Ellen Finkelstein has organized a series of webinar presentations with a great line up of presenters. And not only will you not have any travel and accommodation costs, the webinars themselves are free!

To sign up for the webinars go to this webpage: Outstanding Presentations Workshop.

Each webinar will be at 1:00pm PT, 2:00pm MT, 3:00pm CT, 4:00pm ET in the United States and Canada.

Here’s the schedule for the webinars. Each speaker’s name is a link to a page where you can read more about the speaker and their topic. In the last column is a link to the time in other countries.

All of the speakers will be promoting the webinars to their audiences so reserve your place early as “seats” are limited by the webinar software. Here’s the link again: Outstanding Presentations Workshop.

And I look forward to speaking and interacting with you for my webinar on September 29th.

Related posts:

1. 6 presentation tips from a professional speaker
2. What to look for in a presentation skills trainer
3. Best presentation tips for different presentations

I hate bullet-filled PowerPoint slides, but neither do I advocate having no words on a slide. That’s just going to another extreme. Images and words combined are the most effective PowerPoint slide design for most technical and business presentations. Here are eleven reasons why:

1. A picture may be worth a thousand words – but it may be a different thousand words for each member of the audience. By adding a clarifying sentence you ensure that every person in your audience gets the point you wanted to make with the picture. For example, this slide could make many different points. I ensured my audience got the point with the simple sentence:

2. Stunning photography can be memorable – but your audience may not remember the point (are there TV ads that you love but you don’t know what they’re for?). By putting some words directly on the image you ensure that the image is linked with your point in their memory.

3. An agenda slide gives your audience a skeleton from which to hang your oral presentation.

4. When you’re showing data in the form of a graph or chart the audience can often get lost as they try and make sense of the data at the same time as you’re talking. A concise sentence explaining the meaning of the data will prevent that.

5. A clear and succinct sentence expressing your key message gives your message longevity. If you say it, and an audience member didn’t quite hear it or didn’t quite grasp it…it’s gone. Having it on the slide allows them to reread it so that they can grasp it.

6. You can also highlight the points of your presentation in the same way. This has two advantages:

• If an audience member daydreams for a moment, they’ll be able to get back on track quickly.
• If you’re speaking in your second (or third) language, or if your audience is listening in their second language, one clear and succinct sentence on each slide will help your audience keep track and ensures they understand your main points.

But remember, the more points you emphasize in this way, the less each one is emphasized.

7. Most audience members find it useful to be able to read, rather than have to listen, to a longish quote. Put the slide up and be silent while they read:

8. When you’re explaining a diagram, including text labels to identify the diagram components will help audience members make sense of the diagram. This applies to simple and complex diagrams:

9. If you’re using unfamiliar words, jargon or acronyms having them on the screen will help people grasp and remember them. If I’m giving a presentation on Kiva without slides, I have to spell out the name Kiva. It’s much easier to use a slide!

I’d love to give you some research-based evidence to back this up, but the research focuses on the benefits of adding visuals to words, rather than adding words to visuals. That’s fair. It’s still the main battle we’re fighting when it comes to PowerPoint slide design.

Related posts:

1. Three traps when using images in your presentation
2. New evidence that bullet-points don’t work
3. Presentation images: Are you making these mistakes?

Last week I wrote about the challenge of the third era of presenting: the era of the audience.

Kristin Arnold has written a provocative and intensely practical book Boring to Bravo on how to meet that challenge by encouraging audience participation . The philosophy of the book is summed up by this quote from Amanda Gore in the book:

When I say, “Use audience interaction,” I don’t mean that you should ask a question and have them call out. You must go further. I have my audiences look at each other and do stuff! The more they connect, the better they can learn and actually have an experience (other than just listening to you or being entertained).

Here are my favorite audience participation tips from the book:

1. Set the tone for audience participation

You walk into the meeting room at least a half hour before your presentation…You take a good look around the room. Yep. There are tables, chairs, a projector, and a screen. Sigh. Don’t all these meeting rooms look just about the same? Boring.

Don’t be afraid to change it up to send the signal that this talk is not going to be your typical, ho-hum presentation.

Kristin has great tips on how to do this:

• Set up the room so that it will be easy for people to connect with each other and with you.
• Have just enough seats so that people can’t fill up the back rows and leave the front rows empty (have spare chairs stacked at the back of the room so that you have them available if required).
• Leave access lanes so that people can move around easily.
• Tape a welcome sign on the door and have posters with relevant images, icons, phrases and quotes on the wall.
• As people walk in, play music and a slideshow on automatic.

2. Use a flipchart or write on a tablet

The mighty easel chart can spontaneously engage your audience in real time.

PowerPoint tends to make presentations boring because nothing the audience says can make a change to a future slide. The presentation is set and most of the time will continue on its inexorable path regardless of the wishes of the audience. Using an easel chart (I call it a flipchart) changes all that. It immediately signals that there’s room for flexibility and that the audience can play a part in creating your presentation with you. With a larger audience, you can achieve the same thing by writing on a tablet as Dan Roam did at SXSW 2010.

3. Don’t wait till the end to take questions

By the time you get to the end, your audience will have forgotten the burning question they had twenty minutes earlier, they will be ready to take a break and grab another cup of coffee.

Kristin also points out that if you’ve made the audience listen passively for seven-eights of your presentation, it’s difficult to rouse them into asking questions. And when you do ask for questions how about saying:

I welcome you asking me anything about this topic

rather than the traditional “Are there any questions?”

4. When you ask for participation, accept the curmudgeons

Keep in mind there will always be a small percentage of the population that does not want to play with you. I call these folks “curmudgeons” because they typically sit in the back and convey through their body language, “I don’t want no stinking team activities!”

Kristin’s advice is to address their objections ahead of time by saying something like:

I know some of you think these kinds of things are silly, but I promise there is a point, and it will only take a moment.

and then let go of needing them to participate. If they want to just observe that’s fine. Oh, and don’t use the word “role-play” – it’s a turn-off for lots of people. Use the word “activity” instead.

5. Split people up into small groups

The quintessential group interaction is to break the large group into smaller discussion groups. It forces the participants not only to think about your message but also to connect and collaborate with others, and to apply the new information. It also inherently increases the energy level in the room!

Kristin goes through the six-step process for running a small group activity. What I particularly liked were all the ideas for splitting people up. For example:

• A variation on musical chairs. Ask people to walk around while the music plays. When the music stops the person nearest to them is their partner.
• Pre-assign a number, letter or color to each person on their nametag. Ask the As to join together, the Bs etc.

6. Close with an audience commitment

You can have a great speech, but if you haven’t shifted the audience’s perspective, increased their knowledge, or inspired them to do something differently, your words are for naught.

Kristin suggests asking people to commit to an action step, and then to make a public proclamation to increase accountability. You can ask them to share out loud, write it down on a card or worksheet, or share their commitment with an accountability buddy.

Wow! These six tips probably comprise 1% of the tips in this book. I read a lot of presentation and public speaking books (and have done for many years) and this is one that often had me go “that’s good idea” or I hadn’t thought of doing that way before.” So if you want to increase the level of audience participation in your presentations, buy this book.

Related posts:

1. How to keep audience attention when people are multitasking
2. The best presentations at SXSW 2010
3. How to handle a heckler

There have been three distinct eras of public speaking and presenting. They are all still present today, but at different levels of maturity. The third era – the era of the audience – is going to be challenging for most presenters and public speakers. It requires a new attitude. But first let’s review the first two eras of presenting and public speaking.

The era of the orator

Heyday: From ancient times to 1990s.

In this era every speech is a performance. Each sentence is carefully crafted and the speech taps into a vast repertoire of rhetorical techniques. I first learnt public speaking in Toastmasters and I learnt to speak this way – paying attention to my words, my vocal variety and body language. In one of my first posts on this blog, I described how I had to unlearn this style of presenting so that I could connect better with the audience.

Politicians and other public figures such as Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and now Barack Obama are classic examples of orators.

The era of the slide

Heyday: From 1990s to the future

The era of the slide began in the 1960s with the projection of 35mm slides on a slide carousel, but it didn’t take off until PowerPoint came on the scene. The era of the slide still has a way to go before maturity:

1. Most people still consider the speaker to the best visual aid and the slides are simply an adjunct, rather than an integral part of the total presentation experience. Generally we’re still at the “radio with pictures” stage rather than the integrated “TV” stage.
2. Slide design, despite the best efforts of Cliff Atkinson, Garr Reynolds, Nancy Duarte and many others, is mostly deplorable or non-existent.

Stand-out examples of “era of the slide” presentations are TED presentations and Steve Jobs presentations.

The era of the audience

Heyday: From 2000s to the future

The birth of the era of the audience has been brewing for a long time. It’s partly descended from the era of the orator and the era of the slide, but there’s been other significant influences:

1. Open Space technology

Open Space is a way of meeting in small to large groups where the agenda is co-created and developed by the participants. I first saw Open Space Technology in action during the 1990s and was blown away with the brilliance, creativity and excitement that it generated. No longer did one person have to be in charge. Nowadays the unconference movement is a great example of open space technology at work.

2. The Art of Facilitation

Facilitation as a term was coined in 1950. A skilled facilitator can lead a group to discuss issues and make their own decisions. I trained as a facilitator in the 1990s and it had a huge influence in my attitude and practice as a presenter. No longer was there this dividing line between me and the audience. It was me with a group of people who each had a contribution to make.

3. Audience expectations

Audiences are expecting a more participatory role in presentations, just as they do as citizens and consumers. The development of participatory democracy, consumer activism, mass content creation, the backchannel and the advent of Generation Y all mean that many audiences are no longer content to just sit passively listening to a monologue.

Many presenters and public speakers are adapting to this era. Gary Vaynerchuck spoke for 10 minutes in front of an audience of 1,000s at SXSW 2010 and then opened up his keynote presentation to questions. Within seconds long lines had formed behind the two audience microphones. The rest of his presentation was a fascinating mixture of honest advice, guidance, and challenge in response to the questions he was asked.

Cliff Atkinson’s most recent book The Backchannel is ostensibly about managing the social media backchannel. But it goes much deeper – Cliff starts to outline the shift in attitude that presenters will need to take on to survive in the era of the audience. Will you be ready?

Before Copernicus we believed that the the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth. That’s what it looked like and it made sense. But science showed us that it’s not the case.

Today, many people believe in learning styles theory. At face value it makes sense and it’s easy to make your own experiences fit with the theory. But science does not back-up learning styles theory.

What is learning styles theory

Learning styles theory says that there are different learning modalities and that individuals have a preferred modality. The most common modalities mentioned are visual, auditory, kinaesthetic (this is known as the VAK model – however, there are many other models).

So far, so good. It’s probably true that individuals differ in which modality they prefer– just as we differ in many other aspects of our abilities.

However, learning styles theory takes this a step further and suggests that teaching should take place in the learner’s preferred modality. This is sometimes called the “meshing hypothesis”.

How could learning styles apply to presenting

Presentation advisors have used learning styles theory to encourage presenters to do more than just speak. Listening to a purely-spoken presentation is an auditory activity. So presentation advisers suggest that presenters use visuals (to help the visual learners in your audience), and get audience members to do things (to help the kinaesthetic learners).

Learning styles don’t make sense

At face value this makes sense. But not when you dig deeper. Learning styles theory says that an auditory learner will learn things better when they are presented aurally. But there are many types of knowledge which are hard to grasp aurally – for example the shape of a country or how to ride a bike. Just about everyone will learn the shape of a country by seeing that shape, that is visually. Just about everyone learns how to ride a bike by doing it, that is kinaesthetically. It is the type of information that drives how we should present it – not the learning style of the learner.

Here’s a video from cognitive psychologist Dr Daniel Willingham explaining this in more detail:

Research on learning styles

Here are references to three reports that reviewed the evidence:

• A 1987 meta-analysis of 39 classroom learning style studies found no evidence that teaching to a child’s best modality had an impact on learning.

• In 2004, the UK Learning and Skills Development Agency commissioned an evaluation of learning styles models and their effectiveness in post-16 learning.

“[S]ome of the best known and widely used instruments have such serious weaknesses (eg low reliability, poor validity and negligible impact on pedagogy) that we recommend that their use in research and in practice should be discontinued.”

• In 2008, the Association for Psychological Science commissioned a panel of psychologists and cognitive scientists to review the evidence for learning styles. Their review found that:

“Although the literature on learning styles is enormous, very few studies have even used an experimental methodology capable of testing the the validity of learning styles applied to education. Moreover, of those that did use an appropriate method, several found results that flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis.”

And here’s another reference that makes a mockery of those self-assessment quizzes:

“Furthermore, in a laboratory study of memory performance, participants’ own self-assessment of their learning style (as is commonly used) was shown to be out of line with more objective measures, and memory scores in different modalities appeared unrelated to any measure of dominant learning style (Kratzig and Arbuthnott, 2006).”

What does this mean for presenters

That suggests that rather than concern ourselves with the preferred learning style of an audience member we should think about the modality that best suits the content. For instance most people are likely to prefer to see an organizational chart, rather than have it described to them. Some types of content are likely to be better transferred to audience members by being presented in multiple modalities.

So for your next presentation, examine each piece of content and decide which is the best modality in which to present each piece. All your audience members will benefit.

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