After last night's teleseminar on The Joy of Visibility, I wrote this...I hope it helps someone.
I gave my first talk in front of a public audience 1985. I wasn’t given an option. My boss said he wanted me to speak at a seminar on investments at the top of the World Trade Centre in three month’s time.
Gulp!
I had given small presentations in front of departmental colleagues before, but nothing on this level. And it got worse. The ‘public audience’ was 250 fund managers, investors and bankers from all over the world.
I prayed for the alarm clock to go off. It didn’t.
I said to my boss that I needed his help. If I was going to be a mental wreck for the next 12 weeks, he would have to play his part. Agreed.
He asked me to spend the next few days putting together the talk, covering the issues I would raise and making appropriate proposals. I was to deliver the ‘dry run’ in the office presentation room at the end of the week.
I was nervous enough for the dry run but muddled through it until I reached the last sentence. It was awful.
“What did you think of that?” he asked me. It was a rhetorical question as I never had a chance to reply. “That was the worst presentation I’ve heard in my life…and I’ve heard many” he said. I later found out that he told everyone the same thing. I was stung by his remark, but it provided the catalyst I needed to vastly improve.
He told me to build my talk around these simple guidelines:
1. Give the presentation a sequence. Spoken or written, one point must lead to the next. Without a sequence there’s nothing for the listener’s attention to grasp onto.
2. Bring the audience back to what you’re saying by scattering ‘summary’ phraseology throughout the talk.
Examples:
“The most important aspect of this is….”
“I want to be clear about…”
“The major issue here is…”
“What’s vital about this project is…”
“The three key points are…”
It doesn’t really matter what you say next but you’ve brought their attention back to what you’re saying. Their mind stops wandering and thinks to itself “Oh he’s about to say something important, so I’d better listen.”
3. Listen to yourself talk first. Better still film yourself giving your presentation. Listen to the sound of your own voice. It’s not nearly as bad as you think it is. If you can hear yourself giving your talk, you’ll improve on it every time you re-run.
- you’ll emphasise the right words
- you’ll pause well
- you’ll hear if you’re talking too fast
- you’ll soon realise if your jokes aren’t that funny
4. Deliver with passion. That’s so much easier to do when you’ve got everything else right and you’re talking with confidence. At least your audience will think that!
There are lots of other useful techniques for giving top rate presentations to people. Any good NLP book should cover this subject – looping, anchoring, visualisation, opening for kinesthetics, switching from big picture to small detail, but get these four points above right and you’ll almost be looking forward to trying it out again.
My talk went down very well, thanks to these guidelines. I never forgot these lessons and have always given presentations using this same approach.
Graeme Delglyn
PS I did go to a company presentation which started like this….
“Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen. I have been so nervous about giving this speech today that I decided to practice it in front of the Alcoholics Anonymous group I attend on Mondays. I also delivered it to the Drug Rehab group I meet with on Tuesdays. So for those of you in the audience who’ve heard me speak twice already this week, please forgive me.”
It was delivered beautifully and brought the house down, probably because the audience knew the speaker well. Funny though the opening lines may be, it takes a brave person with good timing to start off like that.