Feeling horny. Reflections on questions inspired by a Middle East taxi

by Peter Watts

Asking your audience a question can cue them back into your presentation, but if the audience aren’t expecting it, a silent collision can result.

I’ve just had a similar near-death experience here in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, only it wasn’t in front of an audience, it was in the back of a rush-hour cab where my driver was using his horn the way that a regular driver might use their turn-signal:

Beep Beep….. I might be turning right

Beep Beep….. I might be turning left

Beep Beep….. I’m not turning at all, but there’s a side-street coming up, so what the heck

Beep Beep….. There’s a large SUV hurtling straight towards me down this dusty side-street and I’m going to play chicken with it, just so long as the British guy in the back doesn’t attempt to leap from the cab

Beep Beep….. I’ve just put on the central locking, so take note British guy: Fear of imminent and messy death is no justification for trying to avoid the fare by jumping out of a moving vehicle

The guy spoke fluent horn and all the other road-users seemed to understand it. He had a Old Testament ability to keep on miraculously parting the traffic, and once I came up out of the airline brace position, I realized that there was a definite schema to all the tooting; a schema that can be applied to asking your audience a question.

He was using the horn to warn other vehicles that he was about to come zipping around them, straight between them, or in the case of that jeep in the side-street, straight at them!

He didn’t just spring the impending collision, he pre-announced it so they could get out of the way. It was fair warning that he was about to do something nuts!

In presentations, the same skill is useful whenever you are about to spring something nuts on your audience, such as a question.

There’s several reasons presenters put questions to the audience:

• It shows that you are confident
• It shows that you want a two-way communication
• It can build rapport
• It can win you thinking time
• It can be used to re-focus people’s attention onto a key point

It’s a valuable tool, but the downside is that many presenters have had the experience of asking an audience question only to be greeted by a puzzled silence.

The silence isn’t caused by the audience being unable to answer your question. It’s caused by the fact that they weren’t expecting a question.

Even the most attentive audience members don’t listen continuously. They tune in and out, and at any given moment, no matter how brilliant a speaker you are, a chunk of those folks are momentarily contemplating other things. When you unexpectedly hit them with a question, the people who had temporarily tuned-out will instinctively glance nervously at the folks to either side of them, and as that ripple of uncertainty spreads, the audience decide that silence is the best option.

From an early morning rush-hour perspective, my cabbie had this completely figured out. He was using the horn to cue other drivers into the fact that he was about to do something unexpected; like drive straight at them! They therefore needed to be paying attention and ready to react.

Your audience don’t expect a question to come straight at them. They too therefore need to be paying attention and ready to react.

Your Beep-Beep will take the form of a simple statement.

Pause for a moment, and then say: “I have a question for you…..”

Now pause again, and look at the audience. You will see people visibly sit forward as they tune into you. Every ear in the house becomes focussed. Ask your question now and you’re much more likely to get an answer.

Simply because everybody heard you.

When you’re about to do something crazy unexpected, like ask a question, use the horn.

Leap the first frontier: Connect early with your audience

by Peter Watts

To make an audience like and trust you early in a presentation is a holy grail. The new Star Trek movie shows us how.

How many times have you been to the movies and almost trampled as everybody rushes to be first out of the theatre the moment that the end credits roll? Few of us stick around to watch those final frames, hence the number of films where all the important names now appear at the beginning of the movie and not the end.

What we’re seeing is the behaviour of an audience who have just sat through the shared experience of a presentation (or film), and remained nicely isolated as solitary individuals. Nothing has touched them as a group to produce a shared action other than dash-for-the-exit. If this movie had been a sales presentation, then it’s outcome would have been polite handshakes and “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Star Trek produces a different outcome, and I saw that  that actively demonstrated as the end-credits rolled. As the original 1960’s Star Trek theme music pumped 1960’s sci-fi Americana out of the Dolby surround-sound, not a single audience member moved so much as an inch from their seat.

The music is re-mastered, but unmistakeable. Audience: spellbound. By the time the first person stood-up to leave, the popcorn cleanup-crew were standing at the front and brandishing brooms like cattle-prods.

Whether it’s a movie or a presentation, every audience has invisible bonds that connect them together as a group. Glancing around the Thursday night movie crowd, the common bond appeared to be age. We were almost all old enough to remember from childhood the original TV Star Trek, and that theme music was reaching out and holding us.

When you link to a common value, you build trust and rapport with an audience. That link then provides the vital connection that bonds you to that audience as a credible presenter.

The concept is called ethos, and amongst its various components such as knowledge, reputation, and integrity, is the aspect of similarity. How similar are you to your audience, and can you link with them by slipping in amongst the common connections that hold them together as a group.

Some similarities are visual and obvious, such as how the audience dress and behave amongst themselves. Are they formal or informal? Outgoing or reserved? The NLP technique of mirroring tells us to establish rapport by consciously reflecting those factors back at the audience, thus projecting an image and behaviour pattern that is reassuringly familiar.

Other links are more subtle. The questions you are looking to answer are:

• How does my message or product relate to the audience
• How do I relate to my audience
• How do my audience relate to each other

The more answers that you can identify, and the more that you can weave strands of similarity into your presentation, the more the audience will see you as being “one of us”.

Find ways as part of your planning process to speak with prospective audience members beforehand, or speak to others who have presented to this audience in the past. At the very least, Google for nuggets such as values, mission statements, or news articles that reflect the people that you’ll be presenting to.

It isn’t necessary to find common links that connect to all 100% of the audience in order for the magic to work. The teenage couple sitting immediately beside me, keys in hand and legs in athlete’s crouch starting-pose, clearly wanted to leave, but because the rest of the audience were transfixed, they too stayed in place. Clearly they were thinking that if everybody else was paying rapt attention, then they should too.

This is the beauty of ethos; connect with enough of the audience and even those outside the immediate chain will fall under its spell through the power of peer pressure.

If you can identify and merge with the common bonds that link a group together, then they will see you as being “one of us”. You will have met the audience where they’re at, and there can be no stronger place from which to boldly go, where no presenter has gone before.

Now why is my grammar-checker insisting that I have a split-infinitive?

 

Links:

For more inspiration on making an early connection to your audience, try these four ideas from Presentation Pro, Dr. Michelle Mazur

Our first PodCast! The Jason Womack Interview

An interview with the author of “Your Best Just Got Better”

by Peter Watts

I recently wrote a blog about a productivity book called “Your Best Just Got Better”  It’s a book that has made a huge personal difference to how I work, where I set my priorities, and how I go about defining those priorities.

As a follow-up to that review, it’s my pleasure this week to be able to welcome to The Presenters’ Blog the author himself, Jason Womack.

Jason has conducted over 1,500 seminars. To each audience he brings not just knowledge, but energy, experience, and passion.

1,500 audiences! How does he do it?

During this podcast, you’ll find out how the personal performance ideas that Jason shares in “Your Best Just Got Better” can be applied to the world of the presenter:

• Overcoming barriers that might be holding you back, such as nervousness

• Why it’s essential to know, and to believe, that your ideas truly matter. That you have something to say!

• How to identify your key message: the one thing that you want everybody in the room to have heard and understood during your presentation

• The role that dissonance plays in the hard-wiring of our brains, and why it’s essential to proactively take charge of our own post-presentation coaching

• Why it’s important to keep every presentation delivery as fresh as the first, thereby honoring your responsibility, as a presenter, to your audience

This podcast is packed with ideas and tips from Jason. Listen to it by clicking this link for the Jason & Peter PodCast, or if you’d rather read the conversation, we’ve included this transcript as well.

In addition, Jason and I have also put together ideas to boost your presenting; how you can identify your own unique knowledge, craft your message, and then take that to the stage…. this week! It’s combined with a very short  video message.

Enjoy the Jason & Peter PodCast, and do please leave any comments that you might have.

It would be great to hear from you.

7 business speaking tips from the Inaugural Address

A master  class in public speaking, from a public speaking master

by Peter Watts

By analysing speeches we gain access to the speech-writing knowledge and techniques of the people who wrote them, and of the leaders who delivered them.

When we take look under the hood of President Obama’s Inaugural Address, there are easy to replicate techniques for any business presentation.

Setting a key message

Every strong piece of presenting has a strong key message, and that message for President Obama’s Inaugural Address was equality of opportunity.

In the opening of his speech he quoted from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

By starting with this quotation, the President was using the technique of Anamnesis, where we quote an important past speaker or document in order to give external credibility to what we are going to say next.

Business Use: First make sure you have a strong key message. Then find a supporting quotation from either a recognized industry figure, or somebody that is relevant to your business case.

Framing your terms

What does the President means by “equality”?

 “We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skins or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names.”

The President is using a public speaking tool called Apophasis. In this technique you can state what something is, by stating what it is not.

Business Use: While the President used three terms within his Apophasis, race, religion, and national origin, the technique can be used just as effectively with just two, or even one opposition, such as “Achieving value is not about sacrificing quality”.

Emphasizing your key message

Within any effective piece of public speaking, there is one element that you will always find present, and that is repetition.

• Repetition of key phrases
• Repetition of important themes
• Repetition of what you most wish the audience to remember

The whole point is to make sure that the audience absolutely hears, and remembers what you want to say.

Let’s look at four easy to copy repetition forms that the President used in this address.

Conduplicatio

This is the most basic form of repetition, and it scatters one particular word and it’s synonyms throughout a presentation. This speech was about equality and inclusivity, so the President used inclusive pronouns to push that message. In particular:

• “We”: 73 occurrences
• “Our”: 80 occurrences
• “Us: 22 occurrences

If we add it all together that makes one inclusive pronoun every six seconds of the speech.

Anaphora is a slightly more showy structure where the same words are used to open consecutive phrases. Here’s just one of the many examples President Obama used:

“Together we determined that a modern economy requires railroads and highways to speed travel and commerce, schools and colleges to train our workers. Together we discovered that that a free market only thrives where there are rules to ensure competition and fair play. Together we resolve that a great nation must care for the vulnerable and protect its people from life’s worst hazards and misfortune.”

Epimone

Eipmone is where the same phrase or theme is repeated throughout a speech, although without the repetitions being in close proximity to each other as with Anaphora.

The President used the words “We, the people…”. This phrase saw five repetitions at various points, with the first taking the form of “We, the people, understand…”, and the next three taking the form of “We, the people, believe….”, before rounding off with “We the people declare”

Business Use: What is the key message of your next presentation? Look for as many ways as possible to repeat that message throughout the presentation, and try to vary the forms that the repetition takes. Remember: You can never over-emphasize your key point.

Build the power of your case

To make sure your message stands out in the mind of the audience, you amplify it:

“We must act knowing that today’s victories will only be partial, and that it will be up to those who stand here in four years and 40 years and 400 years hence to advance the timeless spirt once conferred to us in a spare Philadelphia Hall”

This particular sentence contains a rhetorical double-whammy that can be used in any business presentation, either individually or together.

The first is the Amplification. Here a speaker amplifies something by one step increments: “Four years, 40 years, 400 years.”

Even though the orator has stopped speaking, half the audience is continuing onwards to 40,000, 400,000, to some incredibly distant point. The President is using time as the basis of his amplification, and while it’s only one of many ways to build a point, it is the simplest to deploy. It could be applied to any aspect of a presentation that is about numbers. Money for example, or numbers of employees, or volumes of web hits.

In this particular case though, the application to time introduces the technique of Metastasis. Here we ask an audience to think backward through time, or to project themselves into the future.

Business Use: In so many aspects of business presenting, we will want an audience to take a particular action in the present in order to gain benefits in the future. If you use the line: “Imagine your business one year from now”, then you too are using metastasis. If you extend that to “Imagine your business 1 year from now, 2 years from now, 3 years from now…..” then the amplification combined with metastasis will have customers visualizing all the benefits of taking long-term actions today.

Engage the emotions

Dry facts alone seldom achieve results in public speaking. You need to excite the emotions, either to a smile or to a tear. For this we use Pathos, a section of the presentation specifically designed to reach out and touch the audience:

“For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn”

 Business use: What emotional aspect of acting on your message can you describe for the audience?

 Handle objections

Heading into the environmental section of the speech, the President used these words:

 “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgement of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”

Where we know an objection is likely to be raised against us, Prolepsis allows us to stick it out there in a statement as a part of the presentation, and then immediately shoot it down.

 Business use: It’s always a good idea to anticipate what objections are likely to be raised in a presentation, and then plan for how you will handle them. Including the answer to that objection within the presentation can prevent it from ever being raised.

Make it sound good

You take care to ensure that your visuals are pleasing to the eye, and it’s just as important to make sure your words are pleasing to the ear.

Try saying this next line out loud:

“So we must harness new ideas and technology to remake our government, revamp our tax code, reform our schools…..”

That repetition of all those words beginning with “re” is alliteration, where a stressed syllable is repeated to build emphasis and to make the speech sound almost poetic.

Another location where alliteration appears is in the President’s choice of three key civil rights movements: “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall”. All those “s” sounds are building rhythm for him.

Words that begin with “re”, such as re-build, will all work very well for alliteration, but there are many other combinations to play with. Words that begin with “ap” for example: apply, applaud, appeal, approve. Or with “un”: untangle, undo, uncover, unravel.

When we start to play with language in this way, the art of oratory becomes fun and we can use language to it’s fullest and most pleasing potential.

And that’s when presenting truly becomes powerful, and fun.

The Polymath Principle

The polymath aspect of productive presenters

by Peter Watts

The more skills we add to our range, the more powerful our presence on stage:

• Dance and exercise improve posture
• Singing strengthens the voice
• Painting or photography boost visual awareness
• Working crossword puzzles or playing scrabble can stretch the vocabulary
• Reading builds command of language

The more that we stretch our horizons, the more these skills add invisible strokes of accomplishment to public speaking.

While learning keeps the mind agile, it is variety that keeps it interested. Our brains are like our stomachs; they become easily bored when presented by the same flavors daily, and appetite shuts down. Instead, as any good restaurant knows, nothing gets the juices flowing quite like a well stocked buffet.

Our minds stay at their freshest when presented with an array of stimuli, and the same is absolutely true for the minds of audiences as well.

What new skills could you blend into your polymath presence this year?

No longer able to protect the crown jewels from the cameras? Time to embrace them

Prince Harry’s Vegas party proves that cameras are everywhere

by Peter Watts

When delivering presentations, our every glance, gesture, and utterance now has the capacity to be filmed. As Prince Harry has discovered, where there’s a person there’s a phone, where there’s a phone there’s a camera, and where there’s a camera there’s the World Wide Web.

Should we therefore ban phones and their little cameras from the theatre?  No we shouldn’t.  As Joe Waters demonstrates in his piece “10 Ways to Use Smartphones in Presentations”, there are great ways to get all those little toys working in your favor.

It’s a new world. Mobile devices in presentations are here to stay.

We can choose to ignore this fact, but if we do then we’ll simply be burying our little ostrich heads into the sand and with all those phones in the room someone is only going to photograph our bottoms and stick them on the web!

I think the interesting question is not the challenge presented by the audience member who uses a phone to distract themselves. The challenge is presented instead by the audience member who uses their phone to pay the closest attention possible and videos all the key bits of our presentation.

In the past that would have made us unhappy about the potential for loss of Intellectual Property. I’ve certainly worked with organizations for whom this would have given their Legal Departments apoplexy.

That however, was in the days when cameras were large beasties mounted on tripods. While today it might still be just about possible to know when someone is taping, tomorrow, it’s going to be almost impossible to detect.

The days of attempting to protect our crown jewels from the camera are just about over.

We need to work under the assumption that our utterances are heading for the internet and our much prized Intellectual Property along with them. Attempts to make it otherwise will be as futile as Royal attempts to ban the Las Vegas pictures from appearing in the UK when they are already all over the net.

In their 2010 book Macrowikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams argue the advantages of open collaboration in a highly connected world. Whether we like it or not, that openness is now upon us.

Let’s embrace it, let’s collaborate, and by doing so let’s dream up ideas and inspirations that have never been dreamt before.

You people… Mrs Romney has a message

by Peter Watts

Ann Romney’s “you people” comments have today offered a privileged insight into the potential First Lady’s thoughts about the world beyond Planet Romney. Far more importantly however, they have given the rest of us (us people?) a reminder that despite our best efforts, our true attitudes towards our audiences will always, eventually, come out!

For those of you people yet to see the headlines, Ann blew a gasket today as she defended husband Mitt’s continued refusal to disclose his tax records.

“We’ve given you people all you need to know about our financial situation.”

The contempt implied by those two phrases “you people” and “all you need to know” made the internet light-up like the London Olympics, an event at which Mrs Romney is about to have one of her race horses competing.

Ann Romney is normally so word-perfectly on cue that it’s almost scary. So what went wrong for impeccably word-perfect Ann? How did the mask manage to drop with quite such a resounding thud?

It’s because even if we don’t necessarily like our audiences, it is a pre-requisite that at the very least we find it in ourselves to genuinely respect them. If we can’t command even this most basic level of common ground with the people we are addressing, then the truth of our contempt will always find its way out.

Always!

It might not come with the full power flourish demonstrated by Mrs Romney, but at the very least it will manifest through non-verbal behaviors and attitude, and audiences are super-sensitive to the tiniest hints of condescension, disrespect, or arrogance. High handed haughtiness is never a way to win friends and influence people.

Whenever you are speaking, or engaging in any activity that involves an audience, check-in with your own emotional state first.

What are you feeling towards the audience?

Is it positive?

If it can’t be positive, then at the very least, make it respectful.

Stories, anecdotes, and diversions

by Peter Watts

Anecdotes, stories, and diversions bring a presentation to life.

When we add something personal to a presentation, it is a gift from ourselves to the audience. It paints colour into our words, sharing our passion for the subject.

The secret is to not leave the anecdote to chance. Plan it carefully. Know at what point you are going to introduce it, and most importantly, ensure you know how to link back into the presentation afterwards.

This week I have had the privilege of working in Istanbul, and the even greater privilege of having a small portion of leisure time. During that day off, I found myself walking down one of the city’s principal streets.

All the usual suspects were there. Well known designer brands sat beside Starbucks outlets. Recognition of familiar branding gave me a feeling of being somewhere I knew. Rather like the main theme of a presentation it was easy to navigate.

Numerous smaller streets sat between the western chains. I took a diversion, and headed down one.

Familiar stores were replaced by street markets. The area around me had come to life. THIS was Istanbul. Like a good story or anecdote, my diversion bought me not just the colors of Istanbul, but it’s sounds, and smells, and textures, and tastes. All the senses engaged at once in a full memory locking experience.

I so much enjoyed my diversion, that I wandered further, following the twists and turns. My initial experience so pleasant that I was encouraged to wander deeper.

When we tell a story, the audience sits forward. Interest peeks. We are encouraged to keep going.

Before long, I became aware that the streets were becoming distinctly narrower and more neglected. Time to go back. The problem was that as I traced what I thought was my route back to the street, I realized that I was going in circles. I had passed the same fabric store three times. The store keeper was starting to recognize me. Hopelessly “lost tourist” had to be scrawled all over me.

If we haven’t planned a story thoroughly, before we know it, the walls can start closing in, and we struggle to find our way back to the main theme in a way that the audience start to recognize as a “lost presenter”!

I made it back to that main thoroughfare, and resumed my walk. But I was so disoriented by this point that I started walking in the wrong direction, and five minutes later found myself back-tracking in the heat over places I had already been.

If we become lost in an anecdote, we are so relieved to rejoin our main thread that we then become lost all over again.

My detour into the backstreets of Istanbul was the most memorable part of my day, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. In just the same way, a well placed story will be the most memorable part of your presentation.

For it to be a success though, make sure that you know how far into it you want to go, and have a clear idea of how to find your way back out.

Vocal power to project your pitch. YouTube site will show you how.

by Peter Watts

Saturday sunrise in our local farmer’s market. For vendors, successful selling is strongly dependent on vocal power.

Wherever you look, there is a tangle of flats, shrubs, standards and climbers. Local gardeners, way better at early morning alertness than I am, scramble to get to the good stuff before rival gardeners get there first.

Where first? Which direction? Do I have the patience to dig for the bargain Impatiens?

“10 flats for 40 bucks. 15 flats for 50.”

Loud, clear, and cutting the chaos around me, a vendor’s sales call guided me direct to his pitch.

Public speaking originated in a strikingly similar environment. The Agora in ancient Athens was a thriving temple-ringed market. From the prostitutes to the philosophers, all at the Agora were selling their wares.

For the philosophers this meant standing and proclaiming sufficiently loudly and clearly that they too could cut the chaos and attract a crowd. Crowds meant fame. Fame meant students. Students meant someone paid you!

Nothing’s changed. From the Agora of Athens to your local farmer’s market, vocal skills remain essential to holding an audience.

This week I’ve discovered this excellent section of ExpertVillage. The video clips contained in this library are short and memorable. Everything you need for vocal clarity all contained in one handy spot:

ExpertVillage voice lessons on YouTube

Guest post: “Five key mistakes and three golden rules”

by Peter Watts

In the first guest-blog to appear on The Presenters’ Blog, it is my great pleasure to introduce Bill Grist, from Grist Communications.

Bill’s blog and Twitter feed flashes out bid-support guidance for those engaged in major sales, especially in the worlds of architecture and construction. Last week his blog featured a post called “Presentation Tips for Architects”

Bill’s article impressed on me that no matter how big, how small, how complex, or how simple your subject might be, the rules for effective public speaking are always the same.

Thank you Bill for allowing me to reproduce your post.

Ladies and Gentlemen, with great pleasure I give you:

Presentation Tips for Architects:
Five key mistakes, and three golden rules