Ten Secrets of Successful Speaking

I have heard that Sesame Street tunes are used by the CIA to torture suspected terrorists. These people are clearly amateurs; if they knew what they were doing they would be sending detainees to learning conferences. A few hours spent listening to back-to-back accounts of how learning strategy has been aligned to business objectives and they would be pulling out their own fingernails.

Superficially it might seem ironic that the vast majority of learning professionals seem unable to stand up in front of a small group of like-minded adults and hold their attention for forty minutes or so – but to be fair, most speakers are involved in management rather than delivery of learning, and in this context eliciting the response “whatever – just please God let me out of this room!” is a core skill.

I attend a lot of conferences, and have spoken at many. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of presenters that I actually enjoy listening to. This is a shame, because many of my peers have done great work and have valuable experiences to share – they just haven’t figured out how to do it without making their audience feel as if they have been chained to a wall and subjected to the  psychological equivalent of hand-to-hand combat. You know what I mean: they open with three slides of staggeringly tedious detail on the corporate structure and while the audience are still reeling from this body-blow follow up with a flurry of facts on the learning infrastructure - simultaneously delivering a jargon-filled monologue that leaves listeners dipping in and out of consciousness. It’s brilliant, really. By the time you get to the completion rate histograms and the ROI calculations the audience have eaten all the mints in a five yard radius in an effort to stave off psychosomatic blindness.

I read ‘Confessions of a Public Speaker’ by Scott Berkun recently – and it’s a pretty good read. A central theme is the insight that if you’re a speaker most of your audience are just hoping that you finish on time and say something funny along the way. But I don’t think you need buy the book, or that Scott covers all the important points. I do think it’s quite easy to be a good presenter by following a few simple rules:

1) Have something interesting to say: Sounds obvious, but it’s clear that most presenters haven’t really considered their audience – they have just thought about what they want to say. So what you get is their whole story – whether or not any of it is especially interesting to you – when really what you want is someone to skip the boring bits and say “We discovered three really interesting things while doing this.” I imagine that speakers assume that since they have been asked to speak, that their stuff is of interest. Not so – conference organisers and attendees have very different motivations. If you can, figure out or find out what your audience would like to get out of your presentation before you build it.

2) Give people enjoyable things to do: yes, I know we’re all serious hard-working professionals but on the basis that we’re all trapped in this airless room for the next two days enduring back-to-back powerpoint GIVE US A BREAK! – Unless you are fantastically entertaining then almost anything is better than listening to you talk continuously: watching an illustrative video clip, talking to other people, drawing pictures, checking your blackberry, exchanging amusing anecdotes. Personally, if I am speaking for forty minutes I reckon on having at least four things that I know the audience will enjoy doing and have at least some relevance to what I am saying. And here’s the important bit: this is not the same as giving people thing to do for the sake of it. Many speakers seem to think it’s fine to break after 30 minutes and say ‘Ok, I want you all to brainstorm this on your tables’, followed shortly by ‘Ok everyone – stop what you are doing – sorry we don’t have time for feedback’ which is the conference equivalent of crumpling into a ball your student’s work as soon as they have finished it. For this reason, most of us have learned to ignore the instructions and chat with people we have just met instead.

3) Remember that your feelings are transmitted directly to the audience:  an odd thing about human beings is that they are hard-wired to mirror the emotions of the people around us (mirror neurons). When we look back at our school days, we often remember fondly the teachers who had real enthusiasm. Can you remember a teacher who seemed bored by their own lessons? I bet you can. What was it like for you? When you get up to present, you are performing. You need to be brimming with enthusiasm and life, passionate about the work you are doing, overflowing with energy and inquisitiveness. If you are, you might be able to hold people’s attention for ten minutes at a stretch. If you don’t believe me go and look at Sir Ken Robinson’s videos on the TED site. His videos are amongst the most popular – and his competitors are no less than the greatest minds in the world. Why is he so good? He only has a couple of interesting points to make – but it is his delivery that makes him so effective. And it’s not just ‘showmanship’ – it’s the passion and humour that carries the information and makes it memorable and convincing. How would you characterise most speakers you have seen? Anxious? Tired? Dispassionate?

4) Challenge People: constantly challenge people – right from the outset “What do you think about…?”, “Which of you has…?” – and actually listen to what people have to say, rather than just the tokenistic ‘show of hands’ technique (although this is better than nothing). Keep people on their toes, and make it clear that they are participants – that they may be required to contribute at any point. It’s not just a technique: when you get up in front of people your head swells and you can find yourself forgetting that many of the people in the audience may have something important to contribute.

5) Tell Stories: I hear a lot of people talking about the value of ‘storytelling’ but I suspect that for many it’s just a buzzword. Why? Why tell stories? The answer is simple: stories give factual information episodic and affective context. Instead of saying ‘If you press this button X will happen’ we can say ‘I remember this one time when my friend Bob pressed this button…’ and immediately we build the suspense. Human beings encode information with Affective Context (see post below) – unlike computers which encode facts. So presentations which are stuffed full of facts are like a protein diet: most of it just goes straight through. And it’s not pretty.

6) Get the text off the screen: ok - for starters if people are reading then they are not listening to you (this is explained by Baddeley’s Working Memory Model). You would have thought that by now people would have learned not to put loads of text on powerpoint slides. Not so. They seem only to have learned how to say ‘I know you can’t read this at the back’. Stop it. We’re probably only going to remember two things at best from your presentation – so if you’ve got a load of stuff on your slides then the chances are that you are only trying to impress us in some way. Again – look at the TED site. Most of the speakers have no slides whatsoever. Where they do (such as Hans Rosling’s Gapminder) it’s because the thing they are talking about is actually the thing on the screen. It’s worth asking yourself the question ‘If all my slides were taken away, could I still deliver a good presentation?’

7) Show it to us: don’t just tell us how wonderful your thing is; we’re cynical, we’ve been there, done that. Show us the thing itself – or as close as you can. Which would you rather do: go for a test drive or sit for an hour listening to the salesman go through the technical specifications? Some of the best sessions I have been to are ones where I got to play with the thing (such as Jane Hart’s – ‘top tools’ session or Sudhir Giri’s Google sessions) They actually spoke very little. But even presentations where you just get to see the work (such as Peter Butler’s Dare2Share system) are infinitely better than just hearing about the rollout and ROI data.

8) Practice: it takes time to get good, and maybe practice makes perfect – but we don’t want you to be perfect. I don’t want to listen to an automaton reciting a script, just someone who knows what they are doing, cares about what they are doing and has the confidence to share it with us. Many people new to speaking don’t realise that anxiety changes the brain and makes you forget stuff you know inside out. Those who do know this over-react and script their sessions verbatim – putting in too much content. My advice would be: know exactly what you are going to say to start, know exactly how you want to wrap up and then have bullet-points for the stuff in between. Practice your presentation – pace up and down in your hotel room and go over what you will say at each point. Once you have settled into your stride, so long as you know your stuff, you will be fine.

9) Smile and be confident: just smile. When you feel anxious, forcing yourself to smile reduces that anxiety and puts the audience at ease. Confident speakers are almost always good speakers – they are not just confident because they are good; it works the other way too. For this reason, many speakers will plan to open with an amusing anecdote. It helps us all. If you really want to be good, watch yourself on film – you will be amazed you different you seem from the audience’s perspective. Make sure you do a technical run-through before you present. I have lost count of the times a capable and well-prepared speaker has gone to pieces because the technology let them down. Have working versions of your presentation on your laptop, on a flash drive, and on Google docs. That way you are bomb-proof.

10) Have a structure, make it clear: your presentation structure will, of course, be obvious to you. But to many of your audience it may simply feel like ‘one damn slide after another’. You’re looking to avoid the following reactions “Sweet Jesus – how much more of this stuff is there?” or “What is he/she blabbering on about now?”. You may blabber on, you may have 57 slides – but at least people will know how much more they have to endure and what topic it is that you are boring them about. This will make you better than the other nine speakers. Set out a clear, simple structure at the outset and make it obvious where you are as you talk. No more than five things (headings, key points etc.) is always a good rule of thumb since short term memory is about seven items – leaving your audience room for thinking about coffee and the person they would really like to be talking to.

 Well, that's it. I can't think of any more right now, but I'm hoping that you will let me know of any that I have missed. Not everyone has it in them to be great speakers, but I'm sure that most of us are capable of being better speakers. Hope this helps.