Category Archives: Bad Habits

Bad Habits, competitive advantage, Executive Presence, General, Tips

Bad Presentation?

That bad presentation is your fault.

You sabotaged it.

Screwed it up.

All of us sabotage our own presentations more often than we imagine.

And we do it through self-defeating behaviors.

These self-defeating behaviors come in many forms, but negative self-talk is one of the chief culprits.

We tell ourselves repeatedly that we’ll fail.

We envision humiliation, embarrassment.  Complete meltdown.

We Set Ourselves Up for Bad Presentations

Negative self-talk begins with the most ubiquitous cliche in business school.  That cliche is “I hate presentations.”  This culprit leads to awful presentations.  It undermines everything we strive for in business school presentations.

How can we build a positive presentation on such a spongy foundation?

Negative self-talk translates into bodily reactions of nervousness, trembling, faltering voice.

Shaking knees, sweating, and flushing.

Moreover, our sour and weak attitude can infect our teammates if it happens to be a group presentation.  The negative spiral down means things get worse before they get better.  If at all.

There is, in fact, no greater guarantee of failure.  How could anyone succeed at anything with this type of negativity?

Do You Think Like a World-Class Athlete?

The world’s elite athletes train the mind as well as the body.

Visualizing success is a technique they use to prepare for competition.  I work occasionally with sports psychologists and mental toughness coaches who train athletes in visualization techniques.

All of these experts agree that the mind-body connection – healthy or unhealthy – impacts performance tremendously.

Let’s leave aside the specific techniques and the psychological underpinnings of it that go back more than a century.  Just say now that we must at least rid ourselves of the negative self-talk.

Let’s give ourselves a fighting chance of success at delivering a good presentation.  Even a great presentation.

Bad Presentation is not especially powerful
Stop Negative Self-talk and Fix that Bad Presentation

So why do we talk ourselves down into the morass of self-defeat?

It could be the widespread ignorance of how to deliver a powerful presentation.  This ignorance means uncertainty of performance.

This ignorance and uncertainty breed fear.

It’s this fear of the unknown that drives up anxiety and can result in a bad presentation.  So the key to reducing that anxiety is uncertainty reduction.

And we can reduce uncertainty through preparation and by controlling the variables within our power.

Preparation is the second of the Three Ps of Speaking Technique – Principles, Preparation, Practice.

Can we foresee everything that might go wrong?  No, of course not, and we don’t even want to . . . instead, we plan everything that will go right, and we focus on that.

We rely on our own adaptability and confidence to field the remaining unexpected 10 percent.  This is one key to an especially powerful personal competitive advantage.

Envision Your Triumph

No one can win by constantly visualizing failure.

Envision this, instead – you deliver a tight, first-rate presentation that hits all the right notes.  It weaves a story that grips your audience, that keeps the audience rapt.  And it ends in a major ovation and a satisfying feeling of a job well-done.

When we take the stage, we focus.  We charge forward boldly, presenting with masterful aplomb and professionalism.  With this kind of psychological commitment, we squeeze out the doubts and anxiety.  We wring them dry from our psychic fabric.

We eliminate the bad presentation.

The right kind of preparation empowers us to deal with unknowns that nettle us.

Positive self-talk is essential to preparing an especially powerful presentation and developing personal competitive advantage.

Find more on how to eliminate the bad presentation in The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Bad Habits, General, List-Talk, Uptalk

Stop List-Talk Right Now!

Everyone knows about the atrocious speech pathology called Uptalk, but there’s another speech pattern that sounds much like uptalk and can be a more insidious bad presentation habit.

Let’s call it List-Talk.

Both pathologies must be fixed to lift your presentation skill to a professional level.

Here’s the difference between the two pathologies, both of which can sabotage your presentation.

No Need for Self-Sabotage

First, Uptalk.

Uptalk is the bad speech habit of inflecting the voice up at the end of each sentence, as if each sentence were a question.

Uptalk is usually a 24-7 transgression.  If you do it . .  you do it all the time.

Uptalk is breezy, addle-pated, and weak.  With uptalk, you sound air-headed, uncertain, ditzy.

Whiny and pleading.  Someone who doesn’t care.  Like a cartoon.

You could fix uptalk easily, if you wanted to.

But at this point, if you’re still doing it, you probably don’t want to fix it.

Now look at a parallel speech pattern that sounds similar to uptalk.  This pattern appears only on special occasions.

List-Talk only shows up when it can hurt you.

Break this Bad Presentation Habit  Now

What is List-Talk?

You engage in List-Talk only when you deliver your business presentation.

Exactly when it does you the most damage.

List-Speak is the lilting presentation voice we sometimes assume when we give a presentation.  It’s a form of “presentation voice.”

Presentation Voice is an artifice some people unconsciously adopt when speaking to a group in a formal situation.  Especially when we’re attuned to reading slides instead of simply telling our story.

List-Talk creeps in.  It replaces direct, declarative sentences.

Bad Presentation Habit kills personal competitive advantage
List-Talk can drive an audience crazy

List-Talk offers the lilting upswing of the voice at the end of sentences.

As if you’re reading from a mental list.

Each sentence needlessly telegraphs that there’s more to come, that you’ve not yet completed a thought.

Again.  And again.

And this goes on endlessly, until you finish the last point from your slide.  Only then do you mercifully let your voice drop in completion . . .

. . . only to have it go UP again as the next slide materializes.

This pathology is linked to your slide.  But it’s not the slide’s fault.

It’s not the fault of PowerPoint.

It’s your fault.

It’s 100 percent your fault.

Fix List-Talk Now

Is anything wrong with List-Talk?

No, not unless your audience enjoys the experience of listening to someone obviously not in possession of the facts . . . because this is the impression given.

What causes it?

Nothing more than tendency to read from your slides.  This is a bad presentation habit heinous in its own right, but more than that, when you read from your slides, your voice goes into List-Talk mode.

You inflect UP at the end of every POINT.  You move from bullet POINT to bullet POINT.  The slide itself drags you a-LONG.

This lilting presentation voice takes HOLD OF YOU, and you aren’t even aware of what you’re DOING.

Unharness yourself from the visual behind you, and free yourself to speak in declarative sentences.

Drop your voice at the end of each declarative sentence.

Speak with finality as you complete the thought.  As a hammer clanking down upon an anvil.

With confidence and presence.  Just as you do in routine conversation.

Your daily conversations, after all, don’t consist of lists.  Your sentences don’t consist of stating facts and opinions as if numbered on a list.

Break the bad presentation habit of List-Talk right now and gain personal competitive advantage.

And consult the Complete Guide to Business Presentations for more wisdom on delivering especially powerful business presentations.

Bad Habits, Practice, Preparation, Principles

I’m Going to “Wing It!”

personal competitive advantage
You lose the potential for Personal Competitive Advantage when you “wing it”

In business school, you will espy classmates who demonstrate a pathology of unpreparedness – they “wing it.”

People do this for a variety of reasons.

Many students tend to approach presentations with either fear or faux nonchalance.

No preparation, no practice, no self-respect . . . just embarrassment.

Almost a defiant contempt for the assignment and the audience.

Or real nonchalance.

It’s a form of defensiveness when you wing it.

You offer contrived spontaneity and a world-weary attitude that carries the day.

This means forfeiture of personal competitive advantage.

Wing it with the Curse of Hubris

Too many speakers across the spectrum of abilities never consider the needs of their audience or why they have gathered to hear the message.

Often, a presenter may simply offer an off-the-shelf solution message that isn’t even remotely tailored to the needs of the folks gathered to hear it.  Paradoxically, this occurs often when men and women of power and accomplishment address large groups of employees or conference attendees.

They are infused with the power and, too often, arrogance and hubris that comes with great success.  They believe that this success translates into powerful presenting.

It does not.

especially powerful personal competitive advantage
A crash landing is often the result when you “wing it”

And this kind of presentation abomination leaves the easy-out that the student “didn’t really try.”

It is obvious to everyone watching that you elected to wing it.

Why would you waste our time this way?  Why would you waste your time?

You have as much chance of achieving success “winging it” as a penguin has of flying.

Winging it leads to a crash landing of obvious failure, and whether you care or not is a measure of character.

The lack of preparation by any speaker conveys a kind of contempt for the audience and the time of people gathered to listen.

What we actually witness from presenters of this type is actually a form of contempt.

Presenters from 16 to 60 offer this up too often.

I Read my Own Press Clippings Now

For instance, I recall an occasion of a successful young entrepreneur who spoke to our assembled students about his own accomplishments in crafting a business plan for his unique idea.

He related how he pitched that idea to venture capitalists.

His idea was tremendously successful and, as I gather, he sold it for millions of dollars.

Now, he stood in front of our students dressed in “cool slob.”  He wore a ragged outfit of jeans and flannel shirt and sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup.

especially powerful speech for personal competitive advantage
You sometimes hear the Styrofoam Speech . . . the mark of someone “winging it.”

He might as well have delivered a “Styrofoam speech.”

He was ill-prepared to speak and offered-up toss-off lines.  He had elected to “wing it.”

His sage advice to our budding entrepreneurs for their own presentations?

“Make really good slides.”

That was it.

Make really good slides.

Just a few moments’ thought makes clear how pedestrian this is. What does it truly mean?  You need a millionaire entrepreneur to tell you this?

“Really good slides” means nothing and promises even less.

I guarantee that this youngster did not appear in his own presentations wearing his “cool slob” outfit.  Likely as not, he offered a great idea sharply defined, practiced many times.  It was presented knowledgeably by a well-dressed team that won the day.

And this is the lesson that our young presenters should internalize.  Not toss-offs from a character just dropping by to wing it.

So many of the dull and emotionless automatons we listen to could be powerful communicators if they shed their hard defensive carapaces.

If they accepted that there is much to be learned.

And there is much to be gained by respecting the audience enough to speak to them as fellow hopeful human beings in their own language of desires, ambition, fears, and anticipation.

Conversely, we all can learn from the people we meet and the speakers we listen to, even the bad ones.

The chief lesson to digest here is to always respect your audience and strive to give them your heart.  Do these two things, and you will always gain a measure of success.

You will gain personal competitive advantage.

But you never will if you “wing it.”

Bad Habits, Finance

Finance – False Precision, Faux Anchors

Finance Presenting offers special challenges, but it’s also a chance to increase professional presence and personal competitive advantage

Whether the presentations class is in Philadelphia . . . or Mumbai . . . or Cali . . . or Chennai . . . I hear the same universal and eerie refrain from finance students.

“Finance is different.”

“We don’t do all of that soft-skill presentations stuff.”

“For us, the numbers tell the story.”

Numbers seem to enchant business-people in deep and mysterious ways, as if numerical constructs are somehow less malleable than the English language.

As if they are less subject to manipulation.

In a chaotic world, a spreadsheet exudes familiarity, a firm valuation offers comfort, an income statement serves as anchor.

False Certitude, Faux Anchor

For some, numbers convey a certitude and precision unavailable to mere rhetoric.

And this illusion of certitude and precision exerts influence on finance folks to believe that, well . . . that the laws of human nature that stymie the rest of us do not apply to them in the coldness and hardness of objective numerical analysis.

But this is an illusion.

And the result is 2D presenting, full of voodoo and bereft of nuance and subtle analysis.

Especially Powerful Finance for Personal Competitive Advantage
The illusion of precision can seduce the best

Where business presentations are concerned, finance folks are not different, special, unique or otherwise gifted with special powers or incantations denied the mere mortals who toil in marketing or human resources.

We’re all subject to the same demands placed upon us by the presentations beast.

These demands nettle us equally and indiscriminately during the business presentation process.

As with most things, there is bad news and good news in this slice of life provided here.

The Bad News

The bad news is that modern finance presentations are a vast wasteland of unreadable spreadsheets and monotonous, toneless recitations of finance esoterica.

It seems that there must be a requirement for this in finance.

In fact, many finance presentations devolve into basic meeting discussions about a printed analysis distributed beforehand, with the group of presenters merely standing while everyone else sits and interrupts with strings of questions.

Several presentation cliches guarantee this sorry state of affairs a long life . . .

“Just the facts”

Exhortations of  “Just the facts” serve as little more than a license to be unoriginal, uninteresting, and unfocused.

“Just the facts”

Folks believe that this phrase gives the impression that they are no-nonsense and hard-core.

But there is probably no more parsimoniously pompous and simultaneously meaningless phrase yet devised.

It achieves incredible bombast in just three syllables.

What does it mean, “Just the facts?”  Which facts?  Why these facts and not those facts?

Events are three-dimensional and filled with people and powerful institutional forces; they require explanation and analysis.  Mere “facts” are flat, two-dimensional, unemotional, and unsatisfactory proxies for what happens in the real world.

“Just the facts” masks much more than it reveals.

“The numbers tell the story.”

This is a favorite of folks who seem to believe that the ironclad rules of presentations do not apply to them.  “We don’t deal with all of that soft storytelling,” finance majors often tell me.  “We deal in hard numbers.”

There’s so much wrong with this that it’s difficult to locate a reasonable starting-point.

Personal Competitive Advantage is Hidden HereNot only do numbers, by themselves, tell no story at all . . . if numbers were conceivably capable of telling a story, it would be a considerably incomplete story, giving a distorted picture of reality.

The end result of these presentation shenanigans is an overall level of mediocrity and outright bad presentations.

If firms want nothing more than a group discussion about a handout, with the only thing distinguishing the “presenters” from the audience is that they are standing, then so be it.

It may be useful.

It may be boring.

It may be morale-building.

It may be team-destroying.

It may be time-wasting.

But whatever else it is, it is not a presentation.

“Cut ’n’ Paste”

This is the heinous data dump that all of us eventually experience.

PowerPoint slides crammed with data in tiny, unreadable font.  The display of these heinous slides is accompanied by a sweep of the arm and the awful phrase:  “As you can see . . . ”  The cause of this pathology is the rote transfer of your written report to a PowerPoint display, with no modification to suit the completely different medium.

The result?

Slides from Hell.

The Good News for Finance Shows

In every obstacle exists an opportunity.

Because the bar for finance presenting is so low, if you invest your project with the powerful principles that apply to all business presentations, your own shows will outstrip the competition by an order of magnitude.

This, of course, implies that your content is rock-solid.

It should be.

It must be.

Your ratio analysis, your projected earnings, your sophisticated modeling should all reflect your superb finance education.

Personal Competitive Intelligence
Build Credibility With an Especially Powerful Finance Presentation

But how you present that content is the key to presentation victory.

All of the presentation principles that we discuss here apply to finance presentations, particularly the parsimonious display of numbers and the necessity for their visual clarity.

If anything, finance presentations must be more attentive to how masses of data are distilled and displayed.

A situation statement must be given.

A story still must be told.

Your analysis presented.

Conclusions must be drawn.

Recommendations must be made.

And external factors must be melded with the numbers so that the numbers assume clarity and meaning in an especially powerful 3D presentation.

If you do the above, and nothing more, then your finance presentations will outshine the hoi polloi with ease.

But if you delve even more deeply into the masterful techniques and principles available to you, learning to use your tools skillfully, you can rise to the zenith of the finance presentation world precisely because you are part of the tiny minority who seizes the opportunity to deliver an especially powerful presentation and gain personal competitive advantage.

For more on presenting financial information in a suitable way, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Bad Habits, competitive advantage, Movement

Stick-Puppet Presenter?

Stick Puppet presenting
Eliminate Stick Puppet Presenting and you’re on your way to achieving personal competitive advantage

If experience is any guide for us, we can say that approximately 90 percent of our business presentations are delivered in 2-D fashion . . . we become a stick-puppet presenter.

No, I don’t mean this literally in the sense that people become stick figures.

I mean that the typical business presentation is stripped of depth and breadth.

Stripped of humanity.  Stripped of the qualities that make it interesting, stimulating, and persuasive.

Stripped of anything that might suggest personal competitive advantage.

The potential richness, energy, vigor, and power that is provided by purposive movement is absent.

The Pitiable Stick-Puppet Presenter

We are left with cutout figures, like stick puppets.  You’ve seen stick puppets – crude, flat little figures pasted onto sticks and then used in a child’s display to convey a story.

This is truly an ineffective form of entertainment.  This is as rudimentary as it gets.

The puppets shake and move up and down as someone voices dialogue from somewhere offstage.

Today’s business presentations are sometimes no better than stick-puppet presenting delivered in 2-D fashion.

Think of this, quite obviously, as “Stick-Puppet Presenting.”

Stick-Puppet Presenter is a zombie-like figure crouched behind a lectern, gripping its sides.

Or a speaker who reads from a laptop computer and alternately looks at a projection screen behind him, reading it verbatim.

If any movement occurs, it is unconscious swaying, rocking, or nervous happy-feet dancing.

Stop stick puppet presenting for especially powerful personal competitive advantage
Move the right way for personal competitive advantage

Perhaps there is a bit of pacing back-and-forth to fulfill some ancient advice mumbled to the speaker years earlier:  “Move around when you talk!”

And so the stick-puppet presenter aimlessly wanders about the stage.

This is worse than no movement at all as it adds one more irrelevant distractor to an already deteriorating situation.

But we want movement . . . the right kind of movement.

We want to accelerate from 2-D to 3-D presenting, and one powerful step in that direction is the addition of proper movement.

The addition of proper movement to your presentation can imbue it with energy, depth, richness, and enhanced meaning.

So in the next series of posts, we’ll analyze this component – “movement” on the stage in support of your presentation.

If you want to eliminate stick-puppet presenting and receive a full-bodied explication of the transition from 2D to 3D presenting, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Bad Habits, Uptalk

Uptalk . . . Ugh

The Disease of Uptalk
Uptalk Destroys Your Credibility Question by Question

The verbal up-tic is a ubiquitous speech pathology afflicting folks under thirty.  Its most common manifestation is Uptalk.

Once it grips you, Uptalk won’t let go . . .

It’s maddening.

Everyone who is exposed to this voice experiences doubt, unease, and irritation, many of those persons not cognizant of where this unease originates.

It screams amateur when used in formal business presentations.

It cries out:  “I don’t know what I’m talking about here.  I just memorized a series of sentences and I’m spitting them out now in this stupid presentation.”

Uptalk Destroys Your Credibility

If you have this affectation – if you’re reading this, you probably do – promise yourself solemnly to rid yourself of this debilitating habit.  But recognize that it’s not that easy.

Students confide in me that they can hear themselves uptalking during presentations, sentence after questioning sentence.

But for some reason, they simply cannot stop.

So exactly what is this crippling uptalk?

Uptalk is also called the “rising line” or the “high rising terminal.”

Uptalk is the rhetorical scourge of the 21st century.

Uptalk is the unfortunate habit of inflecting the voice upward at the end of every sentence, as if a question is being asked.  Uptalk radiates weakness and uncertainty and doubt . . . and it conveys the mood of unfinished business, as if something more is yet to come.

On and on.

Sentence after sentence in succession is spoken as if a series of questions.

Uptalk  =  “I have no idea what I’m talking about”

You create a tense atmosphere with Uptalking that is almost demonic in its effect.

This tic infests your audience with an unidentifiable uneasiness.  At its worst, your audience wants to cover ears and cry “make it stop!”   . . . but they aren’t quite sure at what they should vent their fury.

In certain places abroad, this tic is known as the Australian Questioning Intonation, popular among young Australians.

The Brits are less generous in their assessment of this barbarism, calling it the “moronic interrogative,” a term coined by comedian Rory McGrath.

In United States popular culture, someone calling herself Kim Kardashian is the main carrier of this virus.  Listen for it in any interview you stumble upon in popular youth-oriented television.

Disney Channel is a training camp for uptalking.  Reality television females, as a breed, express themselves no other way.  Their lives appear as one big query.

But you can fix it.

And recognizing that you have this awful habit is halfway to correcting it.

For many young speakers, uptalk is the only roadblock standing between them and a major step up in presentation power and personal competitive advantage.  Evaluate your own speech to identify uptalk.

Then come to grips with it for an especially powerful presentation.

For more on correcting the uptalk pathology and building a credible business presentation, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.

Bad Habits, General, Gesture

Stop Busy Fingers Sabotage!

Don't engage in busy fingers
Stop those Busy Fingers!

In the absence of clear instruction, we can develop a bad presentation habit, and one of these is Busy Fingers.

Proper gesture in your presentation means controlling those aimless actions your body takes on its own . . . because of habit or nerves.

As with every craft, there is a correct way to gesture . . . and a wrong way.

For instance, without a clear notion of how gesture can enhance our business presentations, we’re left with aimless ejaculations that distract and leech away the power of our message and the audience’s confidence in our competence.

Accordingly, here are a few of the more common examples of bad gesturing involving just your fingers.

These are so common that I cannot but believe that someone, somewhere is training folks in these oddities, and it’s the equivalent of self-sabotage.

Control Those Busy Fingers!

Under no circumstances engage in “finger play.”

Or this nervous habit can destroy your professional presence, can weaken your confidence, can take you down a dark road of  mediocrity.

This bad presentation habit many people develop unconsciously as they try to discover what to do with their hands.  And so their fingers get busy on their own – Busy Fingers.

You know you should do something with your appendages, but no one has told you what.  So you develop these unconscious bad presentation habits.

Many different activities come under the heading of “finger play.”

Tugging at your fingers.  I suspect that we all carry a “finger-tugging” gene embedded deep in our DNA that is suppressed only with difficulty.

Bending your fingers back in odd manner.  This is a ubiquitous movement, universally practiced.  It consists of grasping the fingers and bending them back, as if counting something, and then holding them there for a spell.  It’s almost a finger-tug, but more pronounced.

Waving your hands around with floppy wrist movement.  This is not only distracting, but the wobbly wrist action creates a perception of weakness and uncertainty.

Simply by eliminating these commonplace pathologies from your own presenting, you strengthen by subtraction.

Especially Powerful Gesture

Why would you want to “gesture?”  Aren’t your words enough?

We gesture to add force to our points.  To demonstrate honesty, decisiveness, humility, boldness, even fear.  A motion toward the door, a shrug, a lifted eyebrow – what words can equal these gestures?

While its range is limited, gesture can carry powerful meaning.  It should carry powerful meaning; this form of nonverbal language predates spoken language.

Said James Winans in 1915:

Gesture, within its limitations, is an unmistakable language, and is understood by men of all races and tongues.  Gesture is our most instinctive language; at least it goes back to the beginning of all communication when the race, still lacking articulate speech, could express only through the tones of inarticulate sounds and through movements.

Imagine the powerful communication you attain when, at the proper moment, your voice, your gestures, your movement, and your expressions combine.

Harmonize.

You attain a powerful communication moment when your voice, your gestures, your movement, and your expressions combine and align with the message and your visual aids to wash over your audience, suffusing them with emotion and energy.

Be spare with your gestures and be direct, and they gain power.

Make them count for an especially powerful business presentation.

You’ll find more on correcting the bad presentation habit of busy fingers in The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.