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If You Use PowerPoint You Need to Know This!

April 27th, 2008 |2 comments

PowerPoint (or any other projection software) can be a great to enhance your message. When used correctly it can help you explain your message in a clearer way that helps your audience understand your message and learn even more.

But a constant problem that many speakers have when using PowerPoint is that they don’t know where to put their notes. To get around this, they put their notes on the screen and read from this. Unfortunately this has awful consequences for the audience. See here for examples.

But there is a way around this. The secret has been part of the PowerPoint suit for many years, but has been kept a secret from most of us. The secret uses a function of PowerPoint and a function of the operating software on your computer. As I use Microsoft XP, I will talk in terms of that.

The first step is to prepare your presentation in PowerPoint (or Imppress, Keynote, Freelance or any other program) using the “Presenters Notes”. In PowerPoint this is called “Normal View”. In this setting you can create your slide for your audience and make any notes that you will need. You can also see what slides you have in your presentation.

The second part of the secret is to set your computer up to run on Dual monitors. First ensure that you have your computer attached to the projector or this wont work. In XP this is done by following these steps:

  1. Go to the “desktop”
  2. Right Click and select Properties
  3. In the Properties box select the ‘settings’ tab
  4. Ensure that 2 monitors are showing (if they are not you will not be able to use this functionality.)
  5. Click on the second monitor
  6. Check the box towards the bottom of the settings box that says (something like) “Display monitor on this screen”

Once you have completed this set up you will be able to have the audience see the slides that you want them to see and you will be able to see your notes, the slides that the audience can see, what slides you have just shown and also the next slide to come.

By setting up the computer this way you will be able to control your notes, presentation and your message to achieve the results you are after.

You can get more info on this from Microsoft by following this link http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/powerpoint/HA010565471033.aspx?pid=CL100626991033

‘Til next time,

Cheers

Darren Fleming

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What is the Temperature of Your Presentation

April 18th, 2008 |1 comment

One of the most disheartening things that can happen to a trainer is to look out at your audience and see half of them asleep, while the other half struggles to stay awake!

While I believe that it is the presenters duty to provide a stimulating presentation that will keep the audience involved, there are other tricks that you can use in your corporate training room to keep your audience awake.

The easiest is to control the temperature of the room. By setting the temperature at around 19 — 20 deg Celsius you audience will notice that the room is cool. When they are slightly cool, your audience is more likely to remain attentive.

If the room tempreature is any warmer then this, your audience will become warm and sleepy. After all, it is easiest to sleep in a warm position.

And when this becomes company policy, you can include this in your briefing instructions to attendees. Tell them that to get the most out of the training they should wear long pants and bring a light jumper or jacket. This is an unusual request that will stick in their mind.

If they are advised in advance they can come prepared.

‘Til next time,

Cheers

Darren Fleming

 


The Focus of PowerPoint

April 18th, 2008 |3 comments

Yesterday I was in a three hour lecture where the speaker used a ppt presentation as the basis of her message.  As I watched her speak, I noticed that her attention was constantly being diverted between three places. The result of this was that she found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying.

Where was she focusing?

She was trying to focus on three places at once. She was focusing on the screen where the audience was looking. She was focusing on her computer to control her presentation. And finally she was focusing on us – the audience. The trouble is that when you divert your conscious attention to so many places all at once, you are unable to pay adequate attention to any of them.

As a result of her constantly changing her focus, she constantly had to change her thought patterns. Even though the changes were only slight, it was enough to distupt the flow.

Why does this happen? It is because of the way the brain is structured. Whilst all visual information is processed in the visual cortex, there are different parts of the visual cortex that process different types of visual information. By constantly changing visual inputs in such a disjointed and random matter, she had to re-establish her thought patterns after each change. This caused he to lose her place for an instant with annoying consequences.

What was the result? In 5 minutes I counted 64 ‘filler words’. These included the traditional ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, but also she said, ‘I guess’ a lot. Now when you are a speaker – and speaking as an expert – telling your audience that you are ‘guessing’ is not good for your credibility.

At 64 filler words in 5 minutes, she spoke an extra 2304 words for the three hour presentation. That is about 15 minutes of speaking! That’s huge!

If she was able to place her attention on the audience and forget about looking at her computer and screen, she would have made a much stronger connection with her audience, reduced the number of filler words used, and been able to remember her presentation more clearly and concisely.

Til next time.

Cheers

Darren Fleming

 


What the Dentist Taught Me About the Fear of Public Speaking

April 11th, 2008 |1 comment

As a public Speaking coach I don’t have the same fear of public Speaking that many people have, but this does not mean that I don’t know irrational fear. While I do get nervous before a major speaking gig, I do not suffer the anxiety that many people do. I suffer anxiety in other scary situations — namely visiting the dentist!

Nine months ago I broke a filling in one of my teeth. While it did not hurt it was uncomfortable and was hard to clean. Instead of going and getting it fixed I put it off hoping that the problem would somehow magically fix itself. Strangely enough it didn’t. So after 9 months of avoidance behaviour, this morning I had the tooth repair.

As I was lying in the chair, feet raised to the ceiling, I could feel my level of anxiety increase. The dentist had not even entered the room and I was feeling nervous. When the dentist arrived and took a look in my mouth, he calmly said, ‘Lets make you numb and fix it up.’ His calm words scared the life out of me. I started to squirm in the chair. My breathing became shallow and erratic. I closed my eyes to ensure that I did not see the massive needle that he was using. I had started to panic.

It was then that it dawned on me that this is how many people feel when they have to give a speech. So I started to control my breathing as I tell my clients to. After a minute or so, I was feeling much better. Then, as hte deentist was examining my other teeth, I started to realise that this was not so bad after all. No I do not like needles or the dentist, I realsied that the dentist was there for my benefit. He wasn’t passing judgement – he was just there as part of the process. He didn’t want me to have a broken filling or to need any other work. he wanted me to have healthy teeth, and set about me getting them.

As a nervous speaker, our relationship with the audience is pretty much the same as a nervous patient with his dentist. The audience wants to see us doing well. After all, they don’t want a presentation that is boring. And like the dentist, they understand that sometimes things go wrong. Despite your best efforts, sometimes you will lose your place when speaking, sometimes you will drop your notes or sometimes you will get the order messed up. In the same way that a dentist knows that despite your best efforts, sometimes you will need a filling, a clean or a broken filling replaced. That’s just a part of life!

So please don’t be so harsh on yourself if you are a nervous speaker. Everyone gets nervous or anxious in one situation or another. The trick is to realise that you can over come the fear and emerge the other side better for it. When you do you will be able experience the situation with less anxiety, and who knows, maybe even enjoy it one day.

‘Til next time

Darren Fleming

(with a great smile)

www.executivespeaking.com.au


Breathe Easy to Stop Nervousness

March 29th, 2008 |1 comment

Have you ever experienced any of these symptoms before you have to speak?

  • Dry mouth
  • Sweaty palms
  • Shaky hands
  • Knocking knees
  • Accelerated speech
  • Thinking at a million miles an hour, and
  • A desire for a nervous wee!

Well you are not alone! These are some of the many common symptoms of nervousness. Some of the more severe symptoms can include extreme reactions such as sleepless nights, hyperventilating before and during your speech, as well as being physically ill.

If you suffer some of the more mild symptoms, there is good news available. You can control these with breathing. If you suffer them more serious symptoms, these breathing skills will form part of an overall approach to controlling your nervousness.

To help control your nervousness, it is important to understand that what our body does is controlled by our brain. Even the involuntary responses that we have are controlled by our brain. Therefore if we can control our brain, we can control our body.

One of the best ways to slow the brain down (and therefore the rest of the body) is to focus on your breathing. When we are nervous we tend to breathe in short sharp breaths. This gets the oxygen in quickly, and this helps us become more agile (this is a throw back to the old flight or fight reflex).

To reduce your nervousness, breathe in 5 long, slow deeps breaths. Take about 5 seconds to breath in, and then just let the air run out of your lungs. Feel your shoulders drop down as the air leaves your lungs. Make sure that you fill your lungs as much as possible. Breathe right down from the diaphragm, and make sure you fill you shoulders as well. It is amazing how much air you can fit in when you straighten your back and fill the top of your lungs.

By following this simple technique, you will find your nervousness subsiding. Just remember to not breathe too quickly as you may hyperventilate! Also, if you breathe in too quickly you will not get the relaxing and calming affects of the breathing.

‘Til next time,

Cheers

Darren Fleming

 

https://executivespeaking.com.au/

 


Perfect PowerPoint

March 26th, 2008 |3 comments

PowerPoint has become the modern tool of today’s corporate trainer. PowerPoint can be a great tool when used properly and the following tips will help you with it!

  1. Before you start presenting, ask if you really need PowerPoint. Did you know that before PowerPoint (and Freelance etc) came along, trainers and speakers spoke without it! If they needed a visual aid they used Over-head projectors or white boards. Sometimes they used nothing. There is no rule saying that you have to use PowerPoint! At your next conference, shock you audience by speaking without PowerPoint! That will certainly get their attention.
  2. What are you putting on your slides? PowerPoint works best with pictures, diagrams and data intensive information that cannot be easily explained with words alone. By keeping the text to a minimum you will be able to keep the focus on you and your message.
  3. Follow the 10/20/30 rule. No more than 10 slides for a 20 minute presentation (that’s 2 minutes per slide) and no smaller than 30 font for the text. Yes, that is big text! This forces you to simplify your slides!
  4. Handouts – Ideally your handouts SHOULD NOT BE your presentation slides. Consider having three sets of notes/slides:
    1. Audience slides – these are the slides that the audience sees. Keep them simple and relevant. Also avoid over doing the text.
    2. Your notes – these are the notes that you have to look at. They should have enough detail for you to remember what to say.
    3. Audience handouts – If you choose to have audience handouts, there is nothing to say that they have to look like the slides on the screen. In fact, there is a great argument that says that your notes should be much more detailed than the notes on the screen. After all, the notes are to re-enforce and also EXPAND on what you spoke about.
  5. Another way to interact with your audience is to give them electronic notes. Send them a link to your website/database/data warehouse where they can get notes. This will save a heap of printing, time wasting and save your notes going into the bin by those that only took the notes because they were there. If you are an external speaker/trainer, you can direct people to your website or blog to show your other products/services!
  6. Remember that your goal as a speaker at a conference or a training session or a team meeting is to engage and connect with your audience. If you can achieve this without PowerPoint then FANTASTIC!

Til next time

Cheers

Darren Fleming

 

https://executivespeaking.com.au


Persuading Tough Audience – Use One of Them!

March 24th, 2008 |1 comment

We all have to communicate with tough audiences, and recently I had to persuade the toughest: my 2 year old daughter Alice.

As anyone who has had children in childcare will know, children seem to pick up every kind of cold and sniffle that is going around, then they bring them home to share with mum and dad! On Monday, Alice had bought home a head cold and by Tuesday night she had developed a nasty cough along with a very sore throat. She had become very worked up and was not wanting to cooperate with anyone. She was just sitting on Mums knee and crying uncontrollably.

To help ease her symptoms, we wanted to give her some medicine. However, in the state that she was in, she wanted nothing to do with it.

After many requests for her to take it (and the occasional attempt to force it down her throat!) we decided to give some medicine to Teddy. Teddy had no problems taking the medicine and felt much better after it. Once Alice saw this, she too wanted to take the medicine. She was asleep with in half an hour!

How does this relate to persuading tough Audience? If you are trying to persuade a hostile audience that distrusts you, use someone like the audience to show that you can help them. These are called ‘Third Party Endorsments’ or testimonials.

Why do they work? Well look at the situation from the audiences point of view. If they distrust you, anything you say will be taken as a way of simply selling your point of view so they buy. However, if you can get someone like them (the audience) to say that they have used you, this will add credibility to your message. This will give you a greater chance of persuading them to your message.

To persuade anyone, whether it is through public speaking, sending e-mails, or convincing your 2 year old daughter to take her medicine, you need to be able to appeal to their interests and needs. In the state that Alice was in, she was not convinced that the medicine would work, and was weary of trusting Mum and Dad. However, she knew that Teddy would not lie to her, and when she saw him take it, she knew it would be OK.

Have you ever been in a situation where you have been trying to persuade someone to adopt your ideas? It could happen when you are giving a speech, addressing a meeting or just wanting the family to do what you want to do on the weekend. Instead of trying to brow-beat them into submission, try appealing to what is important to them and showing them how what you propose fits in with what you are saying.

By appealing to their self interest, you will have a greater chance of them wanting to listen and eventually adopt your ideas.

Cheers

Darren Fleming


How to Make Statistics Training Interesting!

March 24th, 2008 |3 comments

I recently had the opportunity to offer some presentation coaching with a client – Trina – who spent her day delivering statistical training. Her area of speciality was ‘imputation’, which looks at how you estimate certain numbers. As you could imagine, you could make the topic very dry and boring without even trying!

As I watched Trina deliver her training, I noticed that the people in the room were actually becoming involved and excited (well OK – Just involved) in what was being presented. Granted the participants were interested in the information, but lets face it, this was the fourth day of a full week of advanced statistical training! People were bound to be tired and over it. Why were these people so interested?

At the end of the training, Trina came up to me and apologised for all the things that she did wrong, and wished that she could do better. She said this was why she needed public speaking coaching. She apologised for holding her notes while she spoke, apologised for being nervous and apologised for being genuinely excited about the topic when no-one else was. What she did not realise was that her excitement for the topic was what made her so successful at her job.

Her enthusiasm for her topic was evident from the start. She told the participants that she was genuinely excited about the statistical Normal Curve, and what could be achieved by understanding it. She told stories of how her last employer ignored the normal curve, and how it cost them dearly. She showed the participants how they could follow the rules and avoid the same dire consequences. This is what involve the audience.

It was her enthusiasm for the subject that really entertained the audience. She was excited, and happy to be training and the carried her through and the audience through what was at times very tough and tedious learning

The fact that she held her notes, was no real distraction. The audience knew it was a technical presentation, and knew there was a lot of information to be presented, and understood that it would have been difficult to present off the top of your head. I gave her a few pointers on how to reduce the number of notes. She had several pages of the notes she was using. These were primarily be PowerPoint slides she was talking to. She could have made these notes more useful to her by reducing the amount that she wrote on them. Simple bullet points instead of full sentences would have helped her.

She also would have been better do not read the slides verbatim. Many public speaking articles have been written about how to use PowerPoint properly. They all suggest that you should not read what is on the slides as it simply distracts the audience. In fact, there is some research coming out of the University of New South Wales suggesting that reading the slides at the same time as people listening to you and reading them reduces the amount that they take in. This is due to cognitive overload. Our brain can only do so much at once and if we have to listen and read the same stuff, we will not taken as much information.

So yes it is possible to make statistics interesting! If Trina could make statistics interesting, can’t you make you all topic interesting? How do you do this? Follow Trina’s example: be excited about your topic; have stories relate to your topic; & show how the stories relate to your audience.

You can get more information about stories in public speaking by following this link to Executive Speaking.

Till later,

Cheers,

Darren

If you liked this, there are more great tips on making any speech interesting at Speak Motivate and Lead.
Australian Public Speaking courses
www.executivespeaking.com.au


Making Money With Your Public Speaking Skills

March 24th, 2008 |no comments

This blog was not created to show people how to become wealthy public speakers. There are plenty of public speaking blogs out there that can do that.

However, I recently came across this piece of advice from Patricia Fripp, a San Francisco based public speaking coach. They points are great and should be spread. You can get more of Patricia Fripps insights here.

Everything in life is about marketing. Weather you are trying to sell an idea at work or your services as a speaker you need to understand what you have to offer others. Below are some points that will help.

Successful marketing means that you identify prospective clients and position yourself in the market so they choose you over your competition. When I sit down with clients who want to position their marketing, I seek the answers to four basic questions:

1. WHO IS YOUR POTENTIAL CLIENT?

Who wants to buy or could be stimulated to want to buy? Who is in a position to buy what you sell? What geographical and financial factors affect this ability? A good way to identify future clients is to listen
— really listen — to those you have now. Their comments, especially negative ones, will help you tailor both your product and your approach to other prospects.

2. WHY WILL THEY WANT TO BUY?

What emotional and physical factors will influence them? I just worked with an east coast psychiatrist who ran a practice with ten other psychiatrists and wanted to position herself. Our conversations quickly disclosed that her community was predominantly upwardly mobile professionals. Many of the women had delayed having children. Due to fertility drugs, a high percentage of families had twins, triplets, or more. We decided to focus her practice on these families, the first practice in the area to do that. How did we do this? First, we realized her potential audience was geographical, that is, in her community rather than regional, national or international. These prospects had distinctive demographics. By appealing to a unique aspect, we hit on her core group. She’s now hugely successful in her practice.

3. WHAT ANGLE SHOULD YOU TAKE? How is your product or service unique?

Why is it perfect for your target audience? How is it different from everyone else’s? How will it fulfill your core group’s needs in a way that no one else can? This is positioning yourself in the market.
(Remember how Avis advertised, “We try harder.”) As an example, when other advertising consultants do presentations, they talk about budgets, print versus TV, soft versus hard sell. I position myself by emphasizing that you start by targeting your audience, positioning your product, and creating distinctive selling propositions. Lots of mom-and-pop businesses, confronted by super stores, can’t compete or even survive unless they find a unique niche to fill.

4. HOW ARE YOU GOING TO SELL IT?

We all know people with great ideas, products, and inventions. They spend a fortune developing this product, but it sits there because they have no idea what to do with it. Is there a system in place to put your product in the customers’ hands and return their money to you? Or do you need to create one?

Cheers

Darren Fleming
Australian Public Speaking courses


Arguing with Whiskey

March 17th, 2008 |no comments

Have you ever struggled with how to structure your message so you will get buy-in from your audience? If you are in a management position you will know what I mean. T0 truly get full buy-in from your audience, you need to get inside their heads and understand what they want and what they are thinking.

One of the greatest examples of understanding your audience comes from the 1933 Mississippi Lawmaker Noah ‘Soggy’ Sweat. During the debate about prohibition he was asked for his thougths on Whiskey. This is what he had to say:

If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.

If when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.

This is my position, and as always, I refuse to be compromised on matters of principle.

This is a classic example of how to structure your message to include certian parts of your audience.

The strength of this speech lies in the listeners opinion. For example, if you are against whiskey then you would love the first half of his speech. If you were for whiskey, then you would hold on to the second part of his speech. But the clever part is that the speech shows the strength of the opposing views. This helps to bring the two sides together.

How can you use this in the workplace?

If you are presenting an argument, consider the opposing sides view. This is often called playing the Devils Advocate. By understanding where you audience is positioned, you will be equipped to present an argument that they will accept and adopt.

‘Til next time.

Cheers

Darren Fleming – Australia’s public Speaking Coach

https://executivespeaking.com.au


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