This came to me last night. I was on my way to a BUILD event in Boston. BUILD’s mission is to use entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged low-income students through high school to college success. All the 100 students in California went on to college!!  They now have 100 youth in Boston who will create a product, build a business and sell the product—for real!! I printed the evite with the address as well as Google directions. My GPS did not have the address but I told myself, “No problem you have printed directions.”  Well, one hour later (should have taken me 20 minutes) I am still driving around the street. So far I’ve asked directions from a porter at a  hotel, a taxi driver, two policemen and three pedestrians. I was about ready to quit. This was not the evening I planned. Then I asked a bus driver. He says, “Follow me.” I do. Finally he stops the bus, gets out, points to the building and smiles. Best bus ride I ever had!!

I arrive just as the last the student presentation concludes. Frustration mounted and I felt like turning around and leaving. I’d already expended enough energy trying to get there. BUT I stayed and met some wonderful people with great ideas for a product I’m creating as well as learning more about BUILD. It was one of the best networking experiences I’ve had.

Remember, whatever situation you are in, you always have time to use your will power, recuperate and make it positive. Don’t let your unmet expectations that did not happen stop you from recuperating and finding ways to make the experience positive for you and for whoever is around you.

I’d love to hear an experience, where you used your will power, recuperated and made the experience a success.

“To assert your willpower is simply to make up your mind that you want something, and then refuse to be put off.” – Phillip Cooper

1. Stop making twice as many slides as you need for the just-in-case scenario. I have never seen even one client who did not have too many slides when we started working together. “But,” you say, “what if someone asks me a question and I can’t find the answer in my ten backup slides?” I suggest you tell the person you will get back to him or her in the next six hours. That should be sufficient.  Spend the time working on your key business objectives, which I guarantee have almost nothing to do with creating ten extra PowerPoint slides.
2. Stop organizing 40 minutes of data for a 20-minute talk. That means plan for 10-15 minutes of talking with time for discussion.  Do not create 20 slides and then decide which ones to keep or cut. That is a total waste of time. Instead, set up your presentation’s structure and then fill in the details. Tell your audience, “I know you have come to a 20-minute talk. I will be speaking 10-15 minutes, and then we can discuss.” They’ll love you, especially when they find out that you’re not overloading them with unnecessary and inappropriate details. Of course, I know this suggestion will not work for every situation. For example, a TED talk is supposed to be a certain length.
3. Stop writing those “perfect” long sentences on your slides. First of all, you are not supposed to put sentences on your slides. You are going to argue, “But sometimes people are not there and they need my slides.” Believe me; no one wants to look through a slide deck that has sentence after sentence. It’s boring and usually doesn’t make sense. Keep your audience from going nuts trying to read the words and listen to you at the same moment.  Make yourself a rule of how many words to put on a slide and stick to it. For sure, don’t have the same word on a slide more than one time.
4. Stop telling yourself you don’t have time to rehearse out loud. Here’s the ratio of preparation to rehearsal time for most people who are talking for twenty minutes.2011: 8 hrs to create slides + 10 minutes to think about the delivery with no rehearsal = boring and overdone

   Change the ratio:

   2012: 6 hrs to create slides + 1 hour to rehearse = a confident presentation and audience engagement

   People generally look and sound more confident when they have practiced out loud. Do it and you’ll be impressed with yourself!!

5. Stop thinking you are a graphic designer. Do not spend hours creating weird shapes just to make a simple point. Save yourself hours, even days, of time. Graphic design is an art, like sewing your own clothes. Trained graphic designers do know what they are doing. Most of us never went to school for this and should not attempt anything too fancy. What a graphic designer can do in 15 minutes will take you 2 hours and it won’t even look that good, no matter how many times you put shadows around the shapes.
6. Stop giving a presentation that is only about showing slides. Consider having some slides if you must, but then blanking out the screen and telling a story, showing a product or if you are brave, having a group dance your presentation.  Check this out. http://bit.ly/uSpOAx

More importantly spend time asking your audience for their feedback and comments.

I am sure you would like more hours in your days. So go cold turkey and make a resolution to stop these bad behaviors in 2012. I dare you to try these ideas and let me know what happens. Happy New Year!

Presenting is like dancing tango: prepare so you’ll be asked to perform again!

Whether leading or following, the dancer should not depend on the partner for balance. The same is true for presenters. We should not depend on our audience to motivate us, spark our enthusiasm and keep us energized.

How does an Argentine tango dancer prepare? Well, surprisingly, after going through the basic steps, many famous dancers have told me that the most important exercise is to practice without a partner!  In other words, the dancer needs to be able to do the moves by him or herself without relying on another person.

“Turn on the music and dance around your living room.”

“Put a book on your head and do all steps by yourself…to the music.”

I have heard these exact phrases over and over again. This wonderful picture of Fernanda Ghi and Guillermo Merlo, world-class dancers and teachers, shows their intensity. And check out this youtube clip, as they dance alone as well as together. Just amazing!! http://bit.ly/u9DdoB

Yes, it is wonderful to start with an engaged, interested, tuned-in audience. But when you do not, you must still do your part–and do it fabulously–every time.

Too often I hear people say, “I didn’t have a good audience, so I couldn’t get motivated to speak very enthusiastically. I just had to wing it.”  In Tango, too, I hear, “I depend on the leader to keep me on my balance when I’m on one foot.”  But that is not the leader’s role. You should show up on your balance and keep on it yourself without having to lean on the leader. And that means practice. David Shenk, in his book The Genius in All of Us, says, “Simply wanting it badly isn’t enough. Deliberate practice requires a mindset of never, ever being satisfied with your current ability.” (p. 55)

This is certainly true when you want to improve in tango. The reward for all my solo hard work and discipline will come when I have the opportunity to dance with an exquisite leader and I can match his energy and balance. I feel the same way about presentations. You must prepare every time, regardless of your audience, because you never really know, in advance, what your audience will be like!  If your energy comes from within, you will express enthusiasm even to an audience which at first may appear to be asleep.

For every presentation really prepare and practice out loud because then when it’s time to give that all-important presentation, you will know exactly what to do and how to do it. By repetition of effective habits you will have built yourself a wonderful foundation to consistently present with confidence and ease.

Be your own best coach. Prepare for your presentations by practicing out loud. Whether it’s a tango or a presentation, be the best you can be!

If you want to see another world class couple dance go to http://bit.ly/uBviAL  Watch Gustavo Naveira and Giselle Anne (considered two of the best dancers in the world) tango together and apart. You’ll see the time and effort they have spent in perfecting their dance.

Have you ever wondered why speakers:

Create presentations with more dense, text-heavy, unreadable slides than they can use?

Include charts and graphs that are impossible to read, let alone understand?

Data-speak and rarely get to the main point?

There are numerous studies indicating that hundreds of millions of dollars in productivity are lost each year due to information overload. Meanwhile, server farms, which house internet, business and telecommunications systems, consume 3% of our national power supply; worldwide, servers consume more power annually than Sweden – so that we can send ever larger documents that many of us will never read.

Overload

And even though we intuitively know that presentations with too much data, confusing charts and densely populated slides are distracting if not counterproductive, we somehow find ourselves compelled to overload our audience.

Here are four possible reasons, and suggested antidotes, for the Presenter TMI syndrome:

1^st Do you dread “being found out”: that the audience will discover you aren’t really an expert? You operate under the assumption that an expert must know everything and then overwhelm people with data, so that they will know that you know what you are talking about. As one of my clients said to me, “Sometimes I hide behind the data.”

Antidote: Ask yourself: “Do I know more than most people in my audience?” If yes, then ask, “What would be useful for my audience to know?” If no, then ask, “What is there about my area of expertise that will be complementary: a fresh perspective, including stories they can’t know because they are yours, data points that aren’t standard industry statistics. If you can’t compete with what your audience knows, don’t try to. But remember, you’ve been invited to speak because you have something unique to say – so say it.

Prove yourself by being on the audience’s wavelength. Don’t try to prove your competence with data.

2^nd Are you of the mindset that quantity can compensate for any lapse in quality? Do you remember being in school, thinking that if you filled every page in the test booklet, you would get an “A”? I do. If wrote on every single page, I walked out of the classroom thinking I had aced the test. No doubt my answers included irrelevant data, but, by golly, my professor would know that I had read everything. When you spend the majority of your time adding more slides in your appendix, there’s no mental bandwidth left to focus on key messages and recommendations.

Antidote: Ask yourself: “What parts of my data are relevant to my audience?” When you think you have the right amount of information, ask the question again, and cut the amount of data in half. You will be surprised at how much you can cut out and still convey your key messages. Much of my one-on-one coaching focuses on helping clients display executive presence by conveying only the information required to make a decision.

Outperform on the focused bits of information and stories that people actually need to make a decision.  Stop over-performing on the quantity of data you share.

3^rd Are you clear about the big picture of your presentation? How many times have you wanted to ask a presenter, “So tell me, how does what you said all fit together?” We all have – so let me give you an example of what happens when we do operate from the big picture.

Phil Lawler, a gym teacher at Naperville Junior High, has revolutionized physical education. All the kids run a mile every day and use heart-rate monitors. As a consequence, children’s fitness levels have soared, as well as their grades. How did this happen? Lawler, I believe, asked himself, “What should be the overarching goal of gym?” With the answer came a new approach to physical education. His is a fitness rather than a competitive model, one that involves running, heart rate monitors, and kids playing “small-sided sports” like three-on-three basketball or four-on-one soccer, rather than traditional team sports. As Lawler prioritized and set goals for the kids, transforming his approach to physical education, he improved fitness and grades. The same goes for presentations: when we identify the big picture and the major goals, we will be very clear about which data to use and what to discard.

Link to:  Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and The Brain (page 17) by John Ratey with Eric Hagerman.

Antidote: Ask yourself: “Does every single piece of data, line of text, chart and graph support the big picture of this topic? The minutiae of a presentation have one job and one job only – to support the big picture. As you think about the overarching goal of the presentation, you may decide to do what one of my clients recently did. He set aside all 25 of his slides and simply sat down and listened to a potential client discuss his company’s present situation. 

Start with the big picture, only adding what is essential to clarify that picture. Stop using the TMI approach.

4^th Have you limited your key messages? Your key messages are not your agenda. They are the main points you share when someone very high up in the organization tells you, “I can’t make it to your talk. What should I remember from it?” A terrific example of limiting key messages is a TED talk by Sheryl Sandberg. (TED is a website that presents riveting talks by remarkable people.) Sandberg made three points, supplementing them with stories:

• Sit at the table—literally and figuratively.
• Make your partner in life a real partner.
• Don’t leave the workforce before you leave.  (Focus on your career until the day you leave.

Antidote: Ask yourself: What are the three key messages of the presentation? Before you even create the first slide of your presentation, write down your three key messages. Then ask at least three people if they agree these should be your three key messages. Repeat this process until you’ve distilled your presentation into three laser-focused messages – an elevator pitch for someone who couldn’t attend. Hint:  If you want to test how well you are doing, when you give your next presentation and people are live tweeting, what did they tweet? Did they tweet back what you thought you said?

First write down your 3 key messages. Stop making your slides before you’ve identified your messages.

When you stop the TMI approach to presentations, you will end up with a more satisfied audience and, in reality, more time to focus on your other priorities in life.

What would it take for you to do the necessary preparation for presentations in your life?

What do you tell clients who say, “I am so nervous. I can’t do this talk”?

Your nervousness can be your best friend. Nervousness is energy that may contain a message from your innermost self. Your job is to understand what it’s trying to tell you. And then you can harness and transform it into passion and smart choices.

Your nervousness can also signal that you’re a bit fearful about taking a risk or going to the next level in your development or it could mean that you’re excited about the opportunity. Sometimes our excitement about doing something is masked by nervousness – it might feel more familiar to be worried than thrilled.

What’s one major component of preparing to be in front of an audience?

Practicing breath awareness and centering or relaxation exercises. Envision yourself feeling confident, open, empowered and creative as you connect with the audience.

What do you do to prepare?

I get there ahead of time and sit in the space so I can sense the energy of the room and feel at home. I like to set up early and move around the room to get an experience of the environment that I will be using for my presentation. I also sit in the audience to get a sense of their perspective.

What do you ask your clients about their nervousness?

I ask them to consider that we live in a world where nervousness is almost the baseline. What if they change their baseline to relaxation?

Being an actress, how can someone use improvisational skills to handle their nervousness?

Express your nervousness, give voice to it, speak it aloud as a monologue or write a letter to yourself. Turn it into a humorous character. Let yourself shake, move, jump up and down and release that energy. If you keep it inside, the nervousness will go in circles and get trapped into unwanted gestures, verbal tics, vocal patterns, physical awkwardness or stiffness.

Give yourself permission to experience the joy of your creative energy, that’s when you feel freedom and gusto. And that’s when you will surely capture your audience.

Leland Vall, in New York, at freeyourneck.com/blog has some great images, including the ones reproduced here. He also has a a book.

If you are really concerned about your back and posture, I suggest you take some Alexander lessons.

How do you calm yourself before a presentation?
I am not nervous anymore. After all, I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I do certain practices before I talk. I take deep breaths and ground myself. If I can, I close my eyes and do a spiritual practice of settling into my body, running energy from my feet to the heavens and then from the heavens through my feet.  I then focus on being with my audience and deep into myself at the same time.

How do you prepare?
I do a lot of thinking about my talk before I commit anything to paper, mulling content around in my mind sometimes for weeks. When I feel ready, then I grab the computer and sketch out my presentation. I review it. I put it aside and use it as a guideline. I am fortunate as many of my talks are without PowerPoint, so I don’t have the added task of thinking about slides.

What do you do when you have that “gut” feeling?
When I am speaking and feel certain bodily sensations I use them as a trigger to decide what needs to happen in the room. Some people would call this intuition. I receive instructions on what I need to do and then follow them without letting my mental concerns get in the way.

What’s made a big difference for you?
I pay attention by staying present and then choosing what to do. I see the person in the back who is creating a problem, so I start to walk around the room. I realize I need to be a little more casual, so I walk out from behind the podium. For me it’s all about engaging the audience more than sharing facts. In the work I do, I stay fully in the present while at the same time having an airplane view of what is going on.

Wendy Capland is founder and CEO of Vision Quest Consulting and The Magic Parties. In 2009 she was selected as one of the top 500 coaches worldwide. The Magic Parties is an on-line and in-person community of women supporting women to become their best selves and answer the question, “What’s next for me and is it enough?”

Jim came to a workshop and said he wanted to be able to connect to the audience and have them make comments and ask questions. Then he gave his work presentation.

He talked very fast, never pausing between sentences. He was hard to understand as he did not say the end of many words. If someone in the class wanted to ask a question, the person would have had to interrupt Jim.

What’s wrong with this scenario? Jim never paused to give his audience time to digest what he was saying, let alone offer his audience a moment to speak. He has to slow down so his audience feels there is room to talk.

Next time you are speaking, ask yourself: “Do I give my audience silence enough so they feel they can easily ask a question or make a comment?”