Soothe your stomach without the Pepto

Here's a new way to think about that anxiety you feel at the beginning of a presentation.

Picture that nervousness like a ball of fire in your stomach. (Sometimes it actually feels that way!)

Now instead of holding that ball of fire in your stomach and letting it distract and scare you, toss it out to the audience instead. With your opening statement, story, quote, question or startling statistic, throw the ball of fire right out to the audience.

Take that energy that's balled up inside you and release it. Share it. Spread it around! Use that adrenaline to propel the power and excitement of your opening.

When the audience gets that fireball and feels your energy, they want to give it back.

Or in other words, they get fired up!

Five ways to say "I don't know"

Something that trips up a lot of inexperienced speakers is the fear of "I don't know." Even when a speaker understands, logically, that it's not possible to know everything and it's not even possible to prepare for every question, he often still freaks out at the thought of not being able to answer a question, especially when there are experts or superiors in the room.

You have to get comfortable with the idea that you may not be able to answer everyone's questions -- but you can do your best to point them in the right direction.

Here are a few ways to say "I don't know."

1. Follow up later

"I don't have the answer to that right off the top of my head. Please give me your e-mail address after the presentation and I'll get back to you this week."

2. Share resources

"Here's my answer to that question, but I know someone who can answer it even better. I'll give you her contact information during the break."

3. Make use of present experts

"I see that Janie Expert is in the audience. Janie, I'd love to hear what you have to say about this question."

4. Ask the audience

"I have some thoughts on that topic, but I'm also wondering what others in the audience are thinking about this."

5. Give it back to the questioner

"How do you suppose you would handle that situation?" or "What has worked for you in the past?" Etc.

Please add your "I don't know" suggestions in the comments!

The audience can sense your guilt

Have you ever eaten a really garlicky salad or pasta dish, only to find yourself exuding garlic perfume for the next 24 hours?

I've written before about apologizing or qualifying at the beginning of a presentation, and how it does nothing to benefit you or the audience when there's nothing to apologize for.

But how about feeling apologetic and not saying anything? The audience can sense that, too!

A client recently told me that, because of her administrative position in the company, she is always the one delivering either bad news, or compliance- and HR-type issues like sexual harassment or open enrollment. She is certain that no one wants to come to her presentations, and she feels bad for always having to talk about such "boring" and "downer" topics.

Like that garlicky Caesar salad you ate that is now oozing from your pores, that hangdog attitude permeates your presentation through your body language and voice. "I'm sorry I'm so boring." "I feel bad about having to give you this information." How can you hold your head high and speak with conviction when you feel so guilty about what you're saying?

First, we talked about how to make these presentations not boring! There are a million ways to change up her talks to make them more engaging, interesting, and even fun for the employees. And she's in a position where she has the luxury of delivering that kind of presentation, where most of her colleagues are stuck in very rigid and inflexible roles. She was pretty excited as she started thinking of ideas for spicing things up.

The second thing we worked on was reframing: taking these guilty feelings and turning them around into positive ones. Instead of telling herself, "I feel bad that I have to talk about these issues," we talked about telling herself, "This is important information that they need in order to make important decisions for themselves and the company." She needs to own the stage and take pride in this part of her job.

Again: Don't apologize, even if it's in your mind! The audience will sense your discomfort, and you can't expect them to feel good about your message if you don't.

Are you too dependent on your co-presenter?

Imagine you have a presentation you've been working on with a partner. Then the day comes to give your presentation, and your partner is sick, so you have to deliver alone. You panic and think, "I only know MY part of the presentation!"

This is what it's like when you come to rely too heavily on PowerPoint. Can you still give your presentation if your technology fails? If not, you are too dependent on PowerPoint!

I'm seriously concerned about a whole generation of new presenters who have never stood in front of an audience alone without their PowerPoint partner. I asked someone, who's new to speaking, how long her typical presentations are and she replied, "Eight slides." What does that even mean?

Even a three-minute quickie presentation is accompanied by three slides. It's ridiculous. Yet there is a whole corporate culture that insists and demands that a presentation IS PowerPoint.

If your only presentation experience is speaking with a slide show behind you, I highly recommend finding ways to practice speaking without it.

Learn how to be with the audience, just yourself, your content, and your connection. Learn how to educate and inform an audience without slides. Learn how to paint mental pictures for them. Learn how to use your voice, your body and your face to emotionally engage them. Bring props and handouts. Write on a flip chart.

If your only experience is presenting with PowerPoint - especially the bullet- and text-laden kind - you are not really learning how to present. It's like walking onto the stage holding your security blanket or your scruffy little teddy bear every time you speak.

Take the opportunity, when you can, to let go of your partner. Get some practice presenting on your own. Learn how it feels not to have your "blankie." Learn how it feels to be with the audience and connect with them. It might be scary, but you will get better.

Then add PowerPoint back in if you must, but remember, you are the presentation, not your slides.

The audience doesn't need to know

Yesterday I gave a two-hour workshop after only two hours of sleep. I'm sure you know the feeling... lying in bed hour after hour, getting more and more frustrated and panicked as the time you have to get up approaches.

I finally got up at 6:15 for my 8:15 workshop, feeling crummy, but off I went. One thing I've learned over my many years of speaking and before that, performing: The show must go on! You suck it up and give the audience your all.

This post was inspired by my Twitter friend, paramedic, speaker and trainer Greg Friese, who asked if I told the audience, and how do I feel, in general, about such qualifying statements. In conversation with the organizer, I mentioned my lack of sleep, but did I tell the audience? No way!

Like many other apologies or qualifying statements speakers make ("I'm sorry, I'm very nervous" or "I apologize, I have a cold" or "I didn't have much time to prepare"), telling the audience your problems does the following:

1) It points out something they probably never would have noticed. Now they're alerted to your problem and looking for mistakes.

2) In the case of "I didn't have time to prepare"-type statements, it makes them wonder why they should bother listening to you when you didn't have the courtesy to prepare properly for them.

3) You're making it all about you! Personal stories are great if they're relevant to the presentaion, but the audience doesn't care if you're sick or tired or your mother is in the hospital. I'm not saying the audience is heartless, but they're there for information, for inspiration, for instruction. They are taking time away from other things and possibly giving you their hard-earned money to hear what you have to say. And what you have to say should not be "I didn't get enough sleep last night, so forgive me if my brain isn't fully functioning."

I've spoken while sick, while my cat was dying, while suffering a panic attack. I've spoken when tired, when my heart just wasn't in it, and when the audience didn't even want to be there.

I'm one of those lucky people who has endless stores of energy just for times like these. I also have learned how to compartmentalize. You never would have known I had a sleepless night, and the audience didn't have to know. When I got home, I crashed for an hour and then got back into my day.

Play the hard teams

There's a team in our county that got beaten badly by our local team. After that loss, they decided they weren't going to play our team again.

Both as a former team-sport athlete and as a sports fan, I find it shocking that they are giving up the opportunity to improve their skills by playing a tougher team. The truth is, they've lost all their games this season, so I can see how they might feel demoralized.

But unless they want to give up and shut down their team, they are going to keep playing and they are going to keep losing. At least sometimes, because that's how it is for most of us!

When I first started out as a speaker, my audience was teenagers. And I was terrified. I was intimidated. I couldn't imagine making any kind of an impact, or even connecting with them at all. I don't even remember my first experience talking to a classroom full of teenagers; I must have blocked it out.

However, I kept going. (Well, I had to. It was my job.) I kept showing up. I kept tweaking my presentation to make it better. I learned from these high school students how to meet them where they were, how to engage them, how to understand their needs as an audience. I did it for six years. And in the interest of not repeating myself too much, I will direct you to the post I wrote about why you need real world experience, and what I learned from it.

Don't avoid the difficult audiences because you're afraid. Don't shy away from trying something new and hard because you fear embarrassment. If everything you do is easy, you will never grow as a speaker.

We all fail from time to time, but failure is nothing more than a learning experience. Keep learning, keep trying, keep fighting. You will succeed.

Reproduction is like Website - more analogies for your reading pleasure

You know how much I love a good analogy, right? I'm kind of a crazed analogy-gatherer, and now I've found someone else who is as obsessed with analogies as I am!

Meet Peter Mihalik, author of the Ygolana|Analogy blog. He collects analogies from around the Web and posts them on his site. Here's one I like a lot: Reproduction is like Website.

(Click to see the image full-size.)

Also check out Your Business is like Toilet Paper, BP Oil Spill is like Tetris, and iPad is like Walmart.

If you'd like to add more analogies to your presentations, check out my recent how-to post.

"King of the Icy Bodies" - Intervew with an astrophysicist

I'm going a little overboard lately with the videos of scientist speakers. What can I say? I get a kick out of super-brainy people who are able to make their messages accessible to a wide audience, and actually express their true excitement about science. It's not something you see every day, unless you're in third grade.

This is an interview on the Rachel Maddow Show with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium. He's the astrophysicist responsible for demoting Pluto from planet to "icy body" (although it's now "King of the Icy Bodies" instead of just the puniest planet, according to Tyson.) He's also author of the book, "The Pluto Files," on which the documentary of the same name was based.



If you can't see the video, click here.

Technology made accessible - Simon Wardley explains cloud computing

During our lunch break at a recent training, one of the training participants put up this video as an example of a technical speaker using creative visuals. It was a big hit with the group, who are in a technical field and are conflicted about the concept of image-based slides.

I just have to mention that Simon Wardley and I clearly think alike. Last year, during a coaching session with a client who was going to be speaking about cloud computing, I suggested he ask random people what they thought it meant, and then use their definitions for humor. Great minds...



Just a note on the comments below the video. It's interesting to me how several people were disturbed by what they considered to be irrelevant and uninformative slides. This is a perfect example of a presentation that takes a complex and technical topic and makes it accessible and entertaining to an audience of laypeople. But the technical people are upset that the slides aren't full of data.

As one commenter said, "Did you listen to what he SAYS at all? A good presentation is never about the slides but about the story in the speech!"

This is the ongoing struggle between those who cling to the old way of doing slides, for no good reason, and those who are actually making an effort to serve the audience's needs and create presentations that are memorable and help the audience retain what they've learned.

P.S. Here's a previous post about a conversation I had with someone on Twitter about cloud computing. I think I finally understand.

Speak Schmeak in the top 50 communication blogs

I got an e-mail yesterday informing me that Speak Schmeak had been included in a list of the Top 50 Communications Blogs. While I'm not sure how legit the rest of the blog is where this list is posted, it's a pretty thorough list, divided into categories of Media and Journalism, PR and Advertising, Organizational and Business Communications, Public Speaking and Speech Writing, Conflict Resolution, Technical Communication and Science Communication, Communication Theory, and Communication Disorders.

I'm familiar with all the public speaking/speech writing blogs but one and they're all excellent blogs by real pros. Go check out the list and see what you think.

Three steps for adding analogies to your presentations

I'm an analogies geek. Everything reminds me of some public speaking concept. If you've been reading Speak Schmeak for a while, you might remember how the Tour de France, a cheese plate, American Idol, the Olympics and David Lee Roth have all inspired public speaking blog posts.

Analogies are one of the most effective ways of getting your message across to an audience. Analogies help the audience take a concept that might be complicated or foreign to them and apply it to something in their own lives that's easy to understand.

For some examples, here are a few of my favorite analogies. Here are a couple more.

Take these steps to find good analogies for your own content:

1. Make a list of your core concepts and key points.

When you've been speaking about a topic for a long time, it's easier to come up with analogies than when you're new to your topic. Likewise, if you haven't internalized your core concepts, it's harder to see how aspects of daily life can apply to them.

I have a philosophy about public speaking: It's fun, it's an awesome way to express yourself creatively, and authenticity and passion for your topic are worth more than a thousand techniques. In addition, I focus a lot of my persuasive energy on the ideas of putting your audience first, breaking rules and making presentations fun. Because I have internalized my core concepts, it's easy to find analogies for them everywhere I go.

2. Start looking around at how things in your daily life apply to those key points.

Now that you have your core concepts actively engaged, start looking around you and noticing how aspects of your daily interactions and activities are related to your topic. Is there something about the way people drive that reminds you of your topic? Is there something about how the clerk at the bank processes your transaction that reminds you of your topic? How about the way an apple turns brown when cut or the way birds line up on a telephone line?

Start looking at the world as a giant library of resources about your topic.

3. Capture your ideas as they come to you.

When an analogy comes to you, it can be fleeting. You'll need time to develop the analogy in writing, so make sure to have a method of capturing the idea so you don't forget it! Jot it down on a notepad, use your voice recorder, enter it into Evernote, or e-mail it to yourself from your phone. Don't let it slip away!

By putting these methods to work for you, you will soon be finding analogies everywhere you go, analogies that will enrich your presentations and help deepen your audiences' understanding of your key points.

What are some of your favorite analogies for your topic?

Timing your presentation when incorporating activities

I recently wrote a blog post on timing your presentation taking into account that almost all presentations start late. This week, Olivia Mitchell wrote a great, thorough piece on timing in general, and so did TJ Walker. We're all thinking the same thing, apparently, after sitting through too many presentations that go long.

But here's something that none of us has addressed, and I want to make sure it's included.

The previous articles on timing have all assumed that our presentations consist only of talking, taking questions and dealing with occasional interruptions. But what about an interactive training or workshop with exercises and activities? This is pretty much the only kind of presentation I do, so I don't know how it slipped my mind to specifically address this issue.

I have several activities that I use during presentations. One is a variation on the "tappers and listeners" activity from "Made to Stick." One involves having the participants prepare and deliver a short presentation. One is a contest to see if the audience can guess the celebrity who has invented a list of analogies I read aloud. Another is a handout quiz on features vs. benefits. And there are more.

When you are practicing alone, it's difficult to guess how long an activity will take. You really don't know until you try it -- and even then, different audiences may get through the activity at different speeds. But you still have to estimate, so you don't take up too much time doing the activity and then leave out other important content.

I usually run through the activity alone and then tack on as much time as I think it will take, not just to complete the activity, but also to get people to focus back on the front of the room. There is always time lost in starting and ending an activity as people move out of and back into their seats or stop talking to their neighbors.

I also always have a backup plan. If I check my time and it seems that an activity will take too long in groups or pairs, I try to find a way to adapt the activity so I can do it from the front of the room as a full group exercise. If there is no way to do this, I might still describe the activity but not do it. Or, I just leave it out altogether. No one is the wiser.

The trick with activities is to have several variations so that they still fit into your time frame, but also to be flexible enough to let one go if necessary.

Don't forget to include practice time for your activities and exercises, imprecise though it may be. You'll get to know the activity over time and develop a gauge for how long it usually takes. But keep in mind that different audiences will be faster or slower in completing the exercise, so plan accordingly.

Previous Speak Schmeak posts on timing are here, here, here and here.