Image Credit

A Medical Conference Is A Great Place To See People Using Their Speaking Skills

We can talk about how to give great speeches until we are blue in the face; however, it ultimately comes down to just how well all of the things that we’ve discussed are put into practice that will determine how effective our talks are.

I recently had a chance to attend a series of presentations that were talking about the U.S. healthcare system. This gave me a unique opportunity to watch some very well educated folks do their best to give a good speech. Come along with me and we’ll see how they did…

Pam Arlotto

Pam Arlotto Speaks

Pam has great credentials: she is a big player in the healthcare field having been a past president of the HIMSS organization and currently being an advisor to the CCHIT. What missed right off the bat was that her introduction didn’t do her credit.

Sure the introducer covered the high points; however, he didn’t provide her with a lead-in that would have gotten the audience excited to hear what she was going to be talking about. Remember: your introduction is really your opening act. Since you are the one who cares the most about it, you need to write it out and give it to the person who will be introducing you.

Pam had a great voice and she was easy to hear. The challenge was that she was somewhat difficult to find. She strolled across the stage from side to side while she was talking leaving the audience feeling like they were watching a tennis match.

Her information was great, but her PowerPoint slides were not. On one slide I counted 15 text bullets — way too many to cram onto a single slide and way too many to expect an audience to read. I’ll be the first to admit that Pam had a challenge here — she was reviewing federal laws and they tend to be both lengthy and detailed. However, that doesn’t mean that your slides need to be that way. Break it up and use multiple slides if you have to.

The one thing that Pam did better than any of the other speakers who spoke that day was to use stories. Once again, a lot of what she was talking about were issues related to federal policy and that can be a bit dry. However, she added stories that were both motivational (you’ve got to make changes) as well as relative (“my customers are telling me…”). This really helped to make her speech stand out.

Dr. Jay Wolfson

Dr. Jay Wolfson Speaks

Dr. Wolfson was, in a word, a character. He started off his presentation by telling the audience that he’s been a university teacher for over 25 years and it really showed in his presentation. He seemed to feel at home standing behind the podium and he had clearly done this before.

Dr. Wolfson exuded energy. From the forcefulness of his voice to his rapid hand gestures you could see that he not only knew his subject well, but he also cared deeply about it.

For such a high-energy person, it must have been frustrating to have to be tied to the podium, which is where the microphone was. However he dealt with it gracefully and only occasionally had to restrain himself from going for a stroll.

For such a great presenter, you’d hope that the supporting slides would be of the same quality. Nope, once again the slides clearly had not been designed to do what PowerPoint slides should do — support the speaker. Instead, odd fonts had been used and too much small text had been crammed into each slide. I believe that these slides may have looked fine on a computer monitor; however, once they were displayed for a large audience they showed their flaws.

What All Of This Means For You

Hopefully you can take heart from this report back from the front lines of public speaking — even really well educated people could stand to improve their speaking skills. Both Ms. Arlotto and Dr. Wolfson really knew their material well, it’s just that their presentations could have used some help.

The next time that you give a speech, make sure that you are prepared to stand where they tell you to. Whether it’s anchored behind a podium or anywhere on a stage, you’ll need to adapt your speaking style to match it.

Finally, although we all have mixed feelings about PowerPoint slides these two presentations clearly show that when you create a deck of slides you need a second opinion. Taking the time to run your slides by a colleague can do wonders for you ability to successfully connect with your audience.

How many bullet items do you think a PowerPoint slide should be limited to?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you want to make a lasting impression on your audience, then sometimes you just gotta bring in some help to pull it off.  It’s time to bring out an advanced speaking skill – rigging a speech…

No related posts.

Presenters Who Can Visualize Lots Of Data Are Better Communicators

We would all like our next presentation to be our best. However, when we’ve got lots and lots of data to present, we can all too easily overwhelm our audience. What’s a presenter to do? It turns out that the good folks over at IBM have come up with a way to help us out of this mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into…

Not having enough data to support our position is rarely the issue. Rather, having too much data and not enough knowledge that has been created by processing that data IS the issue. Researchers at IBM have set up an experimental web site at www.many-eyes.com where you can upload data and then play around with it in order to visualize it.

Now I’m sure that everyone is well aware of the graphing capabilities of both PowerPoint and Excel. The problem is that EVERYONE is aware of these and so all too often, every presentation starts to look the same.

The scientists at IBM’s Watson Research Center (located up in Cambridge, Mass.) have created this site not so much to help presenters, but rather to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. However, there is no reason that we can’t make use of the tools that they are providing us with and if we can get some social networking suggestions along the way, all the better.

The web site is the creation of two IBM researchers, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. What they wanted to do was to take the sophisticated data visualization tools that have been available to researchers and make them available to the masses.

Currently, the Many Eyes site provides 16 different ways to present your data. Yes, your old friends the stack graphs and bar charts are there. However there are also more interesting presentations such as diagrams that let people map relationships and TreeMaps which show information in colored rectangles.

This Is An Example Of A TreeMap Visualization

When the site first became available, they only offered visualisation tools that would work with numbers. Quickly the site owners discovered that their users were attempting to upload books and blog posts. Based on this discovery, they went ahead and added visualization techniques that would work with unstructured text.

One of my favorite unstructured tools is the Tag cloud that you’ve probably been seeing show up on blogs (like mine). The more a word is used, the larger it appears in a tag cloud. Here’s an example:

Example of a Tag Cloud Visualization

If you want to learn how to use this tool to process your data, Rich Hoeg has created the Northstar Nerd Tutorial: Data Visualization via IBM’s Many Eyes.

One important point to realize, the tool was really designed to allow people to share data and visualizations. Don’t upload confidential info! You can delete your information after you are done processing it; however, if it has been commented on by others this won’t make the site’s owners very happy.

Have fun coming up with different ways to look at your data and present it to your audience. However, keep in mind that once you start to look at the data in a different way, it may end up giving you answers to questions that you didn’t even know that you had.

When you have to present data as part of a presentation, what format do you normally use? What tools do you use to create your visualizations? Do you think that your audience can understand what your visualizations are saying? Do you feel that all graphs are starting to look the same? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

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.

No related posts.

Senator Daniel Webster Became A Great Presenter Just Like You Can

So why do you care about how good of a presenter you are? Hey, if you’ve been able to keep from bursting into flames when you address a staff meeting, a department, or even bigger gatherings then haven’t you really done enough? For many people, the answer to this question is “yes”. And they just leave it at that. But, how about you – are you content to be just “ok”. Or would you like to be just a little bit better than everyone else out there?

No matter how well you’ve done in the rest of your life, how much money you’ve made, how far you’ve risen in your career, or how ever else you choose to measure success by, you can become a great presenter. The only thing that is holding you back is your desire to become better. If you are willing to make the commitment, then you will have made the first step toward presenting greatness.

I hate to say it, but you know what you need to do – you’ve got to tell someone that you want to become a great presenter. Yeah, yeah, this can be horribly embarrassing – they might think that it’s silly and what if you fail?

However, this is a journey that you are starting on and it can become easy to lose your way or to become disheartned after a presentation doesn’t go the way that you wanted it to. Having told someonw what you are trying to do means that you’ve made a public commitment and so you are much more likely to stick to it.

So now we move on to the next step: where to look for ways to improve our presenting skills. I’m hoping that I don’t have to remind you that Toastmasters is an orgainzation that you really need to join. Keep in mind that there are a lot of really good presenters out there that we can study from.

There are more books, CDs, DVDs, classes, webinars, etc. than you can shake a stick at just waiting for you to show some interest. Additionally, history has shown us who the great presenters were: Woodrow Wilson, Senator Daniel Webster, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, etc. Their words and even thier speeches have been recorded and are available for you to study. Learn, learn, learn!

I’m almost done, but the one final though that I’d like to leave you with is to realize that you are sitting on a gold mine of personal stories that can help you move your presentations from good to great. As you improve your technique for delivering presentations, you also need to improve the content of what you are presenting.

This means that you need to make it more interesting. The one thing that grabs everyone’s attention no matter what the topic that you are presenting on, is personal stories. These are stories that we’ve not heard before and so we want to know more.

No matter how boring you may think that your life has been, to others it will be a source of endless fascination. Write down the stories that make up your life and then start to study how they can be worked into your presentations. You’ll soon go from good to great!

Do you have someone that you could confide in that you are going to work on becoming a better presetner? Do you have a favorite public speaker that you think that you could learn from? Is there any historiacle figure that really impresses you with their ability to present? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

Giving A Presentation Internationally Requires Different Skills

As if being a public speaker for a day wasn’t hard enough, just try taking yourself out of your home territory and plopping you down somewhere else in the world. Can you just image the amount of trouble that you could get yourself into quickly? We work hard to create a presentation that will capture the imagination of our audience and cause them to take some sort of action. However, as we are building our speech, we have a habit of imagining our audience as being like us. If we travel to somewhere else in the world and deliver a presentation, then all of a sudden this very basic assumption is no longer correct and we may find ourselves in hot water. Let’s see if there are some tips on how to handle international presentations…

Terri Morrison is an author who has written a couple of books on the topic of delivering international presentations and so she really knows her stuff. As with all speaking opportunities, the secret to your success is to study ahead of time. Here are three tips that will help make your international presentation a success:

1. Careful With Names: We probably don’t spend that much time thinking about names in our everyday life. We get introduced to people and then we just start calling them by their first names: “Bob”, “Ann”, etc. Well it turns out that is exactly the wrong way to handle names when you are presenting internationally. In the rest of the world, names are treated with a great deal of respect. Often times a persons name has a lot of family history worked into it. Morrison points out that in many European cultures a person’s parent’s names are worked into their names – this means that you can easily insult more than just one person if you screw-up pronouncing their name. Assumptions will also trip you up. In China, the family name comes before the middle name which then comes before the last name. This means that the leader of China, Hu Jintao, would be addressed as Mr. Hu, NOT Mr. Jintao! In one of my favorite countries, Germany, people are very, very formal with their names. Basically, outside of the home you would never use someones first name to address them – you always refer to them as “Mr. Smith”, not “John”. Oh, and one more thing – get the pronunciation of the name correct. This just might be the most important thing that you do!
2. Would You Like A Date?: This is a small point that can have a huge impact. In the U.S. we like to write the date in month, day, year format: 11/02/08. In Europe, the date is written in day, month, year format: 02/11/08. Just to make things really confusing, Morrison reports that in China and Hong Kong dates are written in year, month, day format: 08/11/02. How to prevent this from becoming a problem during your presentation? I suggest that you always write out dates: November, 2nd, 2008. This way there can be no confusion.
3. Watch That Dancing: This may be the most difficult point of all. Non-verbal communication is a critical part of all of our presentations. However, just like spoken language, non-verbal communication differs in every part of the world. Lots of us like to use BIG gestures during our presentations so that the folks at the back of the room can see what we are doing. However, this can be the wrong move in countries like Japan. In Japan, subtlety is how communication is done and so it’s your little movements that the audience will be looking for, not the big over the top ones. Your best bet is to basically try to move as little as possible during your presentation so as to not inadvertently send the wrong signal to your audience.

Being asked to take your presentation on the road should be seen as a great complement. However, you need to be aware that you are not in Kansas anymore Dorothy. Your best bet for avoiding offending your audience and allowing your words to do your talking for you is to get a local mentor. This would be someone who understands where you are coming from and who understands your local audience. They can share with you the do’s and don’ts of how best to deliver an effective presentation … and isn’t that really why you are there?

Have you ever had a chance to deliver a presentation internationally? Where? Were there any local customs that you were / were not aware of before giving your presentation? How did the presentation go? If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

A Podcast Is A Great Way To Record And Distribute Your Speech

So speaking in front of a real, live audience is a great way to communicate. However, we don’t always get to control the world that we live in and so sometimes it’s just not possible to have you (the speaker) in the same place as all of the people who need to hear your message (your audience). What’s a speaker to do? Back in the olden days, this would be the time that you’d whip out the cassette recorder, make a master tape, and then through the magic of high-speed dubbing you’d crank out as many copies as you needed and off they’d go in the mail. Thank goodness those days are behind us now.

Here in the 21st Century we’ve now gone all digital. When we want to record our voices to share with others, we no longer reach for the cassette, now we reach for our laptops and iPods to create podcasts. As easy as it is these days to capture and publish our spoken words, lately I’ve been running into a lot of really poorly done podcasts and it’s got me scratching my head. I mean, aren’t these people listening to what they are creating and, just like me, doesn’t it make them shudder?

To make sure that you don’t get off the beaten path, here are some tips that will help you create a great communication tool your first time at bat:

• How Do I Record My Voice In The First Place? You’re going to need two things in order to capture your voice on your laptop: a microphone and some software. You can get wacky about microphones if you  are a real audiophile; however, just about any one will do. It turns out that the sound card built into your laptop actually does most of the work, so the physical microphone just has to be good enough – if you already have one, then use it. If you need a recommendation, the Labtec Verse 524 is a good one to go with and you can’t beat the price: ~$10.
• What Software Should I Use?: Once you have your speech recorded, you are going to want to do at least a bit of editing on it – chop off the false starts at the beginning or trim off the run on bit at the end. Once again, I’m a big advocate for doing this on the cheap and so I’d recommend downloading and using the very popular free (as in beer), open source software that everyone else seems to be using called Audiocity.
• How Long Should My Recording Be?: Ok, so this is where you can get yourself into some serious trouble. The longer you speak, the more damage you can do. You have no way of actually “seeing” the audience who will be listening to your podcast, so you need to be as brief as possible and keep to your main points. You want to speak long enough so that your listeners get value from what you are saying; however, you don’t want to speak so long that they start to look at their watches wondering if you are ever going to wrap this thing up. Remember, they are not sitting in an audience so if you lose them, they’ll just click you off. As a general rule of thumb, I’d say that you don’t want to talk for longer than 15 minutes on a single podcast.
• What Should I Not Do?: This is an easy question to answer – get rid of any “umms” and “ahs” that show up when you are speaking. Since there is no live audience, there is a good chance that if you aren’t careful you’ll start to fill in the blank spots in your speech with these filler sounds and especially on a podcast, they are quite distracting and really take away from your message.
• How Should I Change My Speaking Voice?: Stop – don’t! Sometimes your microphone, your laptop, or even Audiocity software will let you change how your recorded voice sounds. I’ve had women friends who have fooled with these settings so much that their recordings made them sound like James Earl Jones was speaking their parts. You are better off speaking using your normal voice. It can be quite a shock when you hear your recorded voice the first time; however, spend some time with it and become comfortable with it – everyone else is!

Have you had a chance to create a podcast yet? Why did you have to do it? Did you have any technical challenges making the actual digital recording? Were you happy with the final outcome? What did you think about how your recorded voice sounded? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

No related posts.

So why do we even bother communicating information to others? The answer is simple: we often need others to see things the way that we do. Study after study has shown that most people (myself included) believe that we’re so smart that we can not be sold. The great communicators know that the truth turns out to be that we can be persuaded to do something if, and only if, we don’t recognize that a “sales” technique is being used on us. Why should this matter to you? Simple – when you are presenting information and you take the time to incorporate a few persuasion techniques then you are taking advantage of what modern psychological research has revealed about how we can make the message that we’re delivering both more credible and believable. Let’s talk about how you can accomplish this…

Use a rifle, not a shotgun: If you want your audience to accept your ideas and make them their own, you need to aim at a narrow target. This means that you need to stop doing what we all instinctively do: back the truck up and dump everything that we know about a topic all over our audience. It turns out that this will just end up overwhelming them and not do much to bring them over to our side. Instead, what you should do is some field work before you present your information and find out what’s important to your audience. This will allow you to focus your persuasion on those and only those points.

Make It Story Time: Stories are a fantastic way for us to learn and they can be very effective way to persuade someone. However, if it sounds like you are giving a sales pitch, then you can be assured that telling a story won’t work. Instead, if you focus on a story that has real meaning, then your audience’s unconscious mind will automatically draw the necessary connections without any help from you and the result will be that they end up doing the persuasion for you. The key to telling an effective story is to once again pinpoint what matters to your audience and then tell a story about a similar idea or concept. This indirect approach is the secret to winning your audience over to your side and keeps them from feeling like you are selling to them.

How have you won an audience over in the past? Have you ever tried something that did not work out the way that you had intended? Has someone tried to persuade you to do something with a story but blown it by turning it into an obvious sell job? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: persuasion, communication skills, selling, stories

No related posts.

How can you tell when you are going to be sitting though an absolutely terrible speech? There are a lot of ways, but one sure fire sign is when you see the presenter approaching the podium with a big handful of notes that seem to be exploding from whatever he/she has them barely contained in. As the speaker takes the next five minutes to find the start of their notes, everyone in the audience has a chance to sit and squirm because we all know what’s coming next – complete boredom! What’s interesting is that it’s often not the speaker’s fault, but rather the notes that they are using. If the job of every speaker is to connect with their audience, then notes sure seem to be a big brick wall that stands in the way of accomplishing that goal. Why is this?

Why do people who speak using notes have such a hard time connecting with their audience? The answer, it turns out, is actually pretty simple. When you are standing in front of a live audience and every so often you pause to look down at notes, this really screws up your brain. I mean think about it, there you are having this wonderful conversation with your audience when all of a sudden you stop the conversation, look down and start to read. Then you look back up and while your brain is trying to process what you’ve just read, your mouth opens up and tries to jump right back in where you had left off. If you look down frequently, you are almost certain to screw up your speech eventually.

Having said all of this, it may come as somewhat of a surprise to you that I’m going to tell you that I’m actually a big fan of speaker’s notes. Why you ask? I have seem too many speeches where the speaker was half way through and then for some unknown reason just lost it. If the speaker didn’t have notes, then there was this very long, painful, silence in which the speaker completely shut out the audience while he/she desperately tried to remember both where they were and what came next. Ouch! So I fully believe that every speaker should have a nice outline of their speech with them and lay it on the podium as a sort of insurance policy. If everything goes well, then hopefully the speaker will never have to refer to it. However, in case there is a perfect storm, then there is a lifeboat ready and waiting for the speaker.

Dr. Steve Reagles has a couple of suggestions: oral writing and oral practice (don’t laugh). When he talks about oral writing he’s really suggesting that you keep four points in mind:

• Keep it simple: make it so that your audience can easily picture what you are talking about.

• Tell ‘em What You’re Talking About: make sure that you tell your audience what your point is – don’t make them guess based on the material that you’ve presented.
• Make It Memorable: Be sure to lay in rich details and interesting examples so that your audience can remember what you talked about.
• Tie It Up!: Make sure that you have ideas that run throughout your entire speech that you can use to tie various sections together and to make a seamless whole.

After you have that taken care of, Dr. Reagles suggests that you practice, practice, practice. He makes the good point that it’s through practice that we are able to lift the words that we write in an outline up and turn them into a verbal performance.

Have you ever lost your way when you were giving a speech? What did you do – were you able to recover? Have you ever seen someone use too many notes? How did they take away from the speaker’s impact? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Tags: notes, speaker, public speaking, communication skills

No related posts.