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.
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.
And then . . . your mind wanders for a brief moment.
It was just a moment.
But it was enough to sabotage you.
Your thoughts grind to a halt and you can’t remember what to say. Words fail you.
You have lost the proverbial “train of thought” and you’re on the cusp of a presentation meltdown.
What do You do?
Blank-Mind attacks all of us at one point or another during our business presentation careers.
In fact, it happens so often that it might do us some good to think ahead to how we should react to this common presentation malady.
Too often, it leads to a presentation meltdown. But it doesn’t have to.
Presenters have developed trade tricks to help us past the rough spots. Here is one stopgap solution to get you over the speed-bump of lost train of thought.
When you lose your train of thought, don’t panic or you’ll spiral quickly into a presentation meltdown.
Instead, your first reaction should be a calm academic assessment of the situation – you know what’s happened, and you already know what your first action will be. You’ve prepared for this.
Dodge Presentation Meltdown with This
Pause.
Flood the room with silence.
Look slightly upward and raise your right hand to your chin, holding your hand in a semi-fist with chin perch
Especially Powerful Thought Pose
ed and resting on your index finger and thumb – perhaps with your index finger curled comfortably around your chin. You know the posture.
Put your left hand on your hip. Furrow your brow as if deep in thought, which you are.
Now, while looking steadily at the floor or slightly upward at the ceiling, walk slowly in a diagonal approximately four, maybe five steps and stop, feet shoulder-width apart.
Now, assume your basic ready position and look up at your audience.
Your Bought Time
You have just purchased a good 10 seconds to regain your composure, to regain your thought pattern. Time enough to cobble together your next few sentences.
But if this brief respite was not enough to reset yourself, then shift to the default statement.
If you’re thinking, then look especially thoughtful
What do I mean “default statement?”
This is a rescue phrase that you craft beforehand to get you back into your speaking groove. It consists of something like this: “Let me recapitulate our three points – liberté, égalité, fraternité.”
Other phrases might be: “Now is probably a good time to look again at our main themes . . .” or “We can see again that the issue boils down to the three crucial points that I began with . . .”
And then, you simply begin ticking off your three or four main points of your presentation. In doing so, you trigger thought processes that put you back onto the correct path.
Think of this method as levering a derailed train back onto the track.
If you have prepared as you should, Blank-Mind should be no more than a small bump in the road for you, a minor nuisance with minimal damage. If you panic, however, it can balloon into something monstrous.
Remember the rescue techniques: Chin-scratch and Default Statement.
You can control the damage by utilizing the Chin-scratch, which buys you time to reassert yourself. Failing that, the Default Statement can bail you out by taking you back over familiar material you’ve just covered.
If none of the above works, however, you can still stop yourself from going into total presentation meltdown by using the two rescue words I preach to all my students . . .
All of us do it, some more than others – we insert empty, distracting phrases that take us into what I call the Presentation Tall Grass.
You know the feeling of walking through tall grass. Tall grass, as in knee high.
It slows you down.
Think of wading quickly through knee-deep water . . .
Right, you don’t wade quickly through knee-deep water.
You push forward.
Sluggish.
Likewise, tall grass tugs at you, brushes your legs.
Holds you back. And in this case, it holds your audience back too.
It’s so unnecessary, too, so let’s see what to avoid and why to avoid it.
Presentation Tall Grass Phrases
In the business presentation, we sometimes enter the tall grass needlessly.
We insert qualifying phrases that add no necessary substance but do distract the listener from our main points.
These phrases do not cripple your presentation. But if you can eliminate them, you move out of the tall grass.
Your presentation becomes cleaner.
Crisper.
So what do these Tall Grass phrases look and sound like?
Here is one of the most common tall grass phrases. And it seems innocent enough.
“Now, I want to talk a little bit about . . .”
Say what?
No, you aren’t here to “talk a little bit about” anything. You’re here to deliver powerful, even stunning information in a tight, direct presentation that grips your listeners.
The affected breeziness of “talk a little bit about . . .” conveys a chattiness that is anathema to most business presentations.
In some public speaking venues this toss-off line might be acceptable, but I find it difficult to think of any presentation of my own where I would say something like this . . . except by mistake.
Because it’s a phrase that creeps into our show at times when we aren’t careful. I know that if I use it once, it’s bound to show up again.
And again.
As an affected filler. So I train myself to avoid it.
Perhaps you should, too.
References to Repetition – Ugh!
“As my colleague mentioned before . . .”
“As I said earlier. . .”
We tend to say this from an over-cultivated sense of honesty. It springs to the lips, unbidden, when we poise to deliver a point . . . and then we suddenly remember that another presenter said something similar earlier.
We believe that someone in the audience is ready to pounce, to call us on our repetition if we don’t confess.
So we feel compelled to “fess-up” and give credit to our teammate. We inject this wholly unnecessary comment: “As my colleague mentioned before . . .”
Uh-oh.
Suddenly, the audience is jolted into thinking back, tugged back to several minutes earlier, trying to remember if someone actually said this thing earlier and wondering why you’re saying it again. In other words, you have injected all sorts of unneeded distractions into audience minds.
Suddenly, you’re in the presentation tall grass, qualifying and interjecting, distracting.
It’s discordant.
Don’t be discordant.
Simply deliver your point. Don’t refer back to a teammate or to yourself, for that matter. Simply repeat the information.
Are these small points? Sure they are. They’re like individual brushstrokes.
And that’s how any master paints a masterpiece. A single brushstroke at a time.
Deliver enough bad brushstrokes because you believe that each stroke by itself is inconsequential, and soon enough you’re giving just another routine, bad presentation.
So how do you go about hooking and reeling in your audience in those first crucial seconds?
An Explosive Presentation Launch
Think of your message or your story as your explosive device. To set it off properly, so it doesn’t fizzle, you need a detonator.
This is your “lead” or your “grabber.”
Your “hook.”
This is your detonator for blasting into the mind.
This is a provocative line that communicates to your listeners that they are about to hear something uncommon. Something special.
Start your presentation with this provocative line, and you create a desire in your audience to hear what comes next. The next sentence . . . and the next . . . until you are deep into your presentation and your audience is with you stride-for-stride.
But they must step off with you from the beginning. You get them to step off with you by blasting into the mind.
“Thank you, thank you very much . . .”
You don’t blast into the mind with a stock opening like this:
“Thank you very much, Bill, for that kind and generous introduction. Friends, guests, associates, colleagues, it’s a real pleasure to be here tonight with so many folks committed to our cause, and I’d like to say a special hello to a group of people who came down from Peoria to visit with us here this evening, folks who are dedicated to making our world a better place, a more sustainable world that we bequeath to our children and our children’s children. And also a shout-out to the men and women in the trenches, without whose assistance . . .”
That sort of thing.
Folks in your audience are already checking their email. In fact, they’re no longer your audience. And you’ve heard this kind of snoozer before. Far too many times.
Why do people talk this way?
Because it’s what they’ve heard most of their business lives. You hear it, you consider it, you shrug, and you think that this must be the way it’s done.
Perhaps you come to believe that dull, monotone, stock-phrased platitudes comprise the secret formula for giving a keynote address, an after-dinner speech, or a short presentation.
You believe that a listless audience is natural.
Not at all! The key is to do a bit of mind-blasting as you start your presentation.
A Mind-Blasting Presentation Launch
You must blast into their minds to crack that hard shell of inattention. You must say something provocative. But relevant.
You must grab your listeners and keep them. You must arrest their attention long enough to make it yours.
Something like this:
“The gravestone was right where the old cobbler said it would be . . . at the back of the overgrown vacant lot. And when I knelt to brush away the moss and dirt, I could see my hand trembling. The letters etched in granite became visible one by one. My breath caught when I read the inscription–”
Or this . . .
“There were six of them, my back was against the hard brick wall, and let me tell you . . . I learned a hard lesson–”
The opening of your business presentation should be explosive . . . metaphorically speaking, of course
Or this . . .
“I was stupid, yes stupid. I was young and impetuous. And that’s the only excuse for what I did. I will be ashamed of it for the rest of my life–”
Or this . . .
“At the time, it seemed like a good idea . . . but then we heard the ominous sound of a grinding engine, the trash compactor starting up–”
Or this . . .
“She moved through the crowd like a shimmering eel cuts the water . . . I thought that she must be a special woman. And then I knew she was when she peeled off her leather jacket . . . and, well–”
You get the idea.
Each of these mind-blasters rivets audience attention on you. Your listeners want to hear what comes next. Of course, your mind-blaster must be relevant to your talk and the message you plan to convey.
If you engage in theatrics for their own sake, you’ll earn the enmity of your audience. And that is far worse than inattention.
So craft an initial mind-blaster to lead your audience from sentence to sentence, eager to hear your next one.
And you will have succeeded in hooking and holding your listeners in spite of themselves for outstanding personal competitive advantage.
Business Jargon is not a family value . . . or is it?
I struggle with a macro-profession that cultivates its own vernacular, its discrete jargon . . . business jargon.
The arena is academia.
Academia fused with that of the larger battlefield of the business world.
The struggle is between those of us in a noble minority (we must posture as such) and those legions who wear smiling faces, furrow serious brows, and who are imbued with the best of intentions.
The Struggle with Business Jargon
The struggle is for clear and original expression against the encroachment of weasel-words.
The struggle is for meaningful distinctions between useful locutions and the vulgarity of “jargon.”
Every profession contrives jargon and then clutches it to its breast.
It’s useful, yes. Incredibly so.
Jargon is not necessarily a bad word
But some of the more Machiavellian among us contrive it as a second code for entry into a priesthood of the knowledgeable.
And so we have the conundrum – one man’s obfuscation is another man’s sharply drawn argument.
Both use “jargon.”
Who with compassion could strip a man of his outlet for facile expression, the utility of shorthand “jargon,” simply because there exist unscrupulous cads who abuse the privilege of a profession’s lexicon?
It’s a Noble Enterprise, this Struggle
So it’s a struggle, yes, but it’s also an internal struggle.
This struggle is waged within me – I’m torn, because it is my bane to be charged with teaching the lexicon, the “business jargon” to vulnerable young minds.
Minds to which the jargon sounds fresh and innovative, when it is actually already stale and reified. It’s an axiom that once something makes it into a textbook, it likely is already outdated.
“Business Jargon.”
But business jargon does perform valuable service. If used judiciously and properly and with clear intent to the purpose for which it was created.
If it is wielded not to obfuscate.
If it is wielded not to mind-taser the listener into a kind of numb dumbness.
For those of us in the profession that is home to our jargon, it serves as shorthand for many thoughts already thought, not simply a comfortable refuge. Shorthand for many debates already concluded. Many theories already expressed.
Many systems already in place.
In fact, a deep vein of rich discussion lurks beneath the glib façade of most of our, say, business jargon.
And thus “jargon” presents us with a dilemma – if it were not useful, it would not exist. And anything that is useful can be misused.
It should come with a warning label.
A Warning Label?
I provide such a warning label. But only half-heartedly.
Half-heartedly, because it is my first obligation to ensure that my charges remember the “jargon” that I serve up to them.
They must imbibe deeply. And, at some point during a seemingly interminable semester, they must regurgitate the jargon.
They must feast heartily at the table of “core competency” and ladle large portions of “market failure” and “pioneering costs” along with a light sprinkling of what some consider the oxymoronic garnish of “business ethics.”
In praise of business jargon
More insidious than the standard jargon is the phalanx of “new” program buzzwords that march our way in endless columns, recycling ideas of old . . . and then recycling them yet again.
“Best Practices,” “Re-engineering,” “Six Sigma,” “TQM, “Benchmarking,” “Balanced Scorecard,” and on and on . . .
For those of us who bathe regularly in the sea of “competitive advantage” and “market saturation” and “pioneering costs” and “core competencies,” we cannot exercise the luxury of contempt.
Instead, we must labor as any wordsmith must labor.
We must not ban the hammer because some use it to bash their thumb instead of the nail.
We must ensure that tools are used properly.
Just as any writer seeks and secures precision in language, the business writer must labor likewise to secure our business jargon from misuse and abuse.
Constant vigilance is our only guarantor against the debasing of the language. This is true in business and in academia as it is true in the high-minded world of the literati.
High-minded? It might be also useful to exercise constant vigilance that high-mindedness does not become high-handedness.
Humility and the hunger for clarity.
Uncommon qualities in the business and academic worlds?
Perhaps, but surely they should be considered corollary to the business jargon that seems pervasive and inescapable and that nettles us so naughtily.
Cast all of this business jargon aside and consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting for entre into the high priesthood of the finest business presenters in the corporate world!
McTips – Presentation Fast Food that denies you personal competitive advantage
Presentation tips are about as valuable as “tips” to become a rocket scientist.
Let’s look hard at the phenomenon of presentation tips . . . what I call McTips.
And then discover the actual path to personal competitive advantage to deliver a powerful business presentation every time.
The Two Groups?
With regard to presentations, I deal with two large groups of people.
For sake of 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 Tips
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.”
Teddy Roosevelt: Personal competitive advantage for a President
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 presentation tips?
I actually saw a headline on an article that offered 12 Tips to Become a Presentation God!
Have the standards 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” with a handful of presentation tips.
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 this. 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
Take the red pill for especially powerful personal competitive advantage.
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.
You can only go forward to personal competitive advantage.
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 up to you.
For the ultimate guide to developing your personal brand as an especially powerful business presenter, CLICK HERE.
There are two pernicious myths regarding business presentations out there that refuse to be swatted down. Well, probably more than two, but two big myths that 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.
Except . . . there isn’t
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.
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.
McTip your way to great presentations? Not likely!
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?
And if becoming a great presenter is so incredibly easy and the product of a few McTips 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 imbued with personal competitive advantage.
Great presenters are neither born, nor are they easily made.
Anyone can become an especially powerful, capable speaker . . . but it takes work, practice, and courage.
