Presentation Skills - The Seven Laws

Many of us are now required to make presentations as a part of our job.

Being reluctant to present will often limit career prospects.

For the lucky few it doesn't seem to be a problem.

They seem to have always been able to do it and thrive on it.

For the rest of us, however, presentation skills are something we learn. And they're important.

Finding an Approach that Works

It can be a daunting and even frightening area of learning. We use an approach that seeks to make it easy and enjoyable rather than one that makes it even more difficult.

The difficult presentation skills path is the one where you learn to get it right first time, be flawless in your delivery, and make no mistakes. This is "how-to" learning.

Learning what to do and what not to do.

Get Real Confidence in Your Ability to Deliver Great Presentations!

The easier path is the one where you learn how presentation skills work and develop a style that includes your idiosyncrasies and quirks. This means you don't have to learn to behave differently when you present.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Most presenters are concerned about their body language when presenting. Rightly so: what you do matters as much as what you say. So, you have a choice.

You can learn the rules for what you are not allowed to do and apply them. As a presenter, you shouldn't cross your arms, put your hands in your pockets, touch your ear or nose (apparently this means you're lying) or sway from side to side The list is a long one and fortunately, you don't need it. You can take the easy route.

So here are the Seven Laws to effortless brilliant presenting

The Second Law of Presentation Skills

(the first law will be along later)

2. Repetition is Death

When you understand how presenting works you discover that all these things only look wrong if they are repeated. A gesture used over and over again becomes at first irritating and then all-consuming. Your audience won't be able to pay attention to anything else.

The easy presentation skills route then is to do all the things people will tell you are wrong, one after the other. This has the magical effect of freeing up your body language and, very quickly, your hands start working with your words.

It’s perfectly rational to feel so self-conscious when presenting. You are standing in front of a group of people who are looking at you, judging you, trying to interpret your words and understand you. It is important that you are aware of what you are doing.

You don’t need to use different body language to counter this fear. You can choose how much to use, or feature, your natural body language. In place of all those 'don't do' rules, you can just have the second law - no repetition.

Five Days will Transform the Way You Approach Making Presentations Forever!

The Third Law of Presentation Skills

3. Feelings are a Poor Indicator of How you are Doing

An area of presentation skills that is rarely addressed is how we feel about ourselves when we are presenting. This is about self-image and confidence. Here, there is also a hard route and an easy one.

The hard route is to do everything yourself. To be your own critic and to monitor your own performance. This means that you have to learn to be objective about yourself. For any type of performer, this takes years of dedicated work. The problem is that we are always the worst person to give ourselves advice about how we are doing.

Imagine you're standing in front of a group of your peers talking about an idea you've had. You lose your train of thought, then somebody interrupts with a question about an aspect you haven't thought through and you struggle to regain your composure. You limp through to the end and sit down, mortified. Now, how do you think you've done? Chances are you will base your assessment on how you feel and the little voices in your head (you know, the ones that tell you how stupid, useless and silly you are).

However, ask some of your colleagues how you did and they will say things like. "I'm always impressed by the way she brings new ideas to the team " or "She handled Charley well. He's always so negative about new ideas".

Great Presentation Skills are a Key Means to Advance Your Career!

People don't see everything that's going on inside you. They just see what’s obvious on the outside. This means that the information you need about how you are doing lives in other people. You know the saying "perception is reality"? This is it in action.

The point of making a presentation is to communicate ideas and concepts to other people. If they understand your message, it doesn’t matter whether or not you feel you expressed it clearly. It would be nice if you felt good, but that feeling can be deceptive. You can have a great time talking about something with a group of people who don't care and aren't interested.

The good news in this is that you don't have to do any of the "how am I doing?" presentation skills work. They do it all for you. All you have to do is watch. If they are smiling, you must be saying amusing things. If they are not paying attention, you're obviously not being very stimulating. If they are arguing, you must be challenging them.

So exactly how does presenting work and what's the point of it?

The Fourth Law of Presentation Skills

4. The Presenters Job is to Get them to Want More of What You've Got

Presentations work if you impact your audience in some way. They can be impacted in a way you don't want and didn't choose. This doesn’t mean the presentation didn’t work. It might not have turned out how you thought, but it worked. The point of a good presentation is to get the audience to want what you've got.

This is important to grasp. The hard way to present is to gather all the information you have, put it together in a faultless presentation and deliver it impeccably. The mistake is to think that a presentation is a good medium for delivering information.

The easy way to present is to put together the bits that will appeal to the people you are speaking to and use them to entice your audience into wanting to know more. Once you've got there you can stop. Your job is done. They will get the information for themselves.

The difference is rather like getting someone to read a book. You don't do it by reading the book to them. You do it by reading the dust jacket blurb.

Get Real Confidence in Your Ability to Deliver Great Presentations!

The First Law of Presentation Skills

(told you)

1. Audiences Sleep!

While we're on the subject of audiences, there is only one thing you really need to know about audiences, audience interaction, handling questions or anything else involving them. They sleep!

That is their function. All presentation dynamics are set up to encourage this. They sit, you stand. You speak, they listen. Often the lighting and heating are soporific.

It follows then, that your bottom-line function is not to present well, but to keep waking your audience up!

Every one of us has slept through some pretty good presentations because the presenter wasn't following the first law of presenting.

In order to dramatically improve presentation skills we just need to wake them up.

If they are not awake, stop what you are doing and do something different. Most people are sent to sleep by a breaking of the second law. Repetition can also mean not moving (repetition of stillness) or vocal tone (monotony).

The Fifth Law of Presentation Skills

5. When You're Making a Presentation You're in Charge

This is one of my personal favourites. When you are presenting you are in charge of everything. This is how presenting works: as an agreement between presenter and audience. When people accept their role as part of the audience they effectively say, "Ok, over to you. What have you got?" This means you are put in a very powerful position, though it may not feel that way.

The feeling you usually start out with is it's just little old me and all of them. The journey you make from there is one of ownership. You claim a territory that most audiences will willingly give up. When you begin to work from a position of being in charge or responsible for everything, you start to realise that you are responsible for what your audience thinks and feels for the duration of the presentation. If they are excited it's your fault. If they are bored, it's your fault. If they can't keep up, it's your fault.

At first glance, this may seem more, rather than less difficult. But if you look again, you can see that it brings liberation from the straitjacket of only being able to do what you've already prepared (the Blue Peter approach to presenting).

If you can see that your audience hasn't understood and it's your fault, then the obvious thing to do is to depart from the script until everyone does understand.

This can bring a gloriously refreshing approach to the preparation of a presentation, where you begin to look at a grab bag of possible routes and possible things you may bring into your presentation.

Five Days will Transform the Way You Approach Making Presentations Forever!

The Sixth Law of Presentation Skills

6. In Any Presentation, There is Always a Message

I said we'd look at easy ways of approaching presentation skills. Here's an idea that is quite complex to grasp but, once grasped, is frighteningly simple in its effectiveness. Everything we do communicates. The experts who study the way communication works will tell you that in your typical face-to-face presentation situation, the words you say are actually a very small part of the communication. How you say them will often convey more meaning than the words themselves.

For example, the phrase "It's very quiet today", takes on a different meaning if you say "It's VERY quiet today". It is possible to make the most innocent phrase sound vicious by changing the way you say it. Experts will tell you that it is possible that what you do and how you behave can convey more meaning than the combination of what you say and how you say it.

Think of politicians who are delivering the party line or are put on the spot about something. It’s obvious when they’re lying. It seems that if our spirit is not in line with what we are saying, our body will give us away, no matter what's coming out of our mouths.

There are two important factors at work here. The first is this: a strong message is conveyed by words, vocal force, and demeanour. This means that a clearly defined message doesn't necessarily reside in the text or words you choose to say. The most powerful messages are the unspoken ones. You can think of a strong message in soundbite terms. For instance "I want everyone to feel that I know what I'm talking about". I may never say outright "Listen, I know what I'm talking about", but if I make that the central message of my presentation, that is what most people will go away thinking.

Without a clear message, you don't stop communicating. You convey a message by accident. We communicate that we're tired, or we've had a row with the wife, or anything else that happens to be hanging around. So if you haven't got a message - get one.

The second factor at work here is conviction, think belief, think passion. Think of it however you like, but it is that essential ingredient that makes what you say live. If you feel strongly about something, it will affect the way you speak about it. Passion communicates.

Great Presentation Skills are a Key Means to Advance Your Career!

The Seventh Law of Presentation Skills

7. For All Presentations Passion is Mandatory

This is easier than it sounds. If you have to present something you have no real feeling for, then you need to find something you do have some feeling for and relate it to the subject you are presenting. The fit doesn't even have to be a very good one. You can start off by speaking about last night's football game because it excites you, and then make a deliberate segue into talking about widget production. The effect of the excitement in your body will last for quite a while and flow over into widget production. If it suits you, you could even make bad puns and poor analogies part of your style.

The reason I say passion is mandatory is simple. You can get everything else in a presentation just right but without a sense of your commitment, the presentation will be dead. If it's dead, it will be ignored. I can ignore it.

Everything we have been talking about is to do with keeping presentations alive and powerful. Keeping them in the moment so that no one can sleep through them. Keeping them so that no one quite knows what's coming next. Making them something that people can't switch off from. Making them interactive as opposed to a repetition of a rehearsed and fixed programme.

So the Unwritten Law of Presentation Skills?

It's Presentation Not Television

To recap, we're looking for an understanding of the way presentations work that will make them easier and more enjoyable to give. These seven presentation skills laws should help.

Get Real Confidence in Your Ability to Deliver Great Presentations!