The Accidental Communicator

Perhaps you were looking for a top 10 list? I’ve spent some time thinking about all of the technical presentations that I’ve given in the past and I was only able to come up with a list of nine really, really bad things that I’ve done over and over again. Let’s take a look at the bad habits that technical presenters make and, as a bonus, we’ll see if we can find ways to stop doing them!

1. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #1: Reading Your Speech.
   I don’t care how technical the material that you are talking about is, you need to connect with your audience during your presentation and you won’t be able to do this if you are tied to your notes, your slides, or even a script. Instead, practice, practice, practice. Once you really know your material, then you’ll be able to deliver it without notes. Steve Jobs over at Apple does this and that’s why he is so good!

2. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #2: Poor Eye Contact.
   They say that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Well, you’ve got to be looking in those windows in order to be able to determine what is going on inside of your audience’s heads. Too many of us will spend an entire presentation looking at something, anything, else besides our audience. You need to consciously make an effort to make eye contact with your audience at least 90% of the time that you are speaking.
3. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #3: Dressing Badly.
   As a speaker, you always want to be the best dressed person in the room. While you are speaking, your clothes will be speaking to the audience also. You want them to be saying that you are both successful and confidant. A good looking speaker gets the respect of the audience even before he/she opens their mouth. If you don’t feel confident selecting clothes, then get a friend or a salesperson to help you make the right decisions.
4. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #4: Bad Body Language.
   While you are talking, your body may be having a conversation with your audience at the same time. If your hands are fumbling with a pen, coin, or a ring; or if you are pacing, swaying or other wise making movements that distract the audience from what you are saying, then you are sabotaging your own presentation. The best way to stop doing this is to practice in front of a mirror or videotape your practice. You just might be surprised at what you see!
5. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #5: Winging It.
   If you feel that you know your material or your audience so well that a rehearsal is not needed, please print out the following words and place them on your desk where you can see them: “YOU’RE WRONG!” The first time that you give a presentation is the worst time that you give it. You just keep getting better each time you run through it. John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, spends countless hours practicing every part of every presentation. If a big & important guy like him is willing to spend the time, then why wouldn’t you?
6. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #6: Being Too Stiff.
   This bad habit is in a fight with bad habit #4. Although you don’t want your body parts to flap around and distract from what you are saying, you also don’t want to be a statue – this will also distract from what you’re saying. If you assume a frozen position, then that will result in a boring presentation for your audience.
7. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #7: Shooting Your Audience w/ Bullets.
   I’ve got great news for you – chances are that your audience can read! This means that if you spend your presentation reading bullets that are listed on a slide that everyone in the audience can read for themselves, then you will have done everyone a disservice. Remember the slides are there to serve the speaker, not the other way around.
8. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #8: Going On, And On, And On.
   Although you may love to hear yourself speak, studies show that you’ll start to use your audience after about 18 minutes or so. One of the golden rules of presentations is that an audience will never hold it against you if you wrap up early; however, they’ll blame you if you take too long. This all gets back to practicing your presentation before you give it – trim it ruthlessly!
9. Technical Presenter Bad Habit #9: Being Boring.
   Your audience has other things that they could be doing instead of listening to you. You need to do something to grab their attention and make them care about what you are talking about. This means that you need to have a powerful opening that seizes their attention from the get go and a closing that wraps it all up.

There you go – a top 9 list of things that happen all to often when a technical presenter has bad habits. How many of this habits do you have? Have you ever been able to overcome a bad technical presentation bad habit? How did you do it? Leave a comment and let me know what has worked for you.

Tags: public speaking, training, speech, eye contact, body language

So you’ve been given the chance to talk to the big people. Or maybe to important customers. Or maybe just to a group of new hires, it doesn’t really matter — you can blow any of these opportunities if you aren’t aware of what your body is saying. In fact, in certain circumstances, if you don’t really believe what you are talking about, your audience will know it because your body language will be screaming “don’t believe me — I don’t believe what I’m telling you right now!” In order to avoid getting drowned out by yourself, make sure that you listen to what your body is saying.

We’ve all heard the expression “Appearance matters”. Well guess what, it really does. Thanks to about 50,000 years of evolution all of us have developed an acute ability to size someone up before they say a single word. Guess what: when you take the stage to start a talk to a group, they have already formed an initial opinion of you. As you start to talk you will either confirm or refute this impression. So let’s talk about what you need to do to make your body talk a powerful part of your communication skills:

• Stand Up Straight Young Man (or Woman)! This is the simplest thing to do — stand up straight and adopt a stance that exudes confidence, power, and energy no matter how you are currently feeling. If you look like you are in control, then everyone will believe that you are.

• No Chicken Dancing! Our arms and hands are amazing parts of our bodies. However, during a presentation if we are not careful they can put on a show all by themselves and that will end up distracting everyone who is watching us. The right thing to do is to keep them loosely dangling by our sides. Note that although this sounds simple, it is sometimes the hardest thing in the world to do!
• Turn Off The X-Ray Vision: Eye contact is an important part of any presentation. Its how you make contact with the audience and it can be a very powerful tool. However, avoiding looking at people in the audience or, even worse, staring down specific audience members can cause onlookers to become completely distracted and forget to pay attention to what you have to say.

There’s a lot more to understanding what your body is saying. Your goal should be to make sure that your audience is not getting mixed messages from what you say and what your body is saying. If done correctly, your body language can help turn you into a powerful communicator.

Tags: appearances, body language, communication, eye contact, stand up straight

Last week I was invited to sit in on two sets of presentations by junior members of a very large telecommunication firm’s IT department. They are part of a management training program and the program’s instructors asked me to visit because they had had some guest presenters who were *really* bad. The hope was that I could provide immediate feedback for the teams that presented as well as things to avoid for the teams that had yet to present. Sounded fair enough, eh?

During the presentations I wrote notes like a madman. Ten separate engineers presented material and I filled about seven pages of a notebook with comments and ideas. To keep things brief, let me share with you the top three things that I noticed:

1. Who You Talking To?: Each and every one of the presenters spent a lot of their “stage time” with their bodies pointed towards the projection screen and actually talked to the screen instead of the audience. This happens way too often when you use PowerPoint to create an outline of you speech and end up reading it off of the screen.

Solution: The correct way to present material is to make sure that you always face your audience. The slides are there to reinforce your verbal message — you should spend no time staring at them. Instead, have a conversation with your audience and let us choose if we want to look at you or your slide.

2. Here? There? Over There?: Just where to stand was a major problem for each presenter. There was a lectern on the stage (def: a lectern is big and goes all the way down to the floor, a podium is shorter and generally sits on a table. They both hold a speaker’s notes) and nobody seemed to know what to do with it. Some stood behind it, some stood off to its side, and some completely ignored it. They all moved from behind it to in front of it and back during their presentations. The end result was that this turned out to be a distraction to everyone who was watching the presentations.

Solution:: Make a decision before you start to speak — in front of the lectern or behind it. Once you make this decision, stick with it. Neither decision is right or wrong, only alternating between the two positions is wrong because it becomes distracting.

3. Handy Hands: Hands sure are nice to have. Except when you are presenting to a group. Then the difficult question of what to do with your hands when you aren’t making a gesture comes up. Each of the 10 engineers who presented did something different with their hands: in the pockets, behind the back, crossed in front, praying that they don’t get kicked in the groin, etc. What this ended up doing is once again distracting the audience as we watched the speaker try to determine with what to do with their hands.

Solution: When not using them as a part of your speech, let your hands drop to your sides and let them dangle there. This sounds soooo easy; however, it really is quite difficult to do. If you spend time practicing talking in front of a mirror at home, you’ll be able to catch yourself doing “handy” things and can quickly put a stop to it.

Ok, that’s it for now. I’ve got much more to share. Let me know if you’re interested in learning from the faults of others and I can post it.