Archive for December, 2008

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Why Don’t You Act Like A Presenter During Your Presentation?

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
Presenters Use Acting Tips To Keep Their Presentations From Becoming Boring

Presenters Use Acting Tips To Keep Their Presentations From Becoming Boring

Previously we had discussed the fact that any presentation that you give is really sort of like a one person show – if you know how to act, then you’ll be more effective.

The challenge, of course, is that very few of us have been trained to be an actor. Additionally, we tend to think of actors as being “over the top” types of performers (sorta like Heath Leger in that Batman movie).  The truth is actually much different – acting is simply knowing what to say or how to move in order to influence your audience in some way. We’d all like to be able to do that, right?

Here are five acting tips that you can start using in order to improve your next presentation.

Speak In The Moment: In order to make your presentation more powerful, you need to fine tune it to your audience and their current mood. Great actors don’t just memorize their lines, they “stay in the moment” and are constantly reacting to what’s going on in their scene. You need to be constantly reacting to your audience’s feedback and using this to modify how you present your information.

Keep It Fresh: There is the old saying that “variety is the spice of life”. This is especially true when it comes to presentations. Anything that you do for too long will start to bore your audience. Today’s audiences have very short attention spans and you need to be constantly changing your presentation in order to keep them engaged. Ways to change your presentation include emphasis, movement, volume, energy level or material being presented.

Risky Business: If you are not taking any risks in your presentations, then you are not providing a dynamic presentation – it’s going to be the same every time and that’s boring. Trying out new things, interacting with audience members, these are all things that carry an element of risk. Risk keeps things interesting for both you and your audience.

Don’t Be Afraid Of Commitment: When you decide to add some acting to your presentation, do it full throttle. The worst thing that you can do is go at it half speed. It’s your passion and your commitment that will win your audience over in the end.

Concentration Is The Key To Relaxation: If you aren’t careful and you let your mind wander, then you will end up focusing on just how nervous you are. Do what actors do: focus your mind on how you have prepared, the words that you want to say, and your audience – basically anything but your nerves.

There you have it, all of the tips that you need in order to start using the skills that actors use in your next presentation. I can’t promise that you’ll bring home a golden globe award, but the greatest complement will be if your audience can’t wait to see your next show!

How do you vary your speech to keep it interesting for both you and your audience? When was the last time that you took a risk with a presentation? What risk did you take? How do you work to relax before starting a presentation? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in Uncategorized, communication skills | 2 Comments »

Are You Acting Like A Presenter?

Monday, December 29th, 2008
Don't Scare Your Audience, But Do Use Acting To Capture Their Imagination

Don't Scare Your Audience, But Do Use Acting To Capture Their Imagination

When you are asked to deliver a presentation, one way of looking at this request is that you are actually being asked to put on a one-person show. No matter if you are presenting at a college graduation or are simply reviewing last quarter’s sales figures, you are an actor who is there to put on a show for your audience. Do you know how to act?

Ed Brodow is a professional speaker who has also spent 12 years as a Hollywood actor. Needless to say, he know his stuff. He points out that the actors that we like to watch on the big screen or on TV were not born that way. They’ve studied their craft and that’s how they have become so good.

Brodow has worked with a number of acting coaches and he’s discovered the acting skills that speakers need to incorporate into our presentations in order to make them more memorable. No, you’re probably not going to win any Academy Awards for you next presentation; however, you might just do a better job of connecting with your audience.

Learn To Improvise: If you’ve delivered your presentation before or if you’ve spent the last month preparing for this presentation, then there is a chance that you are going to come across as “wooden” or “scripted”. Having the ability to improvise, or make it up as you go along, is the key to making your presentation fresh and making the audience feel as though you make it up just for them.

Stories That Are Personal: We’ve talked about this before, but what makes any presentation memoriable are your stories. Brodow reveals that the way an actor prepares for a scene with powerful emotions is to think back over their life and find a situation in which they were experiencing those emotions. They then substitute the scene that they are playing for their remembered scene and that’s how they are able to convey such powerful emotions.

When you are presenting, don’t just TELL a story. Instead, FEEL a story as you tell it. You audience will pick up on this and your stories will come alive for them.

What’s Your Drive?: This is one of my biggest complaints about so many presentations that I’ve sat though – the speaker didn’t have a point to make. When  you present you need to have a single point – what are you advocating that the audience should do after you are done? How are you hoping to change them? If you don’t have this, then you are just delivering a book report. Pick your position and then tell you audience why it’s the right positon for them also.

Be An Actor: Look, real life is rather boring – we see / live it every day. When you are presenting, you need to step-it-up-a-notch. You need to throw some drama into your words. You need to make your audience laugh. You need to stop being yourself and become an actor playing a role. Become larger than life and you will be able to put on a heck of a show for your audience.

Manage Your Energy: You are leading the show and so you need to be operating at a high level of energy. However, you also need to match you audience’s energy level – if they are to low (like if you were talking to bankers these days) and you are too high, then you’ll never connect to them. Instead, you need to sense their energy level and then start your presentation at an energy level that is just a bit higher then theirs. This way you’ll connect with them and they’ll follow you to whatever energy level you want to take them to.

There you go – this is a start. Anyone can stand before a group of people and deliver a boring presentation. In order to deliver a great presentation that will have an impact and will be memorable you need to become an actor!

When you’ve given a presentation in the past, have you ever had to improvise? Do you tell stories as a part of your presentations and do you take the extra time to personalize them? How do you become “larger than life” when you are giving a presentation? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

Monday, December 22nd, 2008
Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume next week…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time you enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness next week.

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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How To Prepare Your Voice For Your Next Presentation

Wednesday, December 17th, 2008
Your Voice Is The Most Important Speaking Tool You Have - Take Care Of It!
Your Voice Is The Most Important Speaking Tool You Have – Take Care Of It!

We can spend all the time in the world talking about how to prepare better presentations, capture and hold your audience’s attention, create great PowerPoint slides, etc. and it will all be for naught if we forget to talk about one very important thing: your voice. I don’t know about you guys, but I really don’t spend very much time thinking about my voice – until it’s not there!

So if everything is going along fine, then you don’t really need to worry about your voice. However, if you have a big presentation coming up, that’s when things can start to get bad in a hurry. You pick the cause: weather changes, allergies, a cold or flu, no matter the cause – the results are always the same. If there is something wrong with your voice, then that’s what your audience is going to be focusing on – not what you are saying!

We all have ways of dealing with sore body parts that we can get to like an arm or a leg. How does one go about taking care of a voice that is located “in there” somewhere? It turns out that it really comes down to a list of things that you SHOULD be doing as well as another list of things that you SHOULD NOT be doing. Let’s take a look…

Fluids, fluids, fluids. In the end, having a healthy / happy voice requires that you keep your vocal cords supple. Ways to do this include drinking fluids such as sports drinks which replenish sugars, sodium and lots of other nutrients.

Of course, there is a flip side to this – you need to stop drinking some things. You can say goodbye to coffee as your presentation date / time grows nearer. Oh, the same thing goes for alcohol in any form. The reason that you have to avoid these fluids is because they act as a drying agent and that’s the last thing that your vocal cords need.

How do you start your day? I personally enjoy having a glass of orange juice. However, it turns out that orange juice has the potential to irritate your throat. Dang! The OJ has to go on presentation day.

If you start to come down with something as your big presentation day approaches, there are some defensive activities that you can start to do. Adding a humidifier to your bedroom will help to lubricate your throat while you are sleeping. Additionally, you can spend some time in a steamy shower in order to sooth your entire respiratory system.

Once you get your fluids taken care of, you need to make sure that you don’t screw things up now. This means that you need to avoid clearing your throat because this will end up irritating your vocal cords.

If you feel yourself starting to become hoarse there are a couple of things that you can do. Try to gargle with warm salt water a few times during the day. Additionally, you should start to drink herbal tea with honey in order to fight back the hoarseness.

Be very careful about doing what we all normally do: popping a throat lozenges that contains menthol or some other anesthetics. The reason that these are so bad for you is that they numb your throat and this will hide your body’s warning signs that it’s time to stop using your voice.

One final recommendation: during your actual presentation you should do your best to keep your tone at a conversational volume level. By doing this you will be able to avoid overexerting your vocal cords.

Have you ever been in danger of losing your voice just before you were to give a big presentation? What did you do to save your voice? Did it work? How did you sound when you gave the presentation? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in speaker | 1 Comment »

Just How Does One Create A Keynote Presentation?

Monday, December 15th, 2008
Creating A Keynote For A Graduation Dinner Required Careful Planning

Creating A Keynote For A Graduation Dinner Required Careful Planning

Tis the season for college graduations and I was recently asked to deliver a keynote speech as part of an engineering graduation ceremony. The interesting thing about this speaking opportunity was that I was basically starting from ground zero – I didn’t have an engineering keynote speech in my bag of tricks. This meant that I needed to build one from the floor up quickly – they asked me just a week before the big day.

As I was pulling together my keynote, it dawned on me that lots of presenters often find themselves in a similar situation and may not know how to go about creating a keynote speech that will fit the occasion. In an effort to fill this knowledge gap, I’m going to share with you the steps that I went though to build my keynote speech and, because I delivered it last night, I can also give you some feedback on what worked and what didn’t.

  1. Always Start With Your Audience: I followed this rule! I realized that I was going to be talking to a group of graduating engineering students, some of their parents, their professors, and various other people (dates, administrators, etc.). This gave me a fairly homogeneous group and that meant that I needed to work “engineering” content into my speech so that they would feel as though I was talking directly to them.
  2. Start At The End: What’s the purpose of a keynote? You probably aren’t going to change any lives so you had better make sure that you don’t try to. In my case, I decided that I had two goals: to entertain and to provide motivation for the graduates to succeed as they moved forward (“We know that you can do it”).
  3. Content Is King: So what to say? Since I knew that I was not going to be changing any lives with my speech, I decided to focus on two things: funny stories that have happened to me during my career and a discussion about what things the graduates needed to be aware of in order to have a great career. I mixed in several references to paying off student loans (everyone has those), homework (all engineers have too much of that), and dealing with professors. These were common elements that everyone could relate to.
  4. Watch The Clock!: Early on I asked how much time I had for my keynote. I was told that 20 minutes would be perfect. It turned out that this was very important – I shaped my entire speech to fit in this time. It is instant death to the speaker who goes on too long especially in an after-dinner speaking situation like this was. People speak at about 150 words/minute and since I was going to be speaking for 20 minutes I knew that I had to limit myself to about 3,000 words which meant that I needed to…
  5. Write It Out!: There is some controversy to this point, but here goes it anyway: I wrote my speech out from start to finish. There were two reasons that I did this. The first was to make sure that I could fit my speech into the 20 minute window – my written speech needed to be no more than 3,000 words long. The next was because I could remember reading somewhere that if you want to deliver a memorable speech, then you need to get your wording just perfect (“I have a nice thought” vs. “I have a dream”). In order to do this you need to write the speech out word for word. So I did it. Then I proceeded to revise it 1,000,000 times.
  6. Memorize It!: So if you are never supposed to write out your speech, then of course you should never memorize it! However, that is basically exactly what I ended up doing. I practiced my speech over and over reading it as it was written. After about 5 times of doing this, I was able to spend more time looking at my (pretend) audience than looking at my written speech. Did I ever completely memorize my speech, no. I did get it stuck in my brain well enough so that I really only used my written out speech as an occasional reminder. This mean that I spent most of the speech making eye contact with my audience.
  7. Use BIG Print: For the version of my written out speech that I had before me when I was delivering the speech, I made some changes to the written out speech. I increased the font size to a nice, easy to read 16 point Arial. I then turned every sentence into its own bullet point. Needless to say this resulted in a longer printed speech – it was 13 pages long in its final form! Oh, make sure that you put PAGE NUMBERS on each page of your printed speech – you just know that you’ll drop the whole thing as you walk to the podium!
  8. A Highlighter Is Your Friend: As I read over my 13 pages of bulleted sentences, I found it difficult to keep my place. I ended up using a highlighter to highlight the one or two words in each sentence that were the key idea. This allowed my eyes to dance from highlighted word to highlighted word and that helped me to keep my place better.
  9. PowerPoint Can Be Your Friend: I’m really good looking, but 20 minutes is a long time for an audience to spend staring at me. Since PowerPoint slides were already being used as a part of the graduation dinner, I decided to create some to use as part of my keynote. I ended up creating just 10 slides and none of them contained any words – each just contained a single photo. As I delivered my speech, I had written out [man with truck slide] and so I knew when to move to the next slide. Each slide reflected what I was talking about at the time in my speech so the two media, spoken word and displayed image, helped each other. Oh, and I have a Kensington wireless remote control device that I used to automatically advance to the next slide – much smoother than having to run over and hit the space bar (or say “next!”)
  10. Have A Good Ending: Ultimately, this is what will stick in everyone’s memory. I took some extra time and carefully worded my last few sentences so that everyone would feel a warm glow of congratulations for the graduates and they would feel as though they had been recognized for their achievements.

So how did it all turn out? I’d give myself a score of 90/100. The PowerPoint pictures that I used were very well received (here is one with a guy and a truck so you can see what they were laughing at) and so I probably should have used more of them. I explained how Milton Bradly’s “The Game of Life” had good lessons for all of us and that went over fairly flat (not enough laughs). I would make changes if I ever gave this speech again, but I received lots of compliments. Making a speech to engineers interesting AND funny is no simple task!

Have you ever been asked to give a keynote speech? How did you go about creating your content? Did you write your speech out or just speak from notes? Did you use any visuals? How did your speech turn out? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in speech writing | 7 Comments »

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