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"Practice,
practice, practice" might be good advice for a young
cellist asking directions on the streets of
New York
, but it's not necessarily the best way to approach the
presentation process. Successful
presentations today require a much more conversational approach,
and that means designing them to allow for spontaneity rather
than script-reading.
Good presentations
are not about memorization.
Far from it. Good
presentations occur when you, with your thoughts and
organization codified in the on-screen file, are able to
“launch” from the screen, and convert your talking points
into a conversational discourse about what you know. The
less scripted the presentation, the less you’ll sound like
a...well...script, and
more like an expert at a lunch table.
In fact, that is exactly how you want to envision
yourself delivering your presentation - to individuals whom you
know quite well around a table over lunch (and perhaps a glass
of wine or a bottle of beer).
Does that kind of scene make you nervous?
Of course not!
Believe it or not, there are many presentation skills coaches
that actually encourage people to memorize their way to
confidence in public speaking.
Listen to one such expert, quoted along side us in an
article for the online version of USA Today:
“Once
you've settled on the verbal and visual content of your talk,
it's time to start rehearsing. Take a small chunk of the
material and practice it out loud 30 to 50 times.
Practice it in your throwaway time — in the shower, on
the way to work. Practicing 10 to 20 times makes you sound
rehearsed, but 30 to 50 times makes you sound natural. By that
time you've done it so much it's like a muscle memory for your
throat... You don't have to think about it."
Can you imagine
that? Fifty
times? How many of
you have the time to take each part of your presentation and say
it fifty times? Why
would you want to so thoroughly memorize a piece that you might
only give once, and then start all over again for the next one?
Worse, as good as you might get with memorizing ninety
percent of your presentation, do you know what happens to most
people when they get to the one part they don’t remember? They
freak! They freak
and then they freeze, and as the fear of looking foolish builds
quickly, their minds lose the ability to process, much
less recall, detailed information.
Wouldn’t it be
better if you had a system that required no memorization at all?
One that simply gave your memory a shove every few
moments and then let you be yourself?
A properly designed presentation never includes more
information on the screen than it takes to key the audience
where you're going, and to cue you as to what you're going to
say.
Most people like to
talk about themselves, about what they do, and about what they
know. Your
presentations should reflect that.
Use the screen to keep yourself in a pre-set direction,
use it to list all the points you want to be sure to make, but
give the presentation itself from the heart.
Remember, people care somewhat about content, but what
moves them to interest is hearing how you feel
about it. To get
across emotion, you want to be conversational.
Therefore, it is
absolutely essential that the vast bulk of the information
imparted to the audience comes from the presenter and not from
words on the projection screen.
We call this spread between the volume of words you say
and the number of words in your bullet-points your "expert
ratio". All
other things being equal, audiences will gauge your knowledge,
your expertise, by the value you add to what they've already
seen and read for themselves on the screen.
Theoretically there
is no upper limit to this ratio.
Ten to one? Twenty
to one? One hundred?
The point is, audiences will only see you as an expert
when they realize that they can't possibly get the information
by tuning you out and grabbing it entirely from the screen.
With this in mind, can you see why almost nobody paid
attention to you the last time you simply read from the screen?
Your expert ratio when reading is, technically, one.
But in reality, it's worse than that.
The problem is, if
all you are there for is to read the slides, well, the audience
could do that quite easily for themselves, thank you.
In fact, the people who came to hear you speak can read
words about 40% faster than you can speak them - 250 words per
minute for them vs. 150 wpm for you.
If your bullet points are all grammatically correct
sentences, you will always fall into this divide between reading
and speaking speeds. As the presenter, you will not be able to
resist reading straight from the screen, because you’re
conditioned to do that when your brain recognizes a properly
structured sentence.
And the
audience, also being human, will do exactly the same thing.
But their reading takes less time than your speaking, and
by getting in their way to be the first- to-know, you are telling your audience that you really
don’t care very much about them.
It is the equivalent of having a minivan that waits until
the last minute to pull out into the road in front of you, and
then proceeds to drive 40% slower than the speed limit you had
just been pleasantly exceeding.
Demonstrate your expertise by being the main supplier of
information you want your audience to get.
Practice, practice, practice this concept, but never a
script.
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