In my last post on presentation handouts I suggested that it’s best to distribute your handout before your presentation. The comments to that post identified three situations when it makes sense to distribute your handout after the presentation. As not everyone wades through comments I’ve decided to highlight them in this post:

1. Surprise

Mike Slater

Personally I don’t like giving out handouts in presentations as there is usually some element of “surprise”. I “reveal” points during the presentation and if the audience had copies of the slides (or even a more detailed handout) in advance the effect is ruined.

Adam Lawrence

We use surprise as one of our main tools in presentations. With a handout – goodbye surprise and the attention boost it guarantees. Put it like this – would you want the full plot and punchline written on the back of your DVD cover?

2. Brainstorming and discussion

Cathy Moore

I use visual slides to set up a dilemma and then have participants brainstorm how to solve the dilemma. Then I reveal slides that show some solutions, and we discuss how those fit in with the solutions we brainstormed. If participants had the handout at the beginning, the brainstorming about dilemmas would be empty, because all the participants would have to do is look at the next few slides and see the suggested answers.

3. Co-creation of presentation

Adam Lawrence

We try to keep our presentations highly flexible, and to follow up on ideas that come from the dialogue with the audience. Any preprepared handout is dated the moment we start.

Instead, we sit down later to produce a handout that reflects the true content of the session, and the folks ideally get it some days afterwards. The advantages:

It doesn’t get lost in the pile of mostly useless paperwork from that conference day or whatever;

It serves to refresh the memory of the session just at the moment it would otherwise be forgotten (ie a few days later); and

As said, it reflects the true content, not the planned content.

Thank you, Cathy, Mike and Adam for your contribution.

Phil Waknell has written an excellent blog post detailing his reasons for distributing handouts after a presentation (it has also many other excellent tips).

Have you got another good reason for distributing handouts after the presentation? Add it in the comments of this post.

Related posts:

1. 13 Best Practice Tips for Effective Presentation Handouts
2. How to keep to time during your presentation
3. How to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say

Your presentation handout is the lasting concrete manifestation of your presentation. It’s an important part of the total experience for the audience:

But most of us focus on preparing what happens during the presentation, not what happens afterwards. Here are the benefits of having handouts:

Benefits for the presenter

1. They allow you to cut down on the amount of material you cover in your presentation and so not commit information overload.
2. They allow you to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say.
3. Audience members will have a concrete reminder making your presentation more memorable.
4. Audience members can easily contact you later.

Benefits for audience members

1. They allow audience members to relax about having to note down what you’re saying.
2. If they like taking notes, they’ve got a place to do it.
3. If they’re inspired by your topic, they’ve got more information on it.
4. If they want to refresh themselves later on what you covered they’ve got a place to go.

Tips for Presentation Handouts

1. Prepare your handouts in plenty of time

Don’t leave it till the last moment to create your handout. I’ve been guilty of this. We’re most concerned about the actual presentation and not making a fool of ourselves up on the stage so you work on what you’re going to say and the slides, and then 30 mins before your presentation you realise you should have a handout and hurriedly put something together. Handouts are much too important to be relegated to an afterthought.

2. Don’t just print out your slides

This is lazy and not effective. If your slides are bullet-point slides (not recommended) then they will often be cut-down sentences which will no longer make sense to the reader a week later. And if they are visual slides (recommended) then they’re also unlikely to make sense without additional text. If you’re presenting with visual PowerPoint slides, one of the easiest ways of creating a handout is to type the text of the handout in the “Notes” pane of the PowerPoint edit screen. Then print your slides as “Notes”. You’ll have an effective handout.

3. Ensure your handout reflects your presentation

An audience member should be able to relate the handout to the presentation they’ve just attended. If you use the Notes pane of PowerPoint as I’ve suggested above this will happen naturally as you’ll be guided by the visuals you’re using in the presentation. You handout should have the same title as your presentation and should follow the same structure so that audience members can easily find the information they want.

4. Add more information

Presentations are not a good format for transferring a lot of information. However, they are good for inspiring people to find out more about a topic. That extra information can be in the handout. And if you’re the sort of person who wants to tell the audience everything you know about the topic… you can put it in the handout.

5. Include references

If you’re citing research do include the references in the handout. For most presentations (scientific presentations to a scientific audience would be an exception), don’t clutter up your presentation or your slides with references. But do be able to say: “The reference for this research is in your handout.” Let your audience know where they can find out more: books, websites, blogs etc.

6. Consider creating an action sheet

Handouts are a great place to help people put ideas from your presentation into action. You could either list a series of actions that people can take, or provide a worksheet that people fill in on what actions they will take as a result of your presentation. Have people fill in the action sheet near the end of your presentation.

7. Make your handout stand-alone

The handout may be passed onto people who were not at your presentation. Or an audience member may look at it a year from now when they’ve forgotten most of your presentation. Make sure that it will make sense to them. For people who weren’t present include brief credibility-establishing information about you.

8. Provide white space

Some people like to take notes during a presentation. Provide plenty of white space (or even some blank pages at the back) so that they can take notes on the handout and so keep all the information related to your presentation in one place.

9. Make your handout look professional

The handout is the concrete reminder of your presentation. It may also get passed onto other people who were not at your presentation. So it should enhance the perception people have of you:

• Have someone proofread it
• Create a consistent look and feel with your brand (this may include a logo and colors)

10. Consider what additional resources you can provide for your audience

You’re not limited to paper. My bioethics teacher friend who presents at bioethics and education conferences across the globe provides each of her attendees with a DVD with lesson plans and resources.

11. Consider creating a webpage

Cliff Atkinson suggests creating a “home page” for your presentation in his book The Backchannel. If you don’t have a website, you could create a squidoo lens or a Facebook Fan page. Or if you’d like to do more than that, create a wiki website (try pbworks or wikispaces) or use blog software. Both of these can be done for free and just a little technical courage (techphobics shouldn’t try this). All of these options allow readers to comment on what you’ve written, so it’s a great way of continuing the conversation with audience members. For instance, audience members can ask you questions they weren’t able to ask at the time.

If you decide to go the web way, you can cut down the hard copy handout to one page with the most important points from your presentation, your contact details and the web address.

12. Distribute the handout at the beginning of your presentation

This is a perennial topic of debate amongst presenters. Some people are concerned that if they distribute the handout first, people will stop listening and start leafing through it. The problem here is not the handout, it’s that your presentation is not engaging enough.

Not distributing it till after the presentation suggests that you think you know best how people should pay attention to your information. Let your audience decide for themselves.

Recent research suggests that providing handouts to university students before the lecture does not harm their learning.

Update: In the comments to this post, Cathy Moore, Mike Slater and Adam Lawrence have identified three good reasons for distributing your handout after your presentation. I’ve highlighted these reasons in a new post: Three good reasons to distribute your handout after your presentation.

13. Do tell people if it’s not in the handout

Finally, if you go off on a tangent in reply to a question, do let them know that the answer is not in the handout.

Related posts:

1. Three good reasons to distribute your handout after the presentation
2. 8 presentation tips to make your eye contact more powerful
3. How to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say

And as the curtain rose on the first night, I had a flash of intense vertigo, like I was going to pass out and couldn’t find my center. It sent me into a cold-sweat panic.

This is a quote from Jason Alexander, most well-known for his role as George Costanza in Seinfeld, from a book called Stage Fright: 40 Stars Tell You How They Beat America’s #1 Fear. I’ve been sent the book to review and I’ve highlighted below some of the best tips for overcoming stage fright when you’re presenting.

1. It’s not about you

Many presentation coaches say “The slides are not the presentation, you are”. I agree with this up to the point of saying the slides are not the presentation. But neither are you. The presentation is the experience that you create for the audience.

Jason Alexander attributes his recovery to learning this:

When I began to make the story the most important thing, I became much less the focus of my concerns. I realized that I was one small element on the stage, working with my colleagues to tell our audience a story. The information is what people want, the experience is what they want. They’re not there for me.

2. Dealing with things that go wrong

It’s nice to visualize your presentation going perfectly, but it’s not reality. And if you only visualize things going well, it can really throw you when they don’t.

Lawrence Beron, actor and stand-up comedian, says:

Part of the preparation is foreseeing the possibility of problems and not being thrown when they occur. Because they are going to occur. I don’t even call it “going wrong”. It’s what’s going to happen.

3. Let go of people liking you

This is what most of us are really concerned about – will the audience like us and what we have to say. It’s a natural reaction to the public speaking situation but not useful to reducing your nerves. Carlos Alazraqui, another actor and stand-up comedian says:

If you’re comfortable with yourself, confident in your abilities, and you’re not worried about the outcome – whether or not people like you – that allows you to relax. [emphasis added]

4. Play with the importance of the event

Jim Bouton, baseball player and now professional speaker, used to get very nervous before games. Until Ralph Terry, a veteran pitcher told him:

“When you’re out there on the mound today, kid, just remember one thing: No matter what happens, win or lose, five hundred million Chinese don’t care.” [quote slightly changed to remove potentially offensive words]

But when Jim relaxed too much he had to take the opposite approach:

There have been some situations where I didn’t feel nervous, I didn’t feel butterflies, and I had to manufacture butterflies to get a better performance. While pitching with the yankees, for example, games became routine after a while. So I would create an imaginary dire circumstance, I’d put the welfare of mankind at stake.

Now with public speaking, if he doesn’t feel nervous:

I spend some time alone, and talk to myself about the importance of what’s coming up.

5. You should be making mistakes

Jim Bouton was coaching a professional piano player who would get so nervous during performances that she would mistakes.

I said “What are you afraid of?” and she said “I’m afraid of making a mistake.” I said “Well, you should be making a few mistakes.” She said What do you mean?” I said “ If you never make a mistake, that means you’re not playing all out. You’re not playing as open and free as you can. You’re playing too tight, too controlled – that’s not the way to play. You’d be better off having a full-out recital with half a dozen mistakes, than having a mistake-free boring recital. Because the one in which you’ve allowed yourself to make mistakes is going to be more dynamic, more powerful and more musical.”

So it with speaking. If your goal is to make a word-perfect, mistake-free presentation you’re likely to give a boring presentation because the life will have gone out of it.

These are just some of the nuggets from the interviews in Stage Fright: 40 Stars Tell You How They Beat America’s #1 Fear. What have you learnt that has helped you to get over stage fright?

Do you have a fear of missing out something critical from your presentation? This concern can sabotage your presentation in three ways:

1. To alleviate your concern you put everything you want to say on your slides
2. You write a script and read from it.
3. You spend the whole presentation worrying instead of connecting with your audience.

There’s a simple way of dealing with this:

Have only one thing that is really important to say.

And then make it impossible for you to forget to say it.

The one thing that is really important for you to say is called the key message of your presentation. It makes life easier for you because you know there’s only one thing you absolutely have to say and so you’re less concerned about forgetting to say other things. It’s also useful for the audience because there’s only one thing they have to grasp and remember and it provides focus for the presentation.

For help with crafting your key message, see this post: How to craft a memorable key message in 10 minutes.

How to make it impossible not to say it

1. Plan to say your key message several times

Plan to say your key message near the beginning of the presentation, refer back to it in your presentation, and say it at the end. Then if you skip over it by mistake at one point, you’ll be saying it elsewhere, so it won’t matter.

That repetition is also useful for your audience.

2. Put the key message on a slide

Yes, it’s OK to have some words on a slide. And if it’s one of the few slides with words on in your presentation, then it will help people in your audience to remember the words. And if you forget to say your key message, it’s on the slide. So it’s helpful both for you and your audience.

BIG WARNING: This is not an excuse to put everything you want to say on a slide. If you put everything you want to say on a slide, nothing stands out. It no longer works.

What about the rest of your presentation

So yes, there is more to your presentation than the key message. But everything else that you want to say is “nice-to-say” rather than “must-say”. Here are some tips to help you remember what you want to say:

1. Use notes

Notes help you remember what you want to say. If you’re concerned about missing something out, it makes sense to have some notes to keep you on track. I see no shame in having notes. If you have a mind blank, notes are the safety net that can get you started again. For help with constructing your notes see this post: The lost art of notes.

2. Rehearse

Rehearsal is always useful. Rehearse the transitions between your points. This is because you tend to miss something out when you’ve just finished a point and are struggling to think about what comes next.

3. Have a handout

You can let go of worrying about missing something out by having a handout or website to refer people to. If you forget to cover it they can look it up.

Now you can focus on connecting with your audience, rather than be constantly worrying about missing something out.

Related posts:

1. How to stop waffling once and for all
2. 13 Best Practice Tips for Effective Presentation Handouts
3. How getting in the beam makes you a better presenter

Waffling happens when your brain stops working but your mouth keeps going.

The solution to waffling is simple: When you have nothing ready to say, stop, look at your notes, work out what you to say, look up again and start talking.

Easy to say. Difficult to do. That’s because when you start waffling, rather than thinking logically about what you should do, you’re driven to keep talking.

The voices that keep you waffling

You’re driven by voices inside your head. They’re saying to you:

“You must keep talking during your presentation. If there’s any silence that would be awful and uncomfortable and you couldn’t stand that.”

“Don’t take your eyes off the audience. You’ve got to keep looking at them all the time.”

“Don’t look at your notes. If you look at your notes people will think you don’t know this stuff. You’ll look like a loser.”

Until you rid yourself of these voices, you’ll keep waffling. So let’s examine each of these voices and see if they’re true.

“You must keep talking. Silence is horrible”

Have you heard the public advice speaking that pausing is good! Hmmm… pausing=silence. Audiences like pausing (silence), because during that pause they can process what you’ve just said. Studies of people listening to classical music while having their brains scanned in MRI machines show that they’re brains light up during the silences between movements. That indicates that they’re brains are actively processing during those silences.

You can probably get this at an intellectual level. But still that silence can feel horrible when you’re standing in front of a group. It feels like the silence is stretching forever. To get over your fear of silence at a gut level, you need to experience the silence from an audience perspective. The way to do that is to video yourself presenting in front of a friendly audience of a few friends or family. Pause until you start feeling uncomfortable. Ask your audience how they experienced the pause. Sometimes they may even say “what pause?” Now watch back your pause. How long was it really?

Practice this until you can pause for about 5 seconds. That’s how long you’ll need to look at your notes and work out what you want to say. That’s what it will take for you to stop waffling.

“Keep an eye on the audience”

As well as stopping talking, you’ll also need to look down to look at your notes. This can be quite hard to do for more than a millisecond. That’s because when you’re speaking in front of a group, you’re in a high-stress situation and the stress is caused by the threat of the group judging you. And when we’re threatened our instinct is to keep an eye on the threat. So to look down for more than a millisecond you have to override your instinct to keep looking at the threat. Practice looking down in front of your friendly audience.

Because that’s what  it takes to stop waffling – taking your eye off the audience so that you can look at your notes.

“Don’t look at your notes”

Yep, in an ideal world, we’d all have a perfect memory and none of us would need notes. But that’s not the case.

You may look at professional speakers, see that they don’t use notes and assume that you shouldn’t either. But politicians have teleprompters and paid professional speakers deliver the same presentation over and over again. Don’t measure yourself against them.

Which is the greater evil? Looking at your notes or waffling? If you want to stop waffling, get used to the idea of looking at your notes. That’s what it will take.

So next time you realize the words aren’t ready and you might start waffling:

1. Stop talking
2. Look down at your notes
3. Work out what you want to say next
4. Look up again and find someone to talk to
5. Start talking.

Easy… once you’ve got rid of those voices.

Related posts:

1. How to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say
2. How to keep to time during your presentation
3. 8 presentation tips to make your eye contact more powerful

A long time ago I attended a presentation on ostrich farming. It was pleasantly interesting because I love animals but I didn’t really get the point – after all I wasn’t planning on being an ostrich farmer. At the end of the presentation the presenter said “And that’s why you should invest in ostrich farming.” If I had known that up front I would have listened to the presentation in an entirely different way. The presentation structure didn’t work for me.

It seems natural to structure your presentation with the conclusion at the end of your presentation and some articles on presentation structure advise this. But most of the time (exceptions below), it’s more effective to tell your audience your conclusion near the beginning of your presentation. Here’s why:

1. It gives your audience the big picture

In Brain Rules, John Medina argues that we learn and remember best when we:

Start with the key ideas and, in a hierarchical fashion, form the details around these larger notions.

This is because we remember things best by forming mental models or schema. So if you provide your audience with a hierarchical framework starting with your conclusion they will understand and remember better.

2. It enables people to make decisions

Decision-makers want to hear your recommendation upfront. They don’t have the time to be taken on a mystery tour. Managers who engage Effective Speaking to run courses for their staff often tell us ‘I want to know immediately what they’re telling me.” Once they have your recommendation they are then ready to assess your arguments.

3. It allows for repetition

When you establish your conclusion at the beginning of your presentation, you can then weave it throughout the presentation, showing how each point that you cover relates and supports it.

4. It holds people’s attention

This may seem counterintuitive. After all why should they listen if they already know the conclusion? However, as presentation design agency m62 argue:

By presenting the main arguments analytically [conclusion first] you create intrigue in the audience, increasing your audience’s attention.

Showing facts and figures to support an eventual conclusion often lowers the concentration levels of the audience prompting a ‘What’s the point of this?’ mind set.

Good reasons to put your conclusion in your closing

There are some situations where it’s effective to leave your conclusion till the end of your presentation.

1. Create mystery

If you can structure your presentation by posing, and then unravelling a puzzle you can have the audience eating out of your hands. Malcolm Gladwell is a master at this both in his books and in his presentations. You could use it effectively in a keynote presentation (as Gladwell does) or in a teaching/training environment as an introduction to a larger topic. This does require some skill to avoid people tuning out if they can’t follow you. For most presenters it will work best to use this strategy for a segment of your talk – rather than the whole talk.

2. Create ownership

In a training environment, you can set up an exercise which enables people to come to their own conclusions. Debrief the exercise by asking participants what they learnt from it. This does require skillful design of the exercise (so that participants learn from it what you want them to learn) and skillful facilitation to draw out their learnings. Done well it’s a powerful method of creating ownership of the learning.

Bad reasons to leave your conclusion till the end

You may be tempted to leave your conclusion till the end for not so good reasons:

1. You’re concerned that people will stop paying attention once they know your conclusion

As I argued above, this is rarely the case. People are more likely to tune out when they don’t have the big picture.

2.You’re concerned that your audience might disagree with your conclusion

If you have to deliver bad news you may feel tempted to leave the bad news till the end. This is rarely a good idea. A classic example: a representative of a New Zealand government agency made a presentation to a group of commercial retailers about changes which were going to take place to their commercial area. He described how it was going to be revamped and made beautiful and attract a lot more foot traffic. He closed with this statement ‘” And that’s why your businesses will have to be shut down for six months.” You can bet they were furious.

What do you think? When do you put your conclusion in the opening? When do you leave your conclusion to the closing?

Related posts:

1. When can you break the “rule” of a three-part structure?
2. How to write a presentation title that gets people flocking to your session
3. 7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation

Photo credit: m o d e

Last week I received a moving and inspiring email from a reader about how he overcame his fear of public speaking. Dave has given me permission to share his story and I hope you find it inspiring too. It reinforces the point that you can learn to be a confident public speaker – you don’t have to be born with the gift of the gab.

“I grew up as the world’s shyest child… literally. At my 8th grade graduation banquet from my little rural school, I was required to give a speech to my 25 or so classmates. I had never heard a speech before! I had NO idea what I was doing. But I wrote out about 13 lines of stuff (history will never know what, because not even I remember) on an index card and memorized it. From the time of the “invitation” to speak up until that moment of horror, I was, in fact, horrified to the point of being almost physically ill.

I got to about the second line of the “speech” and absolutely, totally forgot the remainder. I sat down… utterly humiliated. (In retrospect, I now realize the teachers, etc. should have given me more guidance, but that’s water under the bridge.) I pledged to myself that I would NEVER allow myself to be that humiliated again (and my second speech, probably 10-minutes in length, at the graduation ceremony a few night’s later was, although not an Academy Awards moment, still not a source of humiliation). [In proof-reading this, it just occurred to me that my own speech was the first speech I ever heard! LOL]

When I reached high school, I noticed Speech classes were offered. I would have dropped out of school rather than have had to take one of those classes.

I never had a date, because I was too terrified to ask, until I was 25-years old. Thank goodness, I finally asked, and married the world’s most incredible woman.

To make a long story VERY short, years later I became a minister and, of course, had to stand before sizeable congregations to preach. (Don’t giggle just yet!). Fortunately, by then I had received intensive training in my subject matter and in preaching, but I was still the same shy guy. However, my delivery and fear-level improved miraculously, and I think I know why.

A few years ago, I was standing with the groom’s party about to make our entrance into the sanctuary for the wedding. I happened to be standing near the soloist, and he asked me if I was nervous (which is not unusual, because the entire party is ALWAYS nervous… for the record, groomsmen mercilessly tease the groom about it). The spontaneous reply that came from my mouth astounded even me… I will never forget what I said, and I will always appreciate the truth of it: “Not really. First, I am very well prepared. Secondly, I am ABSOLUTELY and UNAPOLOGETICALLY convinced of what I am going to say. Thirdly, I HAVE done this a few times.”

If I could add to those 3 points today, the 4th would be, “It’s not about me.”

Miracles do happen to shy, little country boys. Today, although basically still shy,  I can stand with ease before any size crowd or ANY person and boldly, effectively, articulately, and convincingly pronounce what I have to say.”

Here’s the message that I take from Dave’s story:

When you change what you tell yourself about public speaking,

your feelings about public speaking will change

After Dave’s first traumatic experiences he was telling himself “I never want to go through that humiliation again.” That had him avoid any form of public speaking or anything which might risk public humiliation. Years later, when he became a minister, his fear virtually disappeared because he was telling himself “What I have to say is more important than my feelings.” The potential for humiliation was no longer central in his mind because of his belief in his message.

If you can relate to how Dave felt as a young boy and as a young man, consider what you are telling yourself about public speaking.

Related posts:

1. The three causes of public speaking fear (and what you can do about them)
2. How to use your fear of public speaking to be a better speaker
3. Anxiety and public speaking: new research

Photo credit: Roger Smith

Getting no feedback from your audience is hard. That’s what happened to a reader, Emma, this week:

I did a 20-minute presentation during a lunch yesterday and I’m feeling pretty terrible about it.  I would love to tell you all of the details about what I felt went wrong but I am sure that would turn into a very long email. I felt like people were looking at me like a deer caught in headlights. Now I feel anxious and embarrassed that maybe people hated the presentation and that I’m ruined now and that everyone will say, oh, don’t get her to speak – she was boring!  I’m feeling like any chance of speaking becoming a paid gig has been eradicated.

There are two parts to recovering from an experience like this. The first is to examine your thinking around the ‘disaster’. The second is to take active steps to recover from it.

Examine your thinking

Part of Emma’s problem is that she’s not had any objective feedback about how this presentation went. In the absence of proper feedback she’s got a stream of negative thoughts swirling round her head. I don’t know whether Emma’s presentation was good or bad, but here’s what I do know:

1. You can’t tell how a presentation went just by looking at people

Emma didn’t get much positive nonverbal feedback from her audience. She felt like they were just starting at her blankly and she was like a deer caught in the headlights. And she made the worst possible assumptions about what the audience were thinking. Like:

“…maybe people hated the presentation.”

“…she was boring.”

Here’s the thing: you can’t tell what an audience member is thinking by the way that they look. A person can look totally blank and yet be intensely interested in what you’re saying. If you went to the front of a movie theater and looked back at the audience you’d probably be looking out on a sea of slack-jawed blank faces.

I’ve been constantly surprised by people in my audience who looked totally bored and disinterested or even cynical and then I’ve talked to them later and found that they enjoyed it and found it interesting and valuable.

When I see a person who looks bored I still have a little voice in my head that pipes up  “Oh you’re bombing, they’re bored.” I fight back against that voice by saying “No, that’s not true. You don’t know that they’re bored. Plenty of times people look bored but are in fact getting lots of value.”  The voice shuts up. That allows me to just get on with delivering my presentation and engaging with people.

2. All audiences are different

Emma is assuming that because her audience looked blank they didn’t like the presentation. But the way an audience reacts to a presentation is often more about the audience than about the presentation. Audiences can react to the same presentation in many different ways. Because I deliver roughly the same material all the time I’m reminded of this constantly. I’ll deliver the same material and get different reactions. Some of the factors that influence their reaction are:

Confidence: an audience full of confident people will generally give you lots of nonverbal feedback – nodding, smiling etc. If they’re not confident they may not even make eye contact with you. For example, in our Introduction to Presenting course which is tailored for nervous beginners I know that some participants are unlikely to make eye contact with me during the first hour. I’m now prepared for this.

How well they know each other: an audience of friends will be very different to an audience of strangers. An audience of friends who trust each other are likely to laugh more, banter with you etc. I experience this when we run an inhouse course for a tightly-knit team compared to a public course where no-one knows each other to begin with.

My partner, Tony, does some amateur acting. The cast deliver exactly the same play night after night. But the audience reaction can be different every night.

What’s the point of this? When you’re in front of people speaking you feel vulnerable and you’re primed to take it personally. But, the audience reaction (or lack of it) is not necessarily about you.

3. Your perceptions can be very faulty

Emma felt flustered and felt that she was bombing. Just because she felt that way doesn’t mean it was true.

I have a good friend who presents regularly all over the world. One particular presentation, things went wrong for her at the start, she got rattled and she thought the whole presentation was an absolute unmitigated disaster. Luckily, on that trip she’d taken her 23 year old daughter with her. Her daughter was able to set her straight and tell her that the presentation was fine. Maybe not her best performance ever – but fine.

4. Even if your presentation was boring, is that the end of the world?

It’s very easy when you’ve had an unpleasant experience to catastrophize. Emma said:

“I’m ruined.”

“I’m feeling like any chance of speaking becoming a paid gig has been eradicated.”

This is catastrophizing. It’s a very normal human reaction….And it’s your brain playing tricks on you.

To stop your brain playing these tricks on you, you need to challenge what you’re saying to yourself. Is it true that if a person gives a boring speech they will never become a good speaker?

I don’t think so!

Here’s a comment about a speaker: “He was stiff and monotonous, and he spoke like a poli-sci professor-a pedantic lecturer who used lots of deadly boring, neutron bomb language.”

That speaker was Obama.

So even if you’re presentation was boring – that doesn’t mean anything about the future. Becoming a great engaging presenter is something you can learn, it’s not a talent that you have to be born with.

Take active steps to recover

1. Get feedback

Part of Emma’s problem is that she has no objective feedback to balance the terrible feedback she’s giving herself. I’ve recommended to Emma that she ask for feedback from the meeting organizer.

If you’re prone to this type of catastrophizing after a presentation there are two things you can do:

• take a friend with you who can tell you how it went.
• arrange with the meeting organizer to gather feedback from the audience.

2. Get back on the horse

As soon as you can gather together a few good friends – two or three will do. Deliver your presentation to them. Ask them to give you lots of positive non-verbal feedback while you’re talking eg: nodding and smiling. This is the equivalent of “getting back on the horse”. Give yourself a positive experience speaking to start to outweigh the unpleasant experience you had. There is scientific evidence that this is worthwhile. Ask your friends for straight feedback.

In summary, the advice I gave to Emma was to manage her thoughts to put her nightmare speaking experience into perspective and take active steps so that she don’t have to go through the same thing again. What advice would you have for Emma?

Related posts:

1. Anxiety and public speaking: new research
2. The three causes of public speaking fear (and what you can do about them)
3. Anxiety and public speaking: What everyone ought to know

Photo credit: zoutedrop

Do you regularly go over time when you’re delivering a presentation? If a time limit has been set for your presentation, then it’s your responsibility to finish it within that time. Consider it as part of the contract between you and your audience.

Here are some tips to help you keep to time:

1. Decide on your “talking time”

You can’t keep to time unless you know beforehand how long you should be talking. Your “talking time” is different than the total time you’ve been given for your presentation for two reasons:

• You need to allow time for questions. This may be decided by the meeting organizer. If not, as a rule of thumb I would allow 20-25% of your presentation time for questions.
• Generally, live  presentations take longer than the rehearsal.  This is because of a combination of factors. You might start a couple of minutes late, you might take longer to make a point, and there may be other interruptions that delay you.

So if your presentation time is one hour, your talking time will be 40 minutes (15 minutes for questions and 5 minutes for interruptions and delays).

2. Find out how long it takes to deliver your material

This is a prerequisite to being able to keep to time. If you don’t know long your talk takes how can you hope to meet the time limit. Many presenters are very bad at judging how long it will take to deliver something. Seriously bad. On our courses, we ask participants to prepare a five minute talk. One time, a participant talked for 23 minutes! When we asked how long it was she thought that she had been talking for about seven minutes.

Time yourself early on in your planning process. This will save you time and agony. If you leave timing your presentation till the end of your planning process you’re likely to find that you’ve prepared too much material which will mean you have to edit your presentation. And editing is can be agonizing when you’ve grown attached to your material.

3. Write a timed schedule for your presentation

When you do a final rehearsal, note down the time that each segment takes and then take that information to prepare a timed schedule. So say your presentation started at 3pm your schedule would look like this:

3 pm Opening
3.05 Part 1
3.15 Part 2
3.25 Part 3
3.35 Closing
3.40 Stop talking

That means that during the live presentation, you’ll be able to easily tell whether you’re keeping to time. Note that it’s not enough to know that each part takes 10 minutes. In the presentation itself you won’t have the head space available to calculate whether you’re ahead or behind.

4. Write assertions so that you don’t waffle

Waffling is one of the things that can make a live presentation go longer than the rehearsal. Here’s what can happen: you make your point but the audience looks blank. So you elaborate on it some more, and then some more… and before you know it you’re waffling. The antidote to this is proper planning. During you’re planning, write each point as a full sentence (not a bullet-point) which expresses what you want to get across. You may later reduce this to a keyword or phrase in your notes but you’ll have done the hard thinking required.  It’s much better to do your thinking before, rather than during, the presentation. For more on this see How to avoid waffling.

5. Have a clock or timekeeper

You can’t manage your time unless you can see the time. And you can’t rely on every meeting or conference room having a clock. Have a small, but easily readable, travel clock that you can put on the lectern or even in front of you on the stage. Make sure you can read it at  a distance without your glasses on. There are remotes that also have a countdown timer and that will buzz you at 5 minutes and 2 minutes before the end of your presentation.

6. Start on time

Many presentations go over time simply because they started late. Lisa Braithwaite recently wrote about this issue in her post: You never have as much time as you want. Often that’s because the presenter or meeting organizer has decided to wait for late-comers. Like Lisa, if I’m in control then I’ll start on time. I don’t see why people who have made the effort to be on time should be penalized by having to wait for people who are late.

You may be concerned that people who are late will miss out on crucial information. So don’t start with crucial material. Instead open with a relevant and engaging story which leads into your first main point. The stragglers will come in while you’re telling your story.

7. Be ready to adapt

Despite all your advance preparations you may still run out of time. The solution is not simply to talk faster! Work out ahead of time what segment you will drop if this should happen. Make a note of the first slide number after the dropped segment. By keying in the number of that slide and then pressing ‘Enter’ you will jump straight to that slide. This is much more professional than clicking through your slides. Your audience need never know that you had to edit on the fly.

Go well with keeping to time in your next presentation! If you have any other tips that have helped you keep to time share them in the comments.

Related posts:

1. How to stop waffling once and for all
2. 8 presentation tips to make your eye contact more powerful
3. How to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say

Get inspiration for your presentation title from magazines. Photo credit: bravenewtraveler

You might not give much thought to your presentation title for a conference presentation. The conference organizers will have asked you to provide a title and an abstract for the conference programme and you manage to slap something together just before the deadline.

But your presentation title can determine whether you have a smattering of people attending, or standing room only.

The good news is that it’s not that hard to craft a presentation title. There are a number of tried and tested formats which are easy to adapt to your topic. This is the way professional copywriters write headlines. They don’t start from scratch. They have a collection of previously used headlines (called a swipefile) and then they simply work out which type of headline will work best for their current topic. Next time you’re in the store, check out magazines like Cosmo. You’ll see the same alluring headlines time and time again.

I’ll show you how this can work by taking one topic and generating a number of possible presentation titles by applying the different formats.

The topic is teaching bioethics in secondary schools. I have a good friend who’s an expert on this topic and gives presentations at conferences around the world.

1. Promise benefits

Dale Carnegie’s famous book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” is still one of the best-selling communications books on Amazon. The title of the book is a big part of it’s success. That title works because it promises benefits. It’s not enough to say:

How to teach bioethics

That’s ho-hum. Adding benefits to the title makes it sing:

How to teach a bioethics class that makes students think

How to be an inspiring bioethics teacher

How to engage and inspire your students through teaching bioethics

“How to” is the most common way of starting a benefit title. To explore the “How to” format more deeply check out this post on writing headlines for blog posts. It’s applicable to writing presentation titles too How to write a Killer How To Article that gets Attention

2. Promise a story

We love stories. You probably already know that telling stories is a powerful presentation technique. But you can also use the power of the story in your presentation title. For example:

How a poor school turned delinquent teenagers into philosophers

How a burnt-out teacher reconnected with the love of teaching through bioethics

If you’re presenting a case-study, this format is ideal for your presentation title. Here’s the format “How A got to B”. Make “A” and “B” as far as part as possible by adding adjectives.

3. Put the number three at the front

Consider this title:

Critical concepts for teaching bioethics

Sounds kind of boring and academic, but what if you put a number in front of it:

Three critical concepts for teaching bioethics

Now your prospective audience member is thinking “I better know what those three critical concepts are”. Even if they’re an expert in teaching bioethics they’ll want to find out the three concepts a fellow expert considers critical.

Three is the ideal number of major points to cover in a presentation, and five at the outside. If you try and cover more you won’t be able to do justice to each point. It’s better to go deep, rather than wide. See my post When is it OK to break the rule of three-part structure.

4. Provoke curiosity

If you’re revealing new research in your presentation make the most of it. People want to hear what’s new. They come to conferences to be at the cutting-edge.

New classroom research reveals the bioethics teaching methodology that gets the best results

If you’re a teacher of bioethics how could you resist going to that session?

That title works because of the curiosity that it evokes. You can exploit the natural attraction power of curiosity even if you don’t have cutting-edge research to reveal. For example:

The #1 strategy for teaching bioethics in the classroom

5. Evoke concern

This type of presentation title makes people want to to come to your presentation to check that they’re not making big mistakes. It’s a powerful strategy. For example:

The common mistakes bioethics teachers make

The flaws in current bioethics teaching methodology

or take some ownership with this version:

The mistakes I’ve made teaching bioethics and how you can learn from them

Mix ‘n’ Match Presentation Titles

You can use elements from these different types of title and mix them up. For example, many titles can be improved by adding the number 3. For example:

The common mistakes bioethics teachers make

becomes

The three common mistakes bioethics teachers make

Add contrast to your titles

Adding contrast adds the element of surprise to your title. For example, I can improve this title:

How to teach a bioethics class that makes students think

by changing ’students’ to ‘teenagers’:

How to teach a bioethics class that makes teenagers think

Putting the words “students” and “think” next to each other doesn’t generate any surprise. But put the word “think” next to “teenagers” does.

So simply by applying these formats I’ve generated eleven possible titles. You can do the same. Once you’ve generated some titles, choose the one that resonates best with you and then plan your presentation to fulfill the promise that you’re making to your audience in the title.

Related posts:

1. How to simplify your presentation without dumbing it down
2. How to create soundbites in your presentation
3. 7 ways to keep audience attention during your presentation