Gold Medal Winning Mistakes When Presenting

Our event speaker was a well-coiffed and well appointed senior executive in one of the world’s biggest corporations.  The topic was on building your personal brand. A good crowd had turned out to pick up some pointers.  Anticipation gradually turned to disappointment though, as the talk unfolded.  The slant taken was how to project your brand “within” this gargantuan monster. How to climb their thousand foot high greasy pole.  As with other luncheon speaker events, you had a chance to meet people beforehand and then engage with your table mates over the meal.  I reflected that I had “worked the room” pretty thoroughly, combing the ranks of the assembled professionals for any potential clients.  I noted that none of them worked for a mega beast even close to the size of this colossus, so the speaker’s sage advice didn’t quite hit the mark.  How could that be, I thought to myself?

Who Is In The Room?

One of the big mistakes for a presenter is not understanding who is going to be in the room.  At what level should you pitch your content?  Are they experts, amateurs, dilettantes?  These days it may be hard to get the full list of who is coming, because of privacy concerns, but usually you can at least get the company name and their positions. If our speaker had done that, then hopefully the speech may have taken a different direction and would have become more relevant to those who took the trouble to attend. 

Our Purpose Is?

We need to make a decision about what is the purpose of our talk.  Are we here to inform, entertain, inspire or persuade?  Responding to the organisers request for a talk on a certain topic doesn’t determine the purpose.  We are given the overall theme and analysing our audience, we know now what angle we should select.  In this previous case, it would have been to “inform” and in that sense the speaker got it right.  The relevancy bit was completely missing though, but at least the purpose was correct.  An inspire speech will be totally different to a persuade or entertain speech.  Think back to the presentations you have attended. Could you recognise the event speaker’s approach or was it just a jumble, a catch all effort?  I am putting my money on “jumble”.

First Three Seconds

We have three seconds to grab our audiences’ attention and create a positive first impression. It has to be powerful enough that they don’t seize their phones and escape from us to the siren calls of the internet.  Why three seconds?  Over the last five years I have been asking participants in our presentation classes, how long does it take you to form a first impression of someone new.  The answers used to range from five minutes to thirty minutes.  When I ask that same question today, they tell me three seconds, five seconds, fifteen seconds.  It is shocking how little time we actually have, so our opening has to be well planned and well executed or we will have lost the room.

The Age of Distraction and The Era of Cynicism. 

Audiences are quick to judge, slow to trust and fast to flee from our presentation. We need to have a blockbuster opening. Something that will stop them in their tracks. However, what do we see presenters doing with those first few vital moments?  They are not actively engaging their audience because they are head down, hunched over their laptop, fumbling with their slide deck to get it up on screen. They are doing other amateur things like pounding the microphone asking “can you hear me down the back?” At the next presentation you attend, count the number of first impression killers the presenter is exhibiting.  Have they managed to capture your total attention from the very first few seconds or are you reaching for your phone?

How To Begin

Rules number one and two of presenting are rehearse before you give the talk and never practice on your audience.  Rehearsal is such an obvious point, but it almost never happens with business presenters.  This one thing will change everything about how the talk is received and how you will be perceived.  Get there early and check all the equipment. No microphone thumping please!  Also have someone else load your slide deck for you, if it can’t be primed ready to go.  We need to be 100% present with our audience, so reduce all friction impeding that result. 

Begin by picking out someone in your audience half way back and around the middle of the venue.  Make direct eye contact with that person and for the next six seconds speak to them, as if you were the only two people in the room.  Then at random, move to the next person and just keep repeating this six second process for the entire presentation.  Why six seconds?  Anything less and it doesn’t give you enough time to engage that person one on one.  However, continuously staring at someone burns into their retina and becomes too intrusive.  We want to directly engage as many people as possible in the time we have, so our engagement time split is important.

Wrap Your Information In Stories

We want our message to be fondly recalled, savoured like a fine wine and fully imbibed by our audience.  Many speakers, particularly technical presenters, have deluded themselves into thinking the data is all. They believe they get a free pass on needing to be a proficient and professional presenter, because the quality of their information trumps everything else.  Not true. The audience will remember two things – you and the stories you told.  Sadly none of that cool data you have cavalierly tossed up on screen is retained. 

They will remember you as someone they would like to hear from again or not.  The data wrapped up in stories is the way to make sure your key points are heard and remembered.  Today, we have to overcome all the other competing things going on in audience minds, while they are sitting there listening to us.  Even if they are enjoying your talk, some in the audience have no shame about flourishing their phones to do some multi-tasking, surfing the internet, while taking in your points.  Stories stop them in their tracks and they will switch back to us.  Here is the snapper though, how many speakers have you heard use stories well or at all?  If it is so effective, why are speakers just droning on about the details?  They just don’t know and it shows.

The good news is that the speaker proficiency bar is so low, we can easily shine by just avoiding some of these simple mistakes.  We make it hard for ourselves unnecessarily. We want to be a gold medal winner, but finish up being a prize dud.   The choice is yours, so which will you choose for your next presentation?  Why not go for being a winner, a presentations Olympian, every time you speak.