to give yourself time to digest.

5 TIPS TO MANAGING PRESENTATION NERVES (Part 1)

A certain amount of nervousness before a presentation is normal...and even positive. Most every professional who gets up before an audience -- whether it's a sports figure, a musician or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company -- experiences it to some degree. Nervousness keeps you alert and focused.

[Note: the wonderful story about the musician is compliments of Laura Athavale Fitton's blog Great Presentations Mean Business]

But mind-numbing, knee-buckling, butterflies-on-a-roller-coaster-in-your-stomach nervousness isn't positive. It negatively impacts your success.

THE GREMLIN ON YOUR SHOULDER

Nervousness is a mindset, pure and simple. Sure it has physical manifestations (more on that in Part 2), but it starts in your head. That little gremlin who constantly sits on your shoulder and whispers things in your ear...otherwise known as your self-talk...works overtime when you are getting ready for a presentation. It whispers self-defeating things like..."you'll forget what you wanted to say", "you won't know the answers to the questions they ask", "you'll sound stupid", "everyone will know more than you do", "everyone will be bored".

WHAT TO DO

Coach (or threaten) the gremlin to replace the negative self-talk with these positives:

1. The audience wants you to succeed. They don't want to come to the conclusion that they are wasting their time, so they're pulling for you to be great.
2. You have the knowledge that your audience needs.
3. Your audience doesn't know you're nervous. And short of you collapsing in a shaking mass, they won't.
4. Visualize yourself, while preparing and particularly just before starting the presentation, as a calm, competent speaker ready to meet and exceed your audience's expectations.
5. Focus on the audience and what they need, not on yourself and how you're feeling. The more you can embrace the fact that it's not about you, it's all about them, the less nervous you will be.