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The
only way to assure your presentation audience will stay with you
every step of the way is to maintain proper
eye contact throughout your entire presentation.
Proper eye contact involves delivering your presentation
as a series of one-on-one conversations with each member of the
audience, and holding eye-contact with members through to the
end of a thought or complete sentence.
Most presenters hold eye contact with any one person no
more than one second – to effectively bond with your audience,
you need to pump that up to a range more like three to eight.
The
image to keep in mind here is that you are NEVER delivering to a
group of individuals, but rather to individuals in a group. (When people ask me what’s the largest number of people
I’ve ever spoken to, I always answer, “one”.)
When
delivering a PowerPoint presentation, maintaining proper eye
contact becomes difficult if your slides are structured like
most we see in the corporate world today – with way more
information than the audience can digest before the speaker
feels compels to start speaking. In order to maintain constant
eye contact with members of the audience, you must restrict the
volume of information that you toss up on the screen at any one
time. Otherwise,
you will do what most presenters do, which is to spend much of
the presentation looking at the screen.
In fact, you must restrict each new parcel of information
to that which can be absorbed by both you and the
audience in just a few seconds – ten at the very most.
That
will set you up to then smoothly and coherently transfer the
information from the screen to the audience.
We call the procedure for doing this “Absorb, Align,
and Address.”
Absorb
When new information appears on the screen, all eyes will
follow it, and at this point it is OK, and desirable, for you,
too, to look to the screen.
By doing so, you “give permission” to the audience to
get prepared for what’s coming next.
That’s all the screen info should include, too: just
enough information to set the stage for what you are going to
discuss. At this
point, because you are not looking at any individual in the
group, you must be silent.
Rule
Number 9: If your eyes aren’t locked, your jaw must be.
When you have absorbed the data bite, you can now think
for a moment on how to phrase what you want to say to start off.
This would not include expounding on the point, but
merely filling out the talking points to make a grammatically
correct statement.
Align
Once you and your audience have had the opportunity to
take in this info, you then need to turn your attention away
from the screen, and lock eyes (align) with a member of
the audience. This
is the most difficult part, physically, to perform, as the
natural tendency is to begin speaking as soon as you have
formulated your statement.
Address
Locked on, you finally can address your selected
member of the audience with your version of the talking point.
Understand that if what you’re addressing is a bullet
point, this address should not be the actual words.
You may always say more than the line on the screen, but
never, never any less. Keep
in mind that the group will read everything that’s on the
screen, so if you put words up there but don’t speak to them,
you are actually insulting your audience:
These words aren’t important enough for me to bother
with but I wanted to take up your brain’s time and effort just
the same.
How many times has this happened to you: You go to a
presentation and see slide after slide with all kinds of
footnotes and small type, or graphs with legends and data to
which the presenter never refers?
You’re looking at all the elements on the slide trying
to figure out which stuff is most important, and then the
presenter never even mentions half the stuff you’ve read.
How does that make you feel?
For most people, the first slide that contains more
information than the presenter chooses not to discuss is the
point at which they check out, deciding to figure it all out
later from the handout, which, of course, they trash at the
first can they see outside the presentation room.
Once learned, the Absorb, Align and Address system is a
beautiful thing to behold.
Slides designed with this system never suffer from TMI,
and thus never have too much for the
presenter to deal with.
Presenter confidence is high, and the audience feels this
big time. The audience is forced to turn their attention to you,
because there’s not enough information to allow them to jump
to their own conclusions. By
the same token, you are now able to direct all of your speaking
to the audience and not the screen.
But here’s the really fun part:
When you follow this simple plan for both design and
delivery, almost anyone can look and sound like an expert on
their subject, regardless of how much prep time they’ve put
into rehearsing the presentation!
We prove this in our corporate training classes by having
participants deliver other participant’s presentations that we
have edited and revised to comply with the “rules” (next
chapter). Preferably,
off course, you would have a good background in the subject
matter, so that you can deliver the “meat on the bones” part
effectively. But if
you know to what the talking points refer, and you also know
that no more material than you can deliver in just a few seconds
will appear, you can actually give a presentation for the
very first time and sound like you know what you’re
talking about!
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