Do you invest your topic with energy and elan, regardless of whether it’s shampoo or sugar or ship-building?
What is it that fills you with the thrill of discovery, the adrenaline of newness?
What can compare with the natural high of applying yourself to a task that excites you?
What generates those endorphins? What brings a smile to your face involuntarily? What furrows your brow?
Is it “world hunger?” Or European soccer?
Is it social injustice? Is it political theory? Is it comic book collecting? Chess? Numismatics? Tennis? Travel to exotic locations? Helping others solve problems?
Writing essays? Fashion design? Financial manipulations? Reading and then reflecting on a good book?
What’s your passion? Do you even have one?
Is your Presentation Passion buried?
Likely as not, your passion has been buried under a ton of necessity, the debris we call the business of life.
f you find that your passion is buried, then this is the time to rescue it as one of the most potent factors in delivering your most powerful presentations.
Once you explore your own visceral feelings, your passion, it becomes that much easier to invoke presentation passion in your show.
To exhibit genuine enthusiasm for the subjects of your shows.
Can you generate presentation passion? Of course you can. Will it be “artificial” passion? Of course not. Passion is passion is passion.
Especially Powerful Presentations all exhibit Presentation Passion
Unless you have passion for a subject and demonstrate that passion, you will always be at a disadvantage with respect to those who do.
If you are in competition with several other teams pitching a product or service to a company for millions of dollars – and there is no noteworthy difference in the quality or price of the service – then how does the potential customer decide?
On passion.
If he sees a real passion for the work in one team, if he feels the energy of a team driven to success and truly excited about the offering, don’t you think he’ll be inclined to the team that stirs his emotions? The team that makes him see possibilities?
The team that helps him visualize a glorious future?
The team that shares his love and passion for his product or service and sees in you a shared passion for achieving something special in partnership?
Reread the previous paragraph, because it encapsulates so much of the presentation passion that is absent in presentations today, and so much of what is needed.
Centuries of Presentation Passion
Passion has served as a crucial element in verbal communication for centuries. Here are two of my favorite quotations on its power:
“True emotional freedom is the only door by which you may enter the hearts of your hearers.”
Brees and Kelley, 1931
“Earnestness is the secret of success in any department of life. It is only the earnest man who wins his cause.”
S.S. Curry, 1895
Recognize in yourself the capacity for passion. Recognize that you have the wherewithal to embrace even the most staid material, the “dullest” project.
Remember always that it is you who make it better. You who invest it with excitement.
You are the alchemist.
Many times you hear an “interesting” presentation about an “interesting” topic. It’s well-done, and it engaged you.
And you wonder why you never seem to get the “interesting” projects.
It’s your job to make it interesting
Have you ever admitted to yourself that you might be the missing ingredient? That perhaps it is your task to invest a project with interest and zest?
That what makes a project “interesting” is not the topic . . . but rather the interaction between material and presenter.
Ultimately, it is your task to transform a “case” or business situation into an interesting and cogent presentation. It’s your task to find the key elements of strategic significance and then to dramatize those elements in such a way that the audience is moved in powerful and significant ways.
And you don’t need an “interesting” case to do it.
You just need presentation passion. More on how to develop especially powerful presentation passion here.
Class had ended, and I was giving final feedback for a group that had just presented their business case and did so without presentation drama.
Not a bad group presentation by any means, but individual students needed work, and I like to give advice that young folks can carry with them beyond the classroom and on into the workaday world.
Not just advice, mind you, but nuggets that can confer personal competitive advantage for a lifetime.
As I briefed the presenters, a colleague entered the classroom and stood by, listening in. He’s a smart man. I respect him for his knowledge of finance.
A curious fellow, too.
Presentation Drama?
He took in my feedback as I advised students to eliminate a verbal gaffe called the “rising line” or the “verbal up-tic,” as I call it. I was demonstrating this awful turn of voice.
The Verbal Up-tic or “uptalk” as it is sometimes called, is a verbal pathology that afflicts at least 50 percent of young presenters and is manifested by transforming simple statements of fact into questions. The Brits call this the “Moronic Interrogative,” and you can probably guess that it is not a compliment.
By eliminating this awful verbal tic, you take a giant step toward presenting excellence.
My students packed up and left, and my colleague stepped up beside me.
Add Presentation Drama for More Power
“Well! All this drama! It looks and sounds like drama class.”
By now, I’m accustomed to the raised eyebrow of colleagues who look askance at some of the techniques I advocate. It goes with the territory. There is, after all, a kind of lock-step sameness in the faculty view of business presentations.
Deviations from the barebones structure are not appreciated nor are they recognized for the value they can add.
“You could well say that, Roger . . . there’s a big helping of drama here. It’s much like putting on a show. It’s why I call my presentations ‘shows’ and my students my ‘show-people.’”
Because this, in essence, is what visual and verbal communication is all about and how it differs drastically from written work.
“Showing”
It’s no accident that I use the word “show.” This is what we do when we give a presentation . . . when we present. We don’t deliver a presentation; we present.
The presentation is not something behind you on a screen. The presentation is not on a whiteboard or butcher paper. It’s not on a flip chart.
The presentation is you.
A large part of you is how you express yourself – your presence, your expression. We are at our best when we incorporate presentation drama into our projects, and this is the catalyst that provides the grist for our expression and enthusiasm.
By drama, I do not mean the phony excitement and angst of “relationships” gone wrong, the depression of being brought low by a downer “text,” the anxiety of the “drama queen” or the pomposity of “King Drama.”
I mean the “dramatic situation.”
Life. Variety. Intensity. Color.
You have drama inherent in any situation where there is conflict or the potential for conflict.
We in business, engaged as we are in competing to provide goods and services to our customers, are blessed with dramatic situations.
Business cases are chock full of drama – conflict, suspense, turning points, great decisions. You simply must learn to recognize them and to bring them out. It does not mean exaggerated behavior during your presentation, as noted by one of my favorite Speaking Masters of all time, Grenville Kleiser:
This is not a recommendation of paroxysms of feeling, wild gesticulation, tearing and combing of the hair with the fingers, violent pacing up and down the platform, and other manifestations of old-style oratory, happily now obsolete, but rather to suggest a power which, when properly used, will give life, variety, intensity, and color to the spoken message.
Life. Variety. Intensity. Color. These are what you strive for.
This theatrical aspect of presenting can, in theory, surely be overdone. But given the staid status of business presenting, the danger of this in business presentations is nil.
I never see overdone business presentations, but I’d surely welcome one.
You can harness dramatic techniques to your business presenting style, and a number of books delve into this. One of the finest books available on the subject is Ken Howard’s Act Natural, and I strongly urge its purchase if you are serious about taking your presenting power to a whole new level by incorporating presentation drama.
The speaking secret of expression is an advantage that should be yours and not just restricted as a privilege for those toiling in the theater or in film.
Remember that you have incredible power at your disposal in the form of expression that makes use of drama.
A curl of the lip.
A raise of one eyebrow.
Sincere furrows in the forehead.
A smile.
Speaking Master Joseph Mosher gave us one key secret to expression in 1928, and we would be wise to recognize his observation of the importance of the mouth and eyes.
[T]here is no one element of gesture which furnishes as unmistakable and effective an indication of the speaker’s thought and feeling as does the expression of the mouth and eyes. The firm-set mouth and flashing eye speak more clearly than a torrent of words; the smile is as good as, or better than, a sentence in indicating good humor; the sneering lip, the upraised brow, or the scowl need no verbal commentary.
The secret power of presentation drama is yours for the taking. You need only seize it to develop an especially powerful presentation.
It’s nothing more than an add-on, right? Something perhaps nice to have, but unessential to the point of our presentation.
Incorporate Especially Powerful Presentation Gesture for Competitive Advantage
The fact is that you cannot separate sincerity from your appearance. You can’t disaggregate movement from your inflection. From your volume.
From your nuance.
And you cannot separate your words from gesture.
So let’s add the power of gesture to our words to achieve superior messaging.
What’s a Presentation Gesture?
A wave of the hand.
A snap of the finger.
A stride across the stage with arms outstretched to either side.
A scratch of the chin.
Crossed arms.
An accusatory finger.
A balled fist at the proper moment.
These are all gestures that can either enhance or destroy your presentation. Destroy your presentation.
Professional presentation coaches understand that most of the information transmitted in a show is visual. This is a result of the presence of the speaker.
What Kind of Presentation Gesture?
An audio recording of a talk is not nearly as powerful as an actual live presentation. Executive coach Lynda Paulson is spot-on when she notes the power of gestures to persuade an audience . . . or to alienate an audience, because “at least 85 percent of what we communicate in speaking is non-verbal. It’s what people see in our eyes, in our movements and in our actions.”
Whether the percentage is accurate or not, undoubtedly, gestures provide energy, and accent.
They add power, emphasis, and meaning to our words.
Throughout the history of public speaking, the finest communicators have known the importance of the proper gesture at the proper time.
Especially Powerful Presentation Mastery
Entire books, in fact, have been written about gesture and the power it can bestow. But most of this knowledge resides in the recesses of libraries waiting to be rediscovered. See, for example, Edward Amherst Ott’s classic 1902 book How to Gesture.
Gesture is too important to leave to chance. Certainly too important to dismiss with the airy “move around when you talk.” Let’s understand exactly what it means.
In 1928, Joseph Mosher defined gesture in a way that guides us even today: “Gesture may be broadly defined as visible expression, that is, any posture or movement of the head, face, body, limbs or hands, which aids the speaker in conveying his message by appealing to the eye.”
Gesture in your presentation should be natural. It flows from the meaning of your words and the meaning you wish to convey with your words.
We never gesture without reason or a point to make. Typically, the emotion and energy in a talk leads us to gesture.
Without emotion, gesture is mechanical. It’s false. It feels and looks artificial.
Communicating Without Words
Presentation Gesture is part of our repertoire of non-verbal communication. You have many arrows in the quiver of gesture from which to choose. They can imbue your presentation with power.
On rare occasion, can imbue your presentation with majesty of epic proportions.
Yes, “majesty of epic proportions.”
The Power of Presentation Gesture is always underestimated
For if you do not begin to think in grand, expansive terms about yourself and your career, you will remain mired in the mud. Stuck at the bottom.
Proper gesture increases your talk’s power and lends emphasis to your words.
In fact, gesture is essential to take your presentation to a superior level, a level far above the mundane. You limit yourself if you do not gesture effectively as you present.
As with every craft, there is a correct way to gesture . . . and a wrong way. Without a clear notion of how gesture can enhance our presentations, we are left with aimless ejaculations that can distract and leech away the power of our message and the audience’s confidence in our competence.
Accordingly, here are several 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 Fingers!
Under no circumstances engage in “finger play.”
This is a habit many people develop unconsciously as they try to discover what to do with their hands. You know you should do something with your appendages, but no one has told you what. So you develop these unconscious motions.
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.
The Power of Presentation Gesture
Why would you want to “gesture?” Aren’t your words enough?
To add force to your 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 carries 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.
You attain a powerful communication moment when your voice, your gestures, your movement, and your expressions 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. Make them count.
Look for more detailed analysis on the gestures available to you in this space in coming days.
Your presentation voice is one key to an especially powerful business presentation . . . or a disastrous one.
Your voice and your appearance are the constants that pervade your presentation from start to finish.
Voice is one of the seven dimensions along which we measure the Power Presenter, and a strong, clear, confident voice is one of the seven secrets of powerful presenting.
Paradoxically, we take our voices for granted.
Because we do, this nonchalant attitude can undermine us and destroy all of our hard work.
But you can become quite a good speaker, a presenter whose voice exudes confidence and is welcomed by the ear. Speaking Master Grenville Kleiser tells us that:
“If nature has not endowed you with a good speaking voice, you can do much toward acquiring one. The organs of speech can be trained, like any other part of the body, by assiduous attention and practice.”[1]
You can do many things to improve your presentation voice – your articulation, your power and range, your force and tone.
If you decide that you want to move to an advanced level of presentations and are drawn to improve your voice’s quality through study and practice, many books and videos and recordings are published each year to help you along.
Much of the best writing on voice improvement was produced in the years when public speaking was considered an art – between 1840 and 1940 – and the advice contained therein are about as universal and timeless as it gets.
The reality is that the human voice is the same now as it was 100 years ago (2,000 years ago) and responds to the proven techniques developed over centuries.
Ready to Change your Presentation Voice
It’s time to recognize that your voice is not a sacred artifact, nor is it some precious extension of your very being.
It’s an instrument with which you communicate. You can sharpen your communication skills by developing a powerful presentation voice. And because most people are oblivious of their own voices, simply thinking of your voice in this way will improve its quality.
Working to improve it with the exercise will improve its quality dramatically.
Let’s consider here just two things you can do to improve your voice. Nothing extreme at all. And actually quite fun, if you approach it the right way.
But . . . I love my presentation voice
We have two goals.
First, we want to rid your voice of the chronic crack and rasp. It’s called vocal fry when it’s done intentionally to imitate reality TV personalities. That crack and rasp is a symptom of meekness – no confidence. Do you have this crack and rasp? If not, congratulations and let’s move along. But if you do . . .
“In addition to relaxing the throat muscles, the speaker should make a special effort to vocalize every particle of breath passing over the vocal cords. There should be no wheezy leakage of air.”[2]
Push air across your vocal chords and complete your sentences. Don’t trail off at the end of every sentence with a croaking sound like folks on Disney Channel.
Second, we want to deepen your voice. Why? Like it or not, deeper voices are perceived as more credible.[3] A Stanford University study, one among many, gives the nod to deeper voices:
Our studies show that directions from a female voice are perceived as less accurate than those from a male voice, even when the voices are reading the exact same directions. Deepness helps, too. It implies size, height and authority. Deeper voices are more credible.[4]
Now, should things be this way? Is it “fair” that deeper voices have some kind of advantage?
Deeper Presentation Voice? That’s not fair!
It’s no less fair than that some people are taller than others or larger or faster or rate perfect scores on the SAT. It’s neither fair, nor unfair. It’s simply the reality we’re dealt. If you want to devote your life to fighting for “voice equality,” you have my support. Have at it, and Godspeed.
If, on the other hand, you want to deepen your voice a bit so that you gain personal competitive advantage, then let us analyze what the deep-voice reality means to us.
It means that a deeper presentation voice is more desirable for presenting, regardless of who presents, male or female. Now, the very fact that you are armed with that information empowers you.
When you decide to act on it, it adds to your personal competitive advantage.
Many simple and effective exercises exist to deepen and enrich your voice.
A simple awareness of your own voice-cracking should be enough to remedy that issue. Record your voice, and listen critically. A personal coach can help, or even a trusted confidante as concerned with voice as much as you. Listen to each other, coach each other, and work together to achieve an improved voice.
No, your voice is not a sacrosanct. Voice is the second secret – the second dimension along which speakers are assessed.
Work to improve your presentation voice and you’re on your way to an especially powerful presentation style.
[1] Grenville Kleiser, “How to Speak Well,” in Radio Broadcasting (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1935) , 42-43.
[2] George Rowland Collins, Platform Speaking (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1923), 33.
[3] Suter, J. K. (2003). Der Eindruck vom Ausdruck–Einfluss paraverbaler Kommunikation auf die Wahrnehmung von Nachrichtensprechenden [The impression of expression – the influence of paraverbal communication on the perception of newsreaders]. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of Bern, Switzerland.
[4] Anne Eisenberg, “Mars and Venus, On the Net : Gender Stereotypes Prevail,” (The New York Times, 2000), http://www-personal.umich.edu/~rfrost/courses/SI110/readings/Cyberculture/Eisenberg.pdf
Your ready position is the default stance you assume when giving your talk, when not emphasizing a point with movement and gesture.
Think a moment about how you stand while you give your talk.
I refer to the time when you’re not moving about the stage to emphasize this or that point.
This especially powerful ready position is your anchor, your life preserver in a storm. Your safe harbor.
Powerful . . . Confident . . . In command
When you stride to the stage, move to the command position in front of the lectern and facing the crowd.
Now, plant yourself as you would a paving stone in a garden. Plant yourself firmly, as a stone, with feet shoulder-width apart, weight evenly distributed, shoulders squared. Plant yourself as a deeply rooted Redwood.
Do not slouch or put more weight on one foot than on the other. Point your toes slightly outward. Neither slump, nor stiffen. Shoulders back, head up, expectant.
Do not allow your head to settle down betwixt your collar bones. This compresses your neck like a collapsed concertina. It cramps your voice box and cuts the flow of air that you need to speak.
At this point, let your hands hang loosely at your sides . . . (in a moment, we’ll give you something to do with your hands).
Walking and pointing and looking and eye-contact? Forget it for now.
Forget it all for now.
First, you must seize control of yourself and adopt your strong, basic stance and make it your habit.
You must control all of those little tics and habits and nervous gestures that leech the strength from your presentation. The tics and habits that telegraph your nervousness and lack of confidence.
What tics and habits, you say? Every young presenter has at least some of them and the ready position can help remedy the following pathologies.
Do Not cross your leg in front of you while you balance on the other. This “standing cross” is more prevalent, for some reason, among female presenters than among males. Some males have this habit as well. This is a particularly debilitating movement from both the standpoint of the audience and for you. It projects instability. And it makes you feel unstable.
Do Not cock your hip to one side – this is called a “hip-shot.” Again, this action undermines your foundation. This hip-shot posture degrades your presentation in multiple ways. It shouts nonchalance. It denotes disinterest and impatience. It cries out to the audience a breezy bar demeanor that is completely at odds with the spoken message you want to convey.
Do Not engage in little choppy steps. This side-to-side dance is common. It telegraphs nervousness.
Do Not slump your shoulders. Few things project lack of confidence like rounded shoulders. Slumping shoulders can be a reflexive response to nervousness that leads to a “closed body position.”
Again. Stand in one place, your feet comfortably shoulder-width apart, toes slightly pointed outward. Arms at your sides.
Your Foundation – Your Ready Position
Your goal at this point is to maintain a solid physical foundation. To project an image of confidence to the audience and to imbue yourself with confidence in point of fact. You begin to do this with your stance – solid and confident.
Now here is the most important guidance for your Foundation “Ready” position.
Stand as described, and place your left hand in your pants pocket, out of the way. This position should be your default position. Putting the hand in your pocket gets it out of the way and keeps you out of trouble. Moreover, it projects confidence.
If you have no pocket, ease your left hand a bit behind you and to the side. No, not in a military posture, but enough to disengage it. If you are left-handed, of course disengage your right hand.
And, no, it is not “unprofessional.” This position carries a multitude of positives and no negatives. You never go wrong with this position.
It imbues you with confidence and keeps you copacetic. To your audience, it projects competence, confidence, reassurance, and sobriety: “Here is someone who knows his/her stuff.”
This is your Ready Position.
Your Ready Position Communicates Power
Everything else you do flows from this position. Practice your two-minute talk from this position and do not move.
Stop!
Stop and think. When you are ready to make a point that is crucial to your thesis . . . When you are ready to shift subjects or major ideas . . . then—
Then, step to the left while addressing the people on the left flank. Talk to them. Then, step to the right and address those on your right. Hold open your hands, palms up. Walk toward your audience a step or two. Look them in the eyes. Speak to individuals.
Then, step back to the center and retake your ready position.
Let your movements emphasize your points. When you gesture to a portion of the audience, step toward them in a kind of supplication.
And always always, always go back to the ready postion. I have seen dozens of young speakers transformed into capable, confident speakers by virtue of this alone.
How is that possible? By removing the doubt associated with “How will I stand.”
This powerful and stable ready position imbues you with confidence, your first step toward building positive energy within yourself.
The Ready Position — it’s your safe harbor in a sea of presentation uncertainty.
An Especially Powerful Stance is One Key to Delivering a Great Presentation
You want to project strength, competence, and confidence throughout your presentation, and an especially powerful technique is to utilize “power posing” as the basis of your stance.
Stance is the first of our Seven Secrets to especially powerful presenting and is fundamental to projecting your strong image.
Let me preface with assurance that I do not expect you to stay rooted in one spot throughout your talk. But at the risk of sounding clichéd, let us state forthrightly that it is impossible to build any lasting structure on a soft foundation.
Your Foundation – Power Posing
This foundation grows out of the notion of what we can call “power posing.”
Let’s build your foundation now and learn a little bit about the principle of power posing, which has been researched and popularized by Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy.
How do you stand when you converse in a group at a party or a reception? What is your “bearing?” How do you stand before a crowd when you speak?
Have you ever consciously thought about it?
What is my pose? Sheepish? Mincing? Unsure? Domineering? Awkward?
How you stand, how you carry yourself, communicates to others. It transmits a great deal about us with respect to our inner thoughts, self-image, and self-awareness.
Whether we like this is not the point. The point is that we are constantly signaling others non-verbally.
You send messages to those around you. Folks around us take their cues based on universal perception of the messages received.
Power Posing at its Finest
What is true in small groups is also true as you lecture or present in front of groups of four or 400.
Whether you actually speak or not, your body language is always transmitting. If so, just what is the message you unconsciously send to people?
Have you thought about the silent and constant messages your posture radiates?
Recognize that much of the audience impression of you is forming as you approach the lectern. Your listeners form this impression immediately, before you shuffle your papers or clear your throat or squint into the bright lights.
They form their impression from your walk, from your posture, from your clothing, from your grooming, from the slightest inflections of your face, and from your eye movement.
This has always been true. Speaking Master Grenville Kleiser said in 1912 that, “The body, the hand, the face, the eye, the mouth, all should respond to the speaker’s inner thought and feeling.”
Defeat? Ennui? Melt-down?
Do you stand with shoulders rounded in a defeatist posture?
Do you transmit defeat, boredom, ennui? Do you shift from side-to-side or do you unconsciously sway back-and-forth?
Do you cross and uncross your legs without knowing, balancing precariously upon one foot, your free leg wrapped in front of the other, projecting an odd, wobbly, and about-to-tumble-down image?
Call this defeatist behavior non-power posing.
Your posture affects those who watch you and it affects you as well. Those effects can be positive or negative.
Posture, of course, is part of nonverbal communication, and it serves this role well. The audience takes silent cues from you, and your posture is one of those subtle cues that affect an audience’s mood and receptivity.
But posture and bearing are not simply superficial nonverbal communication to your audience.
Another effect is in play, and it can be insidious and can undermine your goals . . . or it can be an incredibly powerful ally to your mission.
Plant yourself like a paving stone
It is this: Your body language transmits your depression, guilty, fear, lack of confidence to the audience.
It also enhances and reinforces those feelings within you. Most often, if we fear the act of public speaking, the internal flow of energy from our emotional state to our physical state is negative.
Negative energy courses freely into our limbs and infuses us with stiffness, dread, immobility and a destructive self-consciousness.
We shift involuntarily into damage-limitation mode.
It cripples us.
Your emotions affect your body language. They influence the way you stand, the way you appear to your audience. They influence what you say and how you say it.
Reverse the Process
But . . .
You can reverse the process.
You can use your gestures, movement, posture, and expression to influence your emotions.
You can turn it around quite handily and seize control of the dynamic, and this is the secret at the core of power posing.
Instead of your body language and posture reflecting your emotions, reverse the flow. Let your emotions reflect your body language and your posture. Consciously strike a bearing that reflects the confident and powerful speaker you want to be.
Skeptical?
A venerable psychological theory contends this very thing, that our emotions evolve from our physiology. It’s called James-Lange Theory, developed by William James and the Danish physiologist Carl G. Lange. Speaking Master James Albert Winans noted the phenomenon in 1915:
Count ten before venting your anger, and its occasion seems ridiculous. Whistling to keep up courage is no mere figure of speech. On the other hand, sit all day in a moping posture, sigh, and reply to everything with a dismal voice, and your melancholy lingers. . . . [I]f we wish to conquer undesirable emotional tendencies in ourselves, we must assiduously, and in the first instance cold-bloodedly, go through the outward movements of those contrary dispositions which we prefer to cultivate.
Much more recently, a Amy Cuddy’s Harvard study substantiated James-Lange Theory and found that power posing substantially increases confidence in people who assume them while interacting with others.
In short, the way you stand or sit either increases or decreases your confidence. The study’s conclusion is unambiguous and speaks directly to us. Harvard researchers Dana R. Carney, Amy J.C. Cuddy and Andy J. Yap say in the September 2010 issue of Psychological Science that:
[P]osing in high-power displays (as opposed to low-power displays) causes physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes consistent with the literature on the effects of power on power holders — elevation of the dominance hormone testosterone, reduction of the stress hormone cortisol, and increases in behaviorally demonstrated risk tolerance and feelings of power.
In other words, stand powerfully and you increase your power and presence. You actually feel more powerful. This finding holds tremendous significance for you if you want to imbue your presentations with power.
In our 21st Century vernacular, this means you should stand the way you want to feel. Assume the posture of confidence. Consciously affect a positive, confident bearing. Square your shoulders.
Affix a determined look on your face. Speak loudly, firmly, and distinctly. In short, let your actions influence your emotions.
Seize control of the emotional energy flow and make it work for you.
So what is a confident posture?
Let’s begin with a firm foundation.
Foundation
For any structure to endure, we must build on strength. And I mean this both in the metaphorical and in the literal sense with regard to business presentations.
You must not only project strength and stability, you must feel strength and stability. The two are inseparable, and a moment’s thought reveals to you why.
Power Posing Projects Confidence
Consider the confident speaker.
To appear unstable and fearful before an audience, a confident speaker must take a conscious effort to strike such a weak pose. Likewise, it would take a conscious effort for a person, who has planted himself firmly in the prescribed confident posture, to feel nervous, uncertain, or unsure of himself.
The key is to adopt the confident pose and maintain it relentlessly against all of the body’s involuntary urges to crumple and shift, to equivocate and sway.
The point and the goal is to establish a foundation that exudes strength, competence, and confidence.
Essential to this goal is that you know the difference between open body language and closed body language. It is the difference between power posing and powerless posing.
This strong personal foundation is your ready position, your standard posture for your presentation. It serves as the foundation for everything else to follow.
Today we launch the seven secrets of especially powerful presenting. These 7 Secrets promise to launch you to personal competitive advantage in an ever more challenging job market.
Especially powerful presentation techniques are coming to you over the next two weeks, one every-other-day, right here in your Especially Powerful Presentations Blog.
Have these secrets heretofore been hidden from you?
They certainly don’t appear in your business communication textbooks. Face it . . . has anything good ever come out of a business communication textbook?
So where do these secrets come from?
They reside in the collective wisdom of more than 2,500 years of history. This is the link that you share with every great speaker that history has seen fit to remember – you share their humanity. And this is why their secrets speak to us across the mists of time.
Cicero in 50 BC?
You in 2015 AD?
More than two millennia separate you from the Roman Republic’s greatest orator, so what could you possibly have in common with a man half-a-world away and 2,000 years ago?
Here’s the link
History is Filled with Especially Powerful Presentations
Perhaps Cicero spoke to the Roman Senate during the last days of the Roman Republic, while you now speak to your Business Capstone class with PowerPoint on the screen behind you . . . but you both share a core necessity.
You share the necessity to convince your audience by using a handful of reliable tools that have not changed in two thousand years.
For our purposes, the greatest orators in history are still alive with respect to their techniques, their tools, their words, and their abilities to sway audiences.
Demosthenes
Cicero
Quintilian
Patrick Henry
Frederick Douglass
William Jennings Bryan
Daniel Webster
Abraham Lincoln
What could these long-gone people possibly say to you to help you become a superior presenter here in the 21st Century?
All of these orators and many more utilized the highly refined and powerful secrets of elocution, declamation, debate, and oratory to command the stage and to sway audiences. They were the superior presenters of their day.
Their techniques and tools comprise the 7 Secrets of Especially Powerful Presentations.
Tools of the Best
The best speakers of the past 50 years use and have used these Secrets – Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King.
They don’t announce that they’re using secret techniques and tricks of the trade, of course. They wouldn’t be secrets any longer.
So they let you believe that they were gifted with special talents.
Not a chance. Techniques, practice, personal branding . . . and 7 Secrets.
An Especially Powerful Presentation is not the exclusive province of the famous
You begin to learn these Seven Secrets over the next 14 days.
They are the secrets utilized by every great orator until the age of television, radio, and the computer rendered them lost to the vast majority of us.
They faded from use, supplanted by technology in the mistaken belief that technology had rendered you, the presenter, superfluous.
And so presenting as a skill has withered. Until now.
These secrets do not appear in today’s textbooks, and they appear only in partial form in many trade books. Many students don’t even know about them. They believe that great presenting is alchemy, magic, or a product of superior talent.
Many don’t reach the point at which you read these words right now. Many who read these words this second sneer at them with a world-weary sigh.
But a tiny minority reads on.
A tiny minority will join me tomorrow, and the next two weeks . . .
And that select few will begin to acquire the power, dexterity, energy, and charisma to grow into a bold presenter – at home on the stage, at ease with yourself, and facile with the material. You will become a fabulous business presenter.
With each post, the door opens on a new Secret, and you are presented with a challenge.
Master these Seven Secrets, which form the Seven Pillars of your personal speaking platform, and you will soar higher in the business world than you possibly could have imagined. And your career will soar farther and faster than you ever thought possible.
I hope that you are in that tiny minority that continues to read.
Let’s meet here in a couple of days for Secret #1.
Build an especially powerful Business Presentation with this simple structure: Beginning . . . Middle . . . End.
Every presentation – every superb story – has this framework.
Let me rephrase.
Your presentation ought to have this framework, or you’re already in deep trouble.
You should build a business presentation, whether individual or group, according to this structure.
Beginning . . . Middle . . . End
If you’re engaged in a group presentation, each segment of the show has this structure as well. Your segment has this structure.
In fact, every member of a team has this same task – to deliver a portion of the presentation with a beginning, middle, and an end.
In other words, when you are the member of a 5-person team and you are presenting for, say, four minutes, during that four-minute span, you tell your story that has a beginning, middle, and an end.
In the diagram below, each of the boxes represents a speaker on a five-person team delivering a group presentation. The first speaker delivers the beginning. The second, third, and fourth speakers deliver the middle. The final speaker delivers the conclusion or the “end.”
Note that each speaker uses the same beginning-middle-end format in delivering his portion of the show.
Build a Business Presentation that Convinces
This framework is not the only way you can build your business presentation.
You can be innovative. You can be daring, fresh, and new.
You can also fail miserably if you plunge into uncharted “innovative” territory just for a false sense of “variety” or “fresh ideas” or self-indulgence.
Sparkle and pop spring from the specifics of your message and from your keen, talented, and well-practiced delivery.
Sparkle and pop do not spring from experimental structures and strange methods that swim against the tide of 2,500 years of experience that validate what works . . . and what fails.
Build a Business Presentation to Withstand the Fire
Beginning-middle-end is the most reliable and proven form, tested in the fires of history and victorious against all comers.
It’s an especially powerful structure, and I suggest you use it to build your presentation in the initial stages.
You may find that as you progress in your group discussions, you want to build a business presentation structure to better suit your material.
Please do so. But do so with careful thought and good reason.
And always with the audience in mind and the task of communicating your main points concisely, cogently . . . and with über focus.
One way to think of your part of the presentation is material sandwiched between two bookends. You should Bookend your show.
This means to make your major point at the beginning and then to repeat that major point at the end.
Hence, the term “Bookends.” And in-between, you explain what your bookends are about.
Build a business presentation within this structure and you’re on your way to a winning presentation.
Is there some law, somewhere, that dictates that business presentationsmust constitute a painful business ritual?
Boring.
Barren.
Bereft of Excellence.
Given the number of long, dull, pedantic, repetitious, confusing – bad – presentations I see both inside and outside of the business school, I suspect there must be.
This dullness seeps into the consciousness. It numbs us, and begins to legitimize itself. It’s like a business ritual . . . a ritual of pain.
Corporate America seems addicted to this ritual.
And yet a conspiracy of silence surrounds bad business presentations and those who give them.
The Ritual of Pain is Ubiquitous
Bad Business Presentations are everywhere . . . and because they are everywhere, we think that bad business presentations must be legitimate.
They must be the norm. They must be bad, because that’s just the way it is.
And this bad presentation business ritual perpetuates itself, like some kind of awful oral tradition . . . like a ritual.
You see a bad business presentation that some people praise as good. It looks like this . . .
Some Vice President from a visiting company stands in front of you hiding behind a lectern. He reads from slides with dozens of bullet points taken from a written paper and pasted onto PowerPoint slides. He alternates looking at a computer screen and turning to look at a projection screen behind him. He rarely looks at you.
A Wasteland On the Screen
Unreadable spreadsheets appear.
Legions of tiny numbers march in cadence on the screen.
The presenter reads slide-after-slide verbatim, his head turned away from you.
The slides themselves are unintelligible.
It’s a bad presentation, and you can’t remember a damn thing except the three texts you received during the presentation as you checked your iPhone between yawns.
Given this familiar exercise in bad presenting, you could legitimately ask yourself, “Is this all there is?”
If bad business presentations are the norm – if this is the business ritual – you scratch your chin and perhaps you think “That’s not hard at all.”
I can be as bad as the next person.
Just Cobble Together a Bad Business Presentation
Cobble something like that together, and you think you have a business presentation. And why wouldn’t you think that?
It seems to have all the elements: A speaker-reader of slides (you), a PowerPoint display on the screen with writing on it, some numbers, and a 10-minute time slot to fill with talk.
Stop giving bad business presentations!
But what you actually have is something awful – just awful.
You don’t know what you want to accomplish . . . or why.
You have no idea what you should say . . . or why.
And you don’t view yourself as benefitting from the process in any way. Instead, you see it as something painful. Because it is painful.
The Business Ritual of Pain.
Let’s repeat, so there’s no misunderstanding . . . just awful.
This business ritual is painful and awful because of the way it’s been explained to you.
Because the explanations are incomplete. Because you never get the whole story.
Teaching you how to deliver a cogent, competent, powerful business presentation is always someone else’s job.
This can be a problem.
A problem because your career often hinges on how well you can present. And if you present badly, you needlessly handicap yourself.
I Feel Your Pain
Sure, there are “presentation”courses. But it seems that the good folks who actually provide you some sort of presenting instruction in school are often disconnected from your business courses.
They teach you “How to give a speech” or “How to introduce yourself.” But you don’t have the opportunity to engage in a complex group business presentation.
Oftentimes, these folks aren’t even in the business school. They can’t show you how to incorporate business content into your presentations – tools like the SWOT, value chain analysis, financial analysis, PEST, Competitive Intelligence, and such like.
And on occasion, professors in your business can seem indifferent to this business ritual.
For most of your professors, presenting is secondary. This makes sense, as each faculty has a specialty or functional discipline he or she is charged with teaching. Business “Presenting” is no one’s functional discipline, and so it goes un-addressed, orphaned to expediency and neglect.
It is the same in the corporate world. Your presenting woes are the same woes that scourge the American business landscape.
Boring, dull, numbing . . . all of this is equated wrongly with “serious.” We get the bad business presentation as the standard.
The Business Ritual in Corporate America
I attended a business conference on the west coast not long ago to watch the Business Ritual in all its ignominy.
Monotone voices.
Busy slides with tiny letters.
Listeners shifting in their seats.
Motionless speakers planted behind a lectern.
Aimless and endless talking with seemingly no point.
It seemed that no preparation and no practice had preceded these presentations.
Papers shuffling in the audience, because handouts were given prior to the talk.
This is more common than you might imagine. Communications consultant Andy Goodman conducted major research on the issue in 2005, surveying more than 2,500 public interest professionals and asking them to evaluate their presentation viewing experiences.
He then codified responses to this business ritual.
The average grade public interest professionals gave to the presentations they attended was C-. The average grade given to the visuals that respondents observed in presentations they attended was also C-.
When asked to recall presentations they had seen over the last few months, survey respondents said they were more than likely to see a bad business presentation as to see an excellent one.
This is the current state of presentations in corporate America and in business schools. Is it uniformly bleak? No, of course not.
Glimmers of Hope . . . Gigantic Opportunity
Generalizations are just that – general in nature. I have seen a sufficient number of fine presentations to understand that, somewhere, superb instruction holds sway.
Or, at the very least, young people whose early development has trained them for the stage have found their way to the business platform. Good for them. But for the most part, it is as I have described here.
And this presents a magnificent opportunity.
Now that you understand the situation and why it exists, it’s time for you to join the ranks of especially powerful presenters. Becoming a superior presenter means gaining incredible personal competitive advantage that is difficult to imitate.
By investing your presentations with passion, emotion, and enthusiasm, you deliver especially powerful shows with persuasive power. Presentations that are anything but dull. So . . .
Self-defeating behaviors come in many forms, but negative self-talk is one of the chief culprits.
This is especially prevalent in our business presentations.
We sabotage our own presentations more often than we imagine.
We tell ourselves repeatedly that we’ll fail. We envision humiliation, embarrassment, and complete meltdown.
Negative self-talk begins with the most ubiquitous cliche in business school – “I hate presentations.” This is the chief culprit that leads to inevitably awful presentations.
It undermines everything we strive for in business school presenting.
How can we construct any positive presentation experience on such a spongy foundation?
Think Like a World-Class Athlete
Negative self-talk translates into bodily reactions of nervousness, trembling, faltering voice, shaking knees, sweating, and flushing. Moreover, our sour and weak attitude ensures that we aren’t the greatest source of strength to our teammates if we happen to be delivering a group presentation.
The negative spiral down guarantees that 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 visualization?
The world’s elite athletes train the mind as well as the body, and visualization of successful outcomes is one of the techniques they use to prepare for competition.
I work occasionally with sports psychologists and mental toughness coaches who train athletes in visualization techniques, and all of are one opinion that the mind-body connection – healthy or unhealthy – impacts performance tremendously.
Positive Self-Talk is an Especially Powerful Technique
Leaving aside the specific techniques for a later time and the psychological underpinnings of it that go back more than a century, let’s say here that we must at least rid ourselves of the negative self-talk.
We do this to give ourselves a fighting chance of succeeding at business presenting.
So why do we talk ourselves down into the morass of self-defeat?
Quite possibly, it’s the widespread ignorance of how to deliver a powerful presentation, and this ignorance means incredible uncertainty of performance.
Ignorance, uncertainty, and pressure to perform breed fear.
This fear of the unknown can drive up anxiety. So the key to reducing that anxiety is uncertainty reduction – thorough preparation and control of the variables within our power.
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 leave to our own adaptability and confidence to field the remaining unexpected 10 percent.
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, weaves a story that grips your audience, that keeps the audience rapt, and ends in superb closure, a major ovation and a satisfying feeling of a job well-done.
When we take the stage, we focus mind on our intent, and we charge forward boldly and confidently, executing our presentation with masterful aplomb.
With this kind of psychological commitment, we squeeze out the doubts and anxiety, wring them dry from our psychic fabric.
The right kind of preparation allows us to deal capably with the handful of unknowns that nettle us.
Positive self-talk is an essential part of your schema for preparing an especially powerful presentation and developing personal competitive advantage.
Not many of us readily accept suggestions on how to improve ourselves, particularly when it comes to highly personal aspects of our very being that impact our presentations.
For instance . . .
Your voice.
There’s nothing sacrosanct or “natural” about your speaking voice. Your voice is the product of many years of development from numerous influences, many of which you may be unaware of.
Develop an Especially Powerful Voice
Why not evaluate your voice today? See if it gets the presentation job done for you.
Does your voice crack? Does it whine? Do you perform a Kim Kardashian vocal fry at the end of every sentence? Does it tic up at the end of every sentence for no good reason?
Do you lard your conversation with nonsensical filler such as “whatever,” “umm,” “totally,” and “like” hundreds of times per day?
Why not change for the better?
It’s time to recognize that your voice is not a sacred artifact, nor is it some precious extension of your very being. It is an instrument with which you communicate.
You can sharpen your communication skills by improving your voice. Simply thinking of your voice in this way will improve its quality. Working to improve it will improve its quality dramatically and build your voice into an especially powerful skill for personal competitive advantage.
Let’s consider here several things you can do to improve your voice. Nothing extreme at all. Have a look . . .
Malcolm X was a powerful presenter, a passionate man of strong belief and charismatic bearing, and this Malcolm X presentation technique is a textbook on how to sway an audience
Like snapping a towel to skin, you want to sting your audience in a good way, and no better way to do it than with a Malcolm X presentation technique.
Make it sit up straight, snap their heads in your direction.
You can do this several ways, and it’s up to you what you choose, but it should fit your audience and the topic of your presentation.
One effective method is the use of a “grabber” line, which was a Malcolm X presentation technique.
This is a surprising and unconventional sentence or an unusual fact that immediately alerts the audience that its about to hear something special.
Not Another Canned Talk
One of the greatest public speakers of modern times was the late Malcolm X.
While his oeuvre rarely touched on aspects of business that we deal with in our presentation enterprise, his speeches serve as powerful examples of how to grab an audience and mesmerize it.
His techniques are so powerful that he deserves a category all his own, and you can captivate an audience with Malcolm X presentation techniques.
Whether you agree or disagree with him is irrelevant to the point that he was a powerful communicator who drew from a deep well of powerful presentation techniques. His charisma was unquestioned and it grew organically from the wellspring of passion that he invested in his cause and in every speech.
Malcolm X Presentation Technique was a powerful tool for persuasiveness.
Malcolm’s speeches are just that – speeches – and they are written for the ear and not the eye.
They are best read aloud so as to absorb the measured beats, to feel the repetition of key phrases, and to learn the effects of certain rhetorical flourishes.
When you read sentence after sentence, you sense the power and the deep moral outrage coming through, sometimes explicit but most often through a steady recapitulation of ideas using different phrases, but key words.
You gain a sense of the gathering storm, almost hear rolling thunder in the distance.
Today, I mine his speeches for their cadences, their imagery, their use of allegory, anaphora, and turns of phrase. With respect to grabbing an audience’s attention, too many presentations and speeches today begin with routine thank-yous and ingratiation of the audience.
They sputter with routine phrases, a gripping of the podium and a squinting at notes or giving jerky backward glances at an unreadable projection screen.
Use Malcolm X Presentation Technique
Remember that a speech is tremendously different from a written document. Pauses and repetition, tone and inflection are essential with the spoken word. Let’s look at the beginning of a typical Malcolm X speech and see how he grabs his audience. Read it with his spoken delivery in mind.
This speech – Message to the Grass Roots – was delivered in Detroit on November 10, 1963. Irrespective of the time and place and circumstance, which of course will leaven our approach, note that Malcolm begins his talk by immediately establishing intimacy with the audience.
We want to have just an off-the-cuff chat between you and me . . . us. We want to talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.
We all agree tonight, all of the speakers have agreed, that America has a very serious problem. Not only does America have a very serious problem, but our people have a very serious problem.
In the space of four sentences, Malcolm has drawn in his listeners and layed out a situation statement that, at that moment, captivated his audience.
He establishes a mood of confidentiality and rapport. He then states boldly – “America has a very serious problem . . . We have a very serious problem.”
Who wouldn’t want to hear what comes next?
No Chit-Chat in a Malcolm X Presentation
Notice that he did not engage in throat-clearing and chit-chat. No “Thank you Mr. Chairman” . . . no “So good to see so many committed activists tonight and familiar faces in the crowd.” Notice also the use of repetition of key phrases: “Very serious problem.”
Straight to the point, and a bold point it is. See what comes next . . .
America’s problem is us. We’re her problem. The only reason she has a problem is she doesn’t want us here.
And every time you look at yourself, be you black, brown, red or yellow, a so-called Negro, you represent a person who poses such a serious problem for America because you’re not wanted. Once you fact this as a fact, then you can start plotting a course that will make you appear intelligent, instead of unintelligent.
Has Malcolm studied his audience? Is he reaching out with a message that is directly relevant to his listeners?
Has he grabbed your attention?
He surely has. With a Malcolm X presentation technique that grips the audience and never lets it go.
Malcolm was expert at executing Presentation Snap, grabbing his listeners in a way that zeroed in on them.
He focused on their needs, concerns, desires, hopes.
He framed the issue in colorful language, and created listener expectations that he would offer bold and radical solutions to real problems.
For now, focus on the grabber to seize the attention of your audience. Mull this excellent example from the Malcolm X presentation and ask yourself how he contrived it . . . and how it works.
In subsequent posts, we’ll look at more examples from Malcolm X as he moves through delivery of his presentation, building to his call for action at the end.
If you want to learn how to energize a presentation with Malcolm X presentation techniques, as well as the secrets that other powerful speakers use in their presentations, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.
When you deliver a presentation, one of the most important factors that figures into the success of your talk is whether you take the command presentation position.
Don’t follow the example of most after-dinner speakers or professors, who hide behind the lectern, shuffling notes, looking down, gripping the edges of the podium with white-knuckled fervor.
This is grotesque.
It induces your audience to doze, to drift, to check out.
Instead, seize the metaphorical high ground of the presentation terrain . . . the Command Presentation Position.
And this means that you shun the lectern.
The Abominable Lectern!
The lectern is an abomination.
If you happen to be a liberal arts student who drifted here by mistake, think of the lectern as The Oppressor or The Other. It puts a barrier between you and those whom you address.
For many students, the lectern is a place to hide from the audience.
I recommend using the lectern only once, as a tool . . . and this is the occasion to walk from behind it to approach your audience at the very beginning of your talk. This is an action of communication, a reaching out, a gesture of intimacy.
Do not lean upon the lectern in nonchalant fashion, particularly leaning upon your elbow and with one leg crossed in front of the other.
Fix this now.
Move from behind the lectern and into the Command Presentation Position. In today’s fleeting vernacular, occupy the command presentation position.
The Command Position is the position directly in front of a lectern (or well to the side of the lectern, if it’s located on the wing of the stage) and 4-8 feet from your audience. The Command Position extends approximately 4 feet to either side of you. You are not a visitor in this space.
As a presenter or speaker, this is your home. You own this space, so make it yours. You must always perform as if you belong there, never there as a visitor.
Occupy it!
Occupy the command presentation position now for democracy, social justice, and an especially powerful presentation. And personal competitive advantage.
Two pernicious myths pervade the landscape of business presentations, and these myths refuse to be swatted down.
Well, probably more than two myths are circulating, but these two big myths persistently burden folks.
These myths influence two large groups of people.
Without knowing it, these folks subscribe to two schools of presentation thought . . . Birthers and McTips.
The first group – the “Birthers” presentation school – believes that superb public speakers are “born that way.”
Folks in this group believes that it’s nature-not-nurture and that natural talent wins the day. Since it’s an ability you either have or you don’t, well there’s no need to even try.
Just sit back and marvel at those outstanding public speakers who make it all look so easy, but who actually utilize a host of techniques to charm and dazzle you.
Techniques that would be available to you if you would only set aside the self-defeating notion that you can’t develop especially powerful presentation skills.
Rocket Science Presentations? No . . . just reachable goals accessible through dedication and practice.
Supersize Those McTips?
The second group – the “McTips” presentation school – believes that public speaking is both easy and easily learned.
Folks here believe that following a few presenting “McTips” or easy “McSteps” can turn them into tremendous speakers. “Make eye contact” . . . “Move around when you talk” . . . “Use your hands” . . . Presto.
Rocket Science? Hardly!
This McTips view is so pernicious that it does more damage than good.
It’s like a get-rich-quick scheme that scams people.
And who wouldn’t want to believe that there’s a painless shortcut to one of the most universally despised activities in corporate America?
One colleague told me a while back, his fingers steepled in front of him, “I can teach my people all they need to know about presenting in 30 minutes . . . all that other stuff is just B__ S___.”
Really?
Rocket Science Presentations!
And if becoming a great presenter is so incredibly easy and the product of a few tips or steps, then why does the bar stay so low with regard to business presentations?
Why does our business landscape resemble a wasteland strewn with mind-numbing PowerPoint slides and populated with droning executive automatons?
Both views are not only wrong, but they can stunt your development as a top-notch business presenter.
Great presenters are neither born, nor are they easily made.
Every person needs a life-preserver at some point in his speaking career, and one of the most important is how to stop your presentation.
Here I reveal the best way to . . . stop.
Yes . . . stop your presentation.
Stop Your Presentation Now
I’ve tossed this rescue device out many times to students in trouble during a presentation.
At times, even the finest presenters get themselves in trouble, and having this rescue device near to hand can salvage a speech that is careening off-course, even flirting with disaster.
Occasionally we must be reminded of this simple and yet especially powerful device that can serve us well near the end of our talk.
Stop your presentation the right way and leave a lasting impression on the audience
When your talk winds down and you feel yourself suddenly spent . . .
When you begin to spiral out of control and can’t collect your thoughts . . .
When your pulse quickens and your mind goes blank . . .
Grasp for two words.
Your life-preserver.
“In conclusion . . .”
That’s it. Just two words.
Magic Words . . .
These two words have rescued thousands of presenters before you, and they’ll rescue you as well.
“In conclusion . . .”
These two words work a magic on your psyche that is almost inexplicable in terms that a logical, reasonable person would believe.
As soon as you speak them, the path to the end of your talk becomes clear. Your presentation opens up. Speak these magic words, and suddenly you know what to say and do.
You confidently add another crucial phrase . . .
“In conclusion, we can see that . . .”
“In conclusion, our recommendation makes sense for reasons just given . . .”
“In conclusion, this means that . . .”
See how it works? How incredibly easy it is to get out of the sticky wicket of a talk spiraling out of control!
“In conclusion” leads you out of the wilderness and back onto your prepared path. It leads you to restate your thesis in concise manner and then . . .
What’s this bookending and why is it so important to audience response?
Bookending brings your audience full circle, in a sense. You first hook your audience with an intense introduction, and at then at the conclusion of your presentation, you recapitulate.
This provides a sense of closure and completion for the audience.
Presentation Structure Begins with This
The First Bookend.
This means to start your presentation with an anecdote, cue, or visual image that hooks your listeners into the narrative. This is your “grabber.”
Your “hook.”
It can’t be a gimmick, or the audience will feel cheated.
Your grabber must startle and delight your audience. An interesting fact, a controversial statement, a powerful phrase.
And then you follow with your situation statement, which flows naturally from your grabber.
Your clear situation statement of only one or two sentences tells the audience exactly what they are about to hear, start to finish.
One of the best grabbers/situation statements I’ve ever heard was this pithy formulation:
“There’s a deal on the table. Don’t take it. Here’s why.”
That grabber is direct and is almost enough for a situation statement as well. It pulses with power. If you’re the one associated with the “deal on the table,” how could you not want to hear what comes next?
In fact, it encompasses the entire presentation in three especially powerful sentences.
That’s your first bookend.
The Middle of Your Presentation Structure
Then you offer your major points of your presentation, usually three major points.
Why three?
Because of the Rule of Three that I have spoken of in this space so many times. We seem to be hard-wired to receive information most efficiently in threes. Whether it’s a slogan or a fairy tale, when information is grouped in threes, we respond well to it and we remember it better.
This three-part presentation structure can serve you well as a framework for most any presentation.
As you wind to a conclusion, you then construct your second and final bookend.
Recapitulation of your Presentation Structure
You say these words: “In conclusion, we can see that—” Then . . .
Repeat your original situation statement. Hearken back to the original introductory anecdote, cue, or visual image that launched your presentation.
Finally, say: “We believe that our presentation substantiates this.”
You come full-circle, so to speak, and the audience gains a sense of completeness. This recapitulation of your theme knits together your segment into a whole. Your audience appreciates the closure.
Rather than a linear march, where nothing said in your presentation seems to relate to anything that came before, you offer a satisfying circularity. You bring your audience home.
You bring you audience back to the familiar starting point, and this drives home the major point of your talk in two especially powerful ways: 1) the outright repetition of your theme, cementing it in the minds of your listeners, and 2) the story convention of providing a satisfying ending, tying up loose ends, and giving psychological closure.
It’s an elegant technique that can pay big dividends in terms of audience response.
With regard to presentations, I deal with two large groups of people. For descriptive simplicity, let’s call these two groups “Natural Born” and “McTips!”
“Natural Born” and “McTips!” represent two extreme views of what it takes to become an especially powerful and superior business presenter.
Neither is remotely accurate.
And neither group is what might be called enlightened in these matters. Members of both groups are frustrating and irritating in their own ways and completely self-serving.
Here is why . . .
We often look for folks to excuse us from what, deep down, we know we ought to do, or what we can do. If we look hard enough, we find what we search for, and excuses are extremely easy to find.
Let’s look at these two excuses that hold us back from fulfilling our potential as especially powerful presenters.
The First View
The first view would have us believe that great speakers are born with some arcane and unfathomable gift, combining talent and natural stage facility.
That Bill Clinton sprang from the womb declaiming that he feels our pain.
That Ronald Reagan was born orating on lower capital gains taxes. That Oprah Winfrey began her talk show career in kindergarten.
If the first view holds that great speakers are born with a gift, then quite logically this view leaves the rest of us to strive with middling presentation skills.
It’s an excuse for us not to persevere. Why bother to try?
Why not, instead, hire some of these natural born speaker types to do the heavy presentation lifting? The rest of us can skate along and pretend that we’re not actually lazy . . . or frightened . . . or disinterested . . . or unambitious.
The Second View . . . Presentation McTips!
The second view is the opposite of the first.
This “McTips!” perspective would have us believe that delivering effective presentations is a snap. So easy, in fact, that one of my colleagues assured me confidently and with not a little hubris that he could teach his undergraduates “everything they need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.”
He also assured me that “all that other stuff you talk about is B.S.”
Has the presentation landscape changed so much that what was once taught as a fine skill is now mass-produced in 30-minute quickie sessions of speaking “tips”?
I actually saw a headline on an article that offered 12 Tips to Become a Presentation God! Have the demands of the presentation become so weak that great presenting can be served up in McDonald’s-style kid meals . . . “You want to super-size your speaking McTips?”
Hardly.
In the 1800s, public speaking was refined to an almost-art; “elocution” was the new science/art, and departments of elocution and public speaking flourished in universities throughout the land.
In Philadelphia, on Walnut Street in fact, the National School for Elocution and Oratory became a Mecca for would-be stars of the pulpit, the stage, the bar, and the political wars in the 1890s.
On into the first decades of next century, public speech was regarded with respect and a high-skill to be mastered with much study and practice.
The fact is that despite however much we might wish otherwise, today’s PowerPoint high-tech software multi-media offerings cannot change the fundamental truth that it is still you who must deliver the presentation.
So no . . . you cannot learn “everything you need to know about presenting in 30 minutes.” You cannot become an especially powerful presenter at the fastfood drive-in window, unless you want to ply presenting at the lowest common denominator of mundane slide-readers that populate every business and law firm from New York to Nashville, from Boston to Baton Rouge, from Savannah to San Diego.
Ask yourself . . . if learning to deliver top-notch presentations is so doggoned easy, then why are 9 out of 10 presentations such awful forgettable bore-fests?
The Third View – The Power Zone
There is a third group, and it is destined to remain small.
This group is privy to the truth, and once you learn the truth about presenting, you can never go back to viewing presentations the same way. Consider this pop culture analogy from the 1999 film The Matrix.
In The Matrix, humans live in a world that is not what it seems. In fact, everything they believe about the world is false. Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburn) offers to reveal the truth to Neo (Keanu Reeves) about his existence. Morpheus offers Neo a Blue Pill and a Red Pill. The Blue Pill returns him to his old state of ignorance. The Red Pill reveals the secret, and once he learns it, Neo cannot return to his old life.
The process of presentation discovery is much like the red-pill/blue-pill choice that Morpheus offers to the young computer hacker Neo . . .
You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Likewise, you can stop reading this article this instant – the blue pill – and return to the righteous and relaxing world of “Natural Born” or “McTips!” Both viewpoints allow the average presenter to remain mired in mediocrity with an excuse that sounds plausible.
One perspective means you don’t try at all, other means you offer token effort as befits a low-level pedestrian task. So, if you decide to take the Blue Pill, close this site and go your own way. Bon voyage! I wish you a hearty good-luck and Godspeed, and perhaps you will be happier for your choice.
But if you are one of the few who thinks for a moment . . . “Hmm. What if the Professor is right?”
Then . . . Take the Red Pill
Then you can read on to the
next brief paragraph – the red pill – and be forever shorn of the excuse for mediocrity. For the truth is in the Power Zone, and once there, you will never be satisfied with your old presentation life again.
You cannot go back.
That’s the paradox, the Curse of Freedom. It is completely within your power to seize the fruits of great presenting. It’s your choice.
You can launch an auspicious presentation career right now, right this minute. Or you can dismiss this site as yet another fraudulent claim to revealing secrets to you . . . only to have it exposed as a method that requires you to actually do something.
A method that transforms you.
Choose the Red Pill. Step boldy into the Power Zone.
The Power Zone is the province of the privileged few who understand the truth that anyone can become a great presenter, with the right kind of hard work and the willingness to become a great presenter.
To join this third group requires you to take on a new state of mind. If you already carry this view, that’s superb. If you don’t . . . you can decide now to adopt it or forever be relegated to the other two groups – believing you’re not good enough, or believing you are good enough when you’re actually not.
Public presentations – great presentations – require study and practice and preparation and technique. A deep philosophical, academic, and professional history undergirds public speaking. This history informs the very best presenters and their work. You dismiss it only to your great loss.
No, you need not become a scholar of public speaking. In fact, few people have that deep an interest in the subject and even fewer can claim that kind of knowledge today.
But what you can and should do is this: Open your mind and heart to the possibilities of found treasure.
You actually can become a capable presenter. You can become a great presenter. When you enter the Power Zone, you are both cursed and blessed with knowledge. This knowledge represents two sides of the same coin.
You are cursed with the knowledge that the only limitation you have is you. You are blessed with the knowledge that you can become a good – even great – speaker.
An especially powerful presenter.
Now, you have no other real excuse. It’s totally up to you.
For the ultimate guide to developing your personal brand as an especially powerful business presenter, CLICK HERE.
Befuddled! How to transition between speakers is the most-searched term on this site.
One of the least-practiced aspects of the group presentation is how you pass the baton – the transition between speakers.
Yet these baton-passing linkages within your presentation are incredibly important.
They connect the conclusion of one segment and the introduction of the next.
Shouldn’t this connecting link be as strong as possible, so that your audience receives the intended message? So the message isn’t lost in a flurry of scurrying presenters moving about the stage in unpracticed, chaotic fashion?
It sounds absurd, but group members often develop their individual presentation segments on their own. Then, the group tries to knit them together on the day of the group show.
A formula for disaster.
The result is a bumbling game of musical chairs and hot-baton-passing.
Imagine a sports team that prepared for its games this way, with each player practicing his role individually and the players coming together as a team only on the day of the game and expecting the team to work together seamlessly.
Sports teams don’t practice this way. Serious people don’t practice this way.
Don’t you practice this way.
Don’t yield to the tendency on the part of a team of three or four people to treat the presentation as a game of musical chairs.
How to Transition Between Speakers?
This happens when each member presents a small chunk of material, and the presenters take turns presenting.
Lots of turns.
This ungainly dance disconcerts your audience and can upend your show.
Minimize the passing of the baton and transitions, particularly when each person has only three or four minutes to present.
Smooth transitions can bequeath personal competitive advantage to you and your teammates
I have also noticed a tendency to rush the transition between speakers.
Often, a presenter will do fine until the transition to the next topic. At that point, before finishing, the speaker turns while continuing to talk, and the last sentence or two of the presentation segment is lost.
The speaker walks away while still citing a point. Perhaps an incredibly important point.
Don’t rush from the stage.
Stay planted in one spot until you finish.
Savor your conclusion, the last sentence of your portion. It should reiterate your Most Important Point.
Introduce your next segment. Then transition. Then pass the baton with authority.
Harmonize your Messages
Your message itself must mesh well with the other segments of your show.
Each presenter must harmonize the message with the others of a business presentation. These individual parts should make sense as a whole, just as parts of a story all contribute to the overall message.
“On the same page” . . . “Speaking with one voice” . . .
These are the metaphors that urge us to message harmony. This means that one member does not contradict the other when answering questions.
It means telling the same story and contributing crucial parts of that story so that it makes sense. So that each of you acquires, incrementally, personal competitive advantage as you progress through your show.
This is not the forum to demonstrate that team members are independent thinkers or that diversity of opinion is a good thing.
Moreover, everyone should be prepared to deliver a serviceable version of the entire presentation, not just their own part. This is against the chance that one or more of the team can’t present at the appointed time.
Cross-train in at least one other portion of the presentation.
Remember: Harmonize your messages . . . Speak with one voice . . . Pass the baton smoothly. Transition between speakers with authority and confidence for an especially powerful business presentation.
You’d step over to the wall and run your fingers over the colored lines.
You’d trace the outline of the images as you shared the story that the painting illustrates. You’d use the graphic to bring your presentation to life.
Likewise, in your own business presentations today, when you interact with your PowerPoint slides, I suggest that you use 10,000 BC technology – you should “touch the cave paintings” to meld with your presentation.
Breathe life into your Business Presentation!
Take ownership of your business presentation, and touch the cave paintings you’ve created to flesh out and support your message.
Step to the screen when you’re ready to refer to a chart or a graph.
Orient us to what we’re about to see.
Explain the vertical and horizontal axes so that we can quickly grasp the data.
By stepping to the screen and gesturing, you enhance your participation in the presentation, becoming the animation for the slides under review.
And you preclude using one of the most heinous devices ever created that can destroy potentially outstanding business presentations.
Think of the Laser Pointer as a Presentation self-destruct button.
That’s right . . . self-destruct button.
Don’t Self-Destruct!
Even the best of us occasionally thumb that laser pointer self-destruct button that is built into most remote control clickers.
Lose the laser pointer, Skywalker
But you want to deliver a Laser Pointer Presentation, don’t you?
You’ve waited your entire life for the chance to legitimately use that laser pointer!
Haven’t you?
You’ve pictured yourself be-suited and commanding the room . . . standing back, perhaps with a jaunty posture, as you sweep the screen behind you with the little bobbing speck of red light. The meekest among us is invested with bombast and hauteur by even the most inexpensive laser pointer.
The laser pointer is 21st century overkill technology. It distances you from your presentation message at the exact moment you should meld yourself with it.
How so?
If something is so crucially important on your slideshow – perhaps a graph or a series of numbers – that you must direct audience attention to it, then step into the presentation. Gesture to the data with your hand.
Use 10,000 B.C. Technology
Merge yourself with the data. Step into the presentation so that you, in essence, become the animation that highlights your points of emphasis. Don’t divide audience attention between you, the data on the screen, and a nervously darting red speck.
Instead, concentrate your audience focus on your major points, touching the screen, guiding us to the facts and figures you want us to internalize. It’s a cave painting, so run your hands over the cave wall.
Show us what you want us to see with your hand.
Now, I issue a caveat here.
If the screen behind you is so high that you cannot reach it, then you might be justified in using the pointer.
But probably not.
Instead, if you want to highlight or draw attention to your points of emphasis, then utilize the highlighting animation available on most multimedia platforms.
Nothing is more gratuitous in modern business presenting than the laser pointer. And few things more irritating than the laser pointer presentation.
Rid yourself of this awful affectation today. Pledge never to deliver another laser pointer presentation in your business life.
Instead, run your hands over the cave wall, touch the cave paintings to meld with your presentation and communicate with your visuals in especially powerful fashion to gain especially powerful personal competitive advantage.
Overarching the craft of developing an especially powerful presentation is the guidance provided by the “Three Ps,” and the last of of these Ps provides a solid foundation of powerful business presentation principles.
There are seven of them.
These Seven Principles of Especially Powerful Presenting constitute the building blocks of your presentation persona. And you’ll not find a PowerPoint slide in sight.
Elsewhere, I’ve characterized these principles as “secrets.” Like any secret, it’s only a secret if you don’t know it.
Business Presentation Principles are Secret?
They are secrets. In fact, they could be the most open secrets that mankind has ever known.
But they’re difficult secrets.
Difficult – because they require you to actually do something.
They require you to modify your behavior in ways to take advantage of what has been discovered about public speaking and presenting over the past 2500 years.
I think that perhaps when we think of a secret, we tend to equate it with magic. We automatically believe that there is some magic involved that will help us circumvent hard work.
But that’s just not so.
The good news is that these secrets actually are secrets that truly work. They also constitute the dimensions along which we can gauge our speaking ability and judge how much we improve.
This is the most important aspect of these business presentation principles – they allow us to tear away the veil from those who pose as merely talented and to understand this beast called The Presentation.
Now, let’s plot our dimensions on a 7×7 Chart.
Break-Down of Business Presentation Principles
Take, as an example, the chart below, which is labeled across the top with our seven dimensions and along the vertical axis with a seven-point scale of value:
Unacceptable, Below Average, Average, Good, Very Good, Superior, Professional.
The chart plots the seven dimensions against a seven-point scale and provides a thorough evaluation of the presenter’s level of skill. From the chart, we see that this speaker carries a professional-grade stance and is superior with his gestures.
All other dimensions indicate work is needed. The advantage of this chart, is that it disaggregates your various speaking tasks so that you can manage them.
It parses them, so that you can identify your weaknesses in a logical and comprehensive way. It also informs you of your strengths, so that you may build upon them.
Business Presentation Principles for Power and Impact
The upshot is that this Third P of Especially Powerful Presenting – Business Presentation Principles – guides us to master the Seven Secrets, to transform ourselves into truly adept presenting instruments. To put us at home in front of any audience and able to connect across a range of subjects and and in a multitude of venues.
Elsewhere, I have addressed the Seven Secrets in detail, and we’ll revisit them again soon.
For now, let’s remember that the especially powerful presenters of the past 50 years have used basic presentation principles – Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King.
They don’t announce that they’re using techniques and tricks of the trade, of course.
They simply let you believe that they were gifted with special talents. Not a chance.
