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Some
time ago
I was invited to
San Jose
for two days to train and assess over 30 speakers at a
conference of high-tech companies eager to hear what predictions
these presenters had about the future of the industry.
My
overarching assessment of the group of five who presented to the
entire assembly: unlike any other organization I have worked
with in the past ten years, these people
ALL
possessed the one ingredient that makes the whole presentation
process work – passion.
The truth is, you can almost break all the ‘rules’
about proper delivery if in the end you deliver your message
with true passion, and the five main presenters all did exactly
that.
Peggy
Noonan, the WSJ columnist and speechwriter for President Reagan,
is fond of saying (speaking about the audience), “They won’t
care how much you know until they know how much you care”.
In the high-tech business, there are many people who know
a great deal. But
their knowledge matters very little if they can’t convey what
they know with a level of passion that drives people to sit up
and listen.
After
all, it’s not likely that anybody in the audience is going to
care more about your topic than you do, so to ensure that
audiences come away interested and motivated to learn more,
it’s incumbent upon the speaker to stretch to the point of
almost going over the top with passion and enthusiasm for their
topic.
So
for this group, my suggestions for improvement would actually be
for them to back off a little on their preparation. That
might sound odd, but the reality is most everyone spent tens of
hours practicing their material to the point that they knew
their “scripts” by heart.
And though it obviously returned great results, the
approach we teach for successful delivery involves working less,
rather than more. In
fact, that’s our Number 1 rule:
1)
If you’re working too hard, you’re doing it wrong.
The
other two tenants of our teaching are:
2)
When you’re doing it right, it’s always a Win-Win for
both the speaker and the audience, and
3)
People only Start listening when you Stop talking.
Getting back to Rule #1, it is our long-held belief that the
bedrock for presenting well is having a thoroughly comfortable
presenter. A
comfortable presenter doesn’t only make the audience feel
comfortable, and thus conducive to new information uptake, but
sets the stage for the presenter to let go with her passion,
which, as I’ve said, is what it’s all about.
For
the speaker to be as comfortable as possible, she must have
learned two skills: the
ability to engage in structured and controlled eye contact with
individuals in the audience, and the understanding of how much
and of what type of information one can bring onto the screen at
any one time. With
just these two skills (of the many we teach), the speaker frees
himself of the huge, huge burdens that most carry to the
platform. And with
the incredibly lighter load our students bear, they find the
ability to expend their excess energy in directed, meaningful
output that audiences read as, that’s right, passion.
Unfortunately,
most presenters (understandably) believe that their content is
the most important aspect of the presentation process. Yet
research proves this to be undeniably not true. The sad
fact is that no matter how important your content might be, if
you don’t both look good (confident & comfortable) and
sound good (with the solid timbre of sincerely and expertise in
your voice), nobody will take what you say seriously enough for
you to have any impact. Concentrating
on the content too often results in losing the big picture –
people need to hear and see how much you care about what you
say.
These
presenters could also benefit from learning the other 2 rules,
especially rule #3, which is the rule that separates very good
speakers from memorable ones.
Please
understand this: Unless they’ve been trained differently, when
people get up to speak before a group, the most important thing
on their minds is always the next thing they’re going to say.
Most speakers know that as long as they keep hearing
words come out of their mouth, things will be fine.
But God help them if that stream ever stops – what if
they can’t get it started again?
What if they forget what they’re supposed to say?
So they abate that fear by speaking constantly – one
word after another, usually in appended phrases instead of full
sentences – until (thank God!) they get to sit back down.
Once
again, standard behavior works against efficient Knowledge
Transfer. When
audience members are forced to sit through a never-ending
barrage of verbiage, it’s just like trying to read a college
physics textbook that goes on for page after page without a
paragraph break. After
a short while, the brain surrenders and just shuts down,
deciding to wait for the handout.
In
order for audiences to hear, and more importantly retain,
what was said they need frequent and constant breaks in the
monologue – the equivalent of the paragraph in written text.
Next time you pick up a newspaper, note that the average
number of sentences in a newspaper paragraph is 1.5.
Short bursts of information and then a break.
Bill
Clinton is the Master of the Pause.
Barack Obama is a leading student.
Neither John Kerry nor Al Gore has a clue about the value
of the pause. Draw
your own conclusions.
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