President Dale Carnegie Tokyo, Japan, Master Trainer, best-selling author, his latest book is "How To Stop Wasting Money On Training."
Getty
There are some fundamental mechanics of presentation delivery. I would call these hygiene factors for presenting. Eye contact, facial expression, voice modulation, gesture usage, pause insertion and posture are the basics. Unfortunately, in my observation, most business presenters have not mastered these core skills—despite all of the training available and all of the free information being plastered all over the internet. Content marketing experts are establishing their credibility by providing phenomenal information for free. What an age we live in! Yet we still have presentation train wrecks.
Let’s presume some have mastered the basics; so what comes next? Here are three elements we need to be working on.
Clear Meaning
When I ask my presentation class participants what are some of the attributes they want to achieve when speaking in public, “being clear” is always prominent. However, what is required to be clear? The audience has to be able to navigate the talk and follow the direction in which the speaker is taking everyone. I attended a talk by the president of a huge global organization in Tokyo, and he “wandered like a cloud” all over the place. It was a navigation nightmare. Let’s not make our audience work hard to keep up.
The chapters of the talk should be clear, the flow logical and the points quite apparent. The delivery needs the right pacing, with sufficient pauses to allow the messages to sink in. We need a pattern interruption every five minutes of the talk to keep the listeners' interest. We need to ensure there are highs and lows in the delivery so that it is not all delivered at the same pace. This is a very common mistake among business speakers: They have only one speed setting from start to finish. We need to mimic classical music with its ebbs and highs, its lulls and crescendos. Certain critical keywords should be culled from the herd and given special attention and treatment to make the message clearer. We might hit them with a stentorian outburst of raw energy, or we might drop it all down to a cupped hand, a conspiratorial whisper, which the audience has to mentally lean in to hear.
Message Appeal
If your core message is mundane, boring and unremarkable, it will be hard to excite the assembled masses about what you are saying. Storytelling in business is one of the "dark arts." It is rarely mastered, poorly understood and infrequent in its application.
Presenting statistics, for example, can be boring, but wrapping them up in the drama of the story can be gripping. Reveal who were the heroes who forensically excavated these numbers and their herculean efforts to dig into the data to find the gems. Delve into the ramifications of their findings. Extrapolate into the future to paint a picture of hope or despair with these numbers presented as early warning indicators. Capture which careers are about to be shredded or heralded.
When storytelling, we need to take the listener to a place, in a season, at a time of the day, with people they know of, and all of this is located in their mind’s eye. We take the audience to the precise moment it all happened and draw out the hard lessons we have won as a consequence.
Passion And Engagement
Talking in a monotone, matched with a wooden face devoid of expression, quickly becomes a funereal distraction for the audience. Removing all the physical energy from the talk sets it adrift from the listeners. They feel no connection and no interest because the speaker themself doesn’t seem interested in what they are saying.
Enthusiasm is contagious, and we hunger for a speaker with fire in their belly. Instead, we usually get the legions of the walking dead of business speakers—those armies of the gray, gaunt, forgettable and dull. We are not simply advocating high energy, almost crazed hysteria here, but considered belief and a real commitment to the message, one which the audience will definitely buy.
Your energy sets up a vibration. It transports your passion and commitment to what you are saying directly to us and infects and envelops the whole room. When we speak, we employ our ki (気), our intrinsic energy, and we push that energy out all the way to the back wall, as a conscious effort to fill the room with our presence. I am sure you have had the experience of when someone enters a room and they literally fill it with their presence. That is precisely what we want to achieve as presenters—to dominate that meeting room space with our power and ki. The first step is to have that mindset to want to do that and then direct our energy outward, rather than bottling it up and restraining it.
We specifically want to engage the entire audience and connect with them all. We use our eye-contact power to make that connection. We should focus our gaze on a single point, so select an eye of one of the audience members. We look so deeply into their eye we feel we can delve into their soul. Well, delve for only about six seconds, however, because with that intensity, it soon becomes intrusive. The impact of that one-on-one engagement is enormous. They feel they are the only ones in the room and we are talking directly to them. That connection triggers tremendous continued support for our personal and professional brands.
The basics form a platform that allows us to take our presentations to the highest levels. We must work hard on amplifying the connection between our message and the audience. In doing so, we are the rare ones who can break through all the communication dissonance. Others simply fall by the white-noise wayside. Being a presenter has never been tougher or more demanding. In our Age of Distraction and this Era of Cynicism, we have to stand tall as highly capable, skilled communicators, showing everyone the way forward.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
