Why your presentation isn't coming out the way you thought it would

If you’re reading this, my guess is this has happened to you.  You’re about a minute and a half into your presentation when things start going wrong.  Maybe just slightly, uncomfortably wrong or maybe horribly this-can’t-be-really-happening wrong. Either way, you end the presentation feeling somewhere between a little let down and completely wrung out.  “How did that just happen?” you think to yourself, “It sounded so good in my mind.” Want to avoid this kind of unwelcome surprise in the future? Next time, make sure you are not doing the following:

1.  Running through the presentation ‘in your head’: Things sound great in your head. You’re the keynote speaker of your dreams, the smartest guy or gal in the room.  You’re uttering the pithiest, most hilarious, most insightful stuff ever said.  Except that you’re not hearing yourself saying it, you’re hearing it in your head. Nothing ever sounds the same in your head as it does coming out of your mouth.  In fact, you don’t really even know how it sounds at all until you hear it OUT LOUD.  OUT LOUD you’ll hear where you’re missing transitions, where you’re spending too much time on one point and not enough on another.  OUT LOUD you’ll find the right words to say. Oh, and OUT LOUD you’ll see how saying those words feels. Saying stuff in your head and saying stuff OUT LOUD are two completely different experiences. First of all, OUT LOUD you have to push air through your vocal chords and out of your mouth – which has to form different shapes depending on the words you’re saying. That requires energy, effort and skill.  Remember “Sally sells sea shells by the sea shore”?  How easily can you say it in your head?  How easily can you say it out loud? See? Lastly, let’s face it, when you’re running through your presentation in your head you can be easily distracted.  Something else (anything else) can easily take precedent and poof!, your presentation is replaced by thoughts of lunch, a meeting, a Facebook photo… This is why you must practice OUT LOUD.  In your head does not count.  Period.

2.  Reading from a script: I know, I know.  You want to be sure you don’t forget anything.  You don’t want to digress or get a fact or figure wrong.  Plus, (according to you) you’re not so eloquent.  Writing it down ensures you’ll be well-spoken, right?  Wrong.  Writing it down and reading from it ensures you’ll sound like you’re reading.  And unless you’re a playwright or script writer you’ll be delivering something that sounds like reading material, not like conversation. Even worse, it’s virtually impossible to be lively, dynamic and – most important – connecting when you’re reading.  Who cares if you repeat a word, or search for a word or even back track to a previous point to tag on something you forgot to say? As long as you’re looking at your audience and not reading from a script, they won’t care about any stumbles. And if you’ve practiced OUT LOUD there will only be minor stumbles anyway.  You’ll be speaking in real, everyday language, just as you would in conversation with friends or colleagues.  You’ll be communicating living ideas, not reciting from a dry (and most likely deadly) script. Instead of scripting every word, give yourself notes with keywords or at the most, short phrases.  These will keep you on track and focused, while not sacrificing the connection between you and the audience or the natural pace and vocabulary of your regular, lively unscripted speech.

3.  Relying on text heavy PowerPoint slides: This, combined with not practicing out loud, is probably the biggest detriment to presentations.  Frankly, if you practiced your presentation OUT LOUD odds are good you’d end up deleting just about all of the text.  You’d see that having all of those words up on the screen only caused distraction (and not only for you, for the audience as well).  Once you practice your presentation OUT LOUD you’ll find that you don’t need all of those words, you can remember what you want to say without them.  Bravo!  And thank heavens, because those slides were never ever meant to be your notes. Lots and lots of text on a slide does nothing but create a barrier between you and the lively connecting delivery of your message.

Don’t let any of these bad habits get in the way of your next presentation.  Use notes with simple key words or short phrases, remember that PowerPoint slides are there to aid the audience, not hold your copious notes.  And for goodness sake, practice OUT LOUD. You’ll be giving presentations that feel even better than you imagined in your head!  And you’ll be heard.

the beauty of the 180 degree turn

One of my "bespeakisms" is "Turn your focus 180 degrees." By this I mean to urge you, the presenter, to focus on the audience rather than on yourself. Over the years I've found that in addition to being beneficial to the audience, it also greatly benefits the presenter; particularly the nervous presenter.

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to help a client improve her facilitation skills. As we talked over the phone and met in person she described her excruciating preoccupation with herself, her mannerisms, her eye contact (or lack thereof) and her overwhelming feeling of being, well, overwhelmed while facilitating a workshop. This kind of confession is at once heartbreaking and heartening to me; heartbreaking because I hate to see and hear people experiencing that kind of thing, and heartening because I knew I could help.


The first thing I did was to assure her that facilitating a workshop takes practice and skill. It is not something any of us are born knowing how to do. The next thing we did was to talk about her audience, who they were and, more importantly, what they were feeling about the workshop.
  As we talked, it became clear that as scared as she was, her attendees were coming to this workshop even more scared. They were about to learn the results of surveys given to their teams, their peers, and their supervisors. It would be my client's job to create a safe, reassuring atmosphere right off the bat, so that the attendees could not only know how to interpret these results, but begin thinking of how they would use it to create action plans for themselves.

 Once she realized what her audience was feeling, she stopped thinking about herself. Eye contact became a necessity, something she understood the importance of and worked hard to practice. Her empathy and care about her attendees completely overtook her thoughts of herself and in the short time we spent together she became a sincere, commanding facilitator.

 Her supervisor wrote me that she'd "got her mojo back". Interestingly, it snuck up on her when she wasn't looking. She was too busy focusing on her audience; a focus turned 180 degrees.

Mind the gaps

Coming up on four years of working with folks to enhance their presentations (and thus their result) I'm finding that once we build the thing and run it for the first time we are usually faced with gaps between concepts. Ideas without transitions is another way of putting it. We begin with our introduction and then stumble um and ah, stumble some more, until we stop and figure out how we're getting from the intro to our first big idea. Same thing happens when we go from the first big idea to the second, or even to the first idea supporting the first big idea. yikes.

Sometimes we realize the first big idea doesn't even belong after the intro, it belongs after the second big idea. Every once in a while we take a big deep breath and admit that the first big idea doesn't belong in this presentation! (I'm always glad when the client is the realizer for this one. Of course I'll always tell them if something doesn't belong, but it's better when they tell me first.)

These "gaps" between parts of our presentations are inevitable and important to work through. No matter what we discover, whether it's a transition point or story, moral to the story, whether it's moving things around or taking things out, the key is to do it BEFORE you actually give the presentation. That is unless you like walking a tightrope without a net.

As laborious as it is for my clients to go through their presentation that first time and find and fix these gaps, it's much better than the panic they would feel were they to fall through the gaps in front of a live (gulp) audience.

the beauty of a deadline

I know, I know, most of us hate deadlines. (I think the word "dead" might have a little to do with this, but still.) But if we're really honest with ourselves we have to admit that deadlines help us GET THINGS DONE. More important, when you know you have a deadline and it's a reasonably distant one (not a "I need this yesterday" one) it helps us GET THINGS DONE RIGHT.

Such is the case for the most successful clients I work with. They know they'll be giving a presentation in three months so they contact me NOW. They don't wait til 5 days before they're to speak to 800 people. They give themselves time to design and develop their presentation and even time to (gasp, no kidding) practice it! Even my most reticent (a polite way of saying they HATE it) speakers are exponentially LESS nervous and thus have an exponentially BETTER experience when they take advantage of their deadline and use it as the impetus to prepare.

For me deadlines give me something to look forward to, something to move toward, a finish line.

And it looks like I'm about to have a BIG one, or a series of small ones. I've met this morning with three very dynamic gentlemen who, if all goes as I think it will, will be instrumental in the publishing of my book about public speaking! Stay tuned.

silence: a speaker's most valuable tool

I'm sure we can all agree that peppering our speech with "um" and "ah", "you know" and "I mean" only serves as a distraction to our audience. I would add that listening to a message littered with these pointless sounds forces the listener to work much much harder. He or she must sift out all of these sounds to get to the real, useful words, and then string them together, make sentences and thus make meaning out of what the speaker is saying. Whew! That's a lot of work. Instead of filling time with these worthless space fillers, how about just allowing there to be silence instead?

C'mon. What are you afraid of? I'll tell you what you're afraid of. You're terrified that if there's 5 seconds of silence the audience will get restless, or think you've lost your train of thought, or maybe someone else will start talking (OK, if you're having dinner at my house, that last one may happen. We've all got a lot to say around here.) The reality is that silence is a GIFT to your audience. It takes a great deal of mental effort to keep up with what a speaker is saying, even a speaker who's not peppering his sentences with ums and ahs. When you give your audience a moment of silence, you're actually giving them a chance to catch up. It's time that enables them to organize what you've said, and prepare for what's coming next. How could that be a bad thing?
In fact, when you stop speaking for 5 seconds an amazing thing happens; you get the audience's FULL attention. They look up because there's a LACK of sound coming from you. Honest to Pete.

So if we know that silence is a really useful powerful tool, how can we use it to enhance our presentations? Here's one way. The next time you're presenting, when you get to something you're about to say that's really important, try doing it like this; Say to your audience, "I'm about to tell you something really important." Don't make them read your mind or guess what's really important; TELL them! Let them know you're about to tell them something really important and then PAUSE. Let there be silence. Then say the really important thing. (And I like to say it at a little softer volume to add impact, although NEVER so quietly that the audience has to strain to hear me. Nothing will make an audience madder faster than having to strain to hear a speaker.) Pause. Repeat the really important thing. Pause again. Step back, and move on. Your use of silence before, during and after the telling of the really important thing allows your audience the opportunity to digest it. To let it sink in. Even to repeat it to themselves in their own heads. All in all, it's a really important gift to them.

Silence is also a great tool when the audience is laughing, or engaging in cross talk. Rather than shouting over them, just smile and remain silent until the room settles down. (You never want to shout over an audience that's laughing. If you shout over an audience that's laughing they'll stop laughing because they'll be afraid they're going to miss something funny.)

For those of you who are ummers and ahhers, here's my advice. Start TODAY right this minute, paying attention to what's coming out of your mouth. Not the next thing you're going to say, or how the person you're talking to is going to respond; concentrate on the words and sounds coming out of your mouth in real time. Catch yourself before the non-word can escape. Be silent instead. You can do it. I have every faith in you. You'll be an exponentially better speaker in no time. As will those of you who use silence to present your really important thing, or to help quiet a chatty or laughing audience. Oh, and not only will you be a more effective speaker; you'll be heard.

conquering fear of public speaking: take a cure from a ham

Here's the reason "hams" don't typically suffer from fear of public speaking. We've always had an audience orientation - or more accurately - audience stalker-like obsession.

We're not afraid to get up in front of an audience because we're madly in love with the audience, any audience, and we're desperate for them to love us back. It's really that simple. We can't waste time or energy being nervous wrecks; that's our audience out there; we've gotta get on out there, start loving them and squeezin' the love out of them back. That's what energizes us, that's what we live and breathe for.


We're sort of nervous and fearful that maybe they won't like us, which would be a fate worse than death. Seriously.

So to avoid this too-horrible-to-even-think-about eventuality we;


1.) Gear anything we're doing in front of our beloved audience for their maximum satisfaction

2.) Practice like crazy, and

3.) Closely monitor them as we're giving our presentations to gauge their reaction and adjust accordingly.

It's a win-win. To paraphrase Roxy Hart in Chicago we're lovin' the audience and they're lovin' us for lovin' them and we're lovin them for lovin' us lovin' them.

Think about your affection for your audience the next time you plan and deliver your presentation. Just try lovin' them enough to think about what they want to hear, practice like crazy, and watch them like a hawk as you present and adjust accordingly. i guarantee you'll be lovin' it and you'll be heard,

you are here

Yesterday I met with one of the women I'd offered a free 45 minute consult, and we were discussing the nervous symptoms she experienced whenever she spoke to large groups. Although there are numerous theories about why we experience these things (sweating, heart pounding, knocking knees, etc.) - the most common idea is that it's perfectly normal adrenaline that some of us who love the spotlight interpret as a rush and others of us who would just as soon remain in the "shade" interpret as fear.

I think the experience is profound and physical for all of us, especially in this technologically advanced era, because when we stand up to speak we are totally unequivocally physically there. We're not coming in via phone, or email - all eyes are focused on US. We know it, and it's unnerving. I think the fact that we are, by virtue of standing in front of these people, asking for their undivided attention calls into play our own ego issues. Do we really want their undivided attention? Do we deserve it? Do we like it? If we think the answers to these questions are "no" then we're a big ol' bag of nerves. If, on the other hand, we KNOW the answers to these questions are a resounding YES, we're a gigantic bundle of "let me at 'em".

If we know we've developed a presentation with our audience in mind, we know we're about to address some pressing issue, problem or concern, we know we're then going to provide them with a bullet-proof solution, what's to be nervous about? They need what we're there to tell them. We absolutely want their undivided attention. We absolultely deserve it, and (believe it or not) we will like having it. Now the physical symptoms we feel are more like the rush than the fear. It's all in the focus.

presenting without fear

Afraid of public speaking? Congratulations, you've got tons of company. If you think about it, when you're giving a presentation and you're nervous, it's because you're focusing on yourself and the fact that you're standing in front of a group of people who are also focused on you. Then you start focusing on your nervous behaviors and wonder if your audience is focused on them as well. Am I right?

News flash! Your focus is in the WRONG place. I hate to be the one to tell you this, but your presentation has very little to do with you, at least as far as the audience is concerned. It's all about THEM. What are you saying that matters to them? What solutions are you providing to their problems? Are you saying it in a way the can grasp and hold on to? Are you throwing too much at them at once? Are you using words they don't understand? THIS is the stuff they care about. honestly, if your hands shake a little, or your neck gets flushed, or you're sweating , they may or may not notice it but I can pretty much guarantee they're not going to care. (no offense). You only matter to them as far as what you're saying has relevance and importance to them. They're like every 15 year old you've ever known. It's all about them. They know it, and once you know it you'll concentrate your focus where it's supposed to be - on them, and your nerves will take care of themselves.

Go get em.