Gerry Sandusky's Blog, page 13

What to do With Your Hands in a Presentation

Ever have this happen: you walked to the front of the room to give your presentation and suddenly began to wonder, why do I have hands? What should I do with my hands while giving my presentation? Why won’t my hands go away? Why are my hands so damn needy right now?

You probably don’t think about your hands very often. You use them all the time. You just don’t think about them. Until you get in front of the room to give a presentation. Then, if you’re like a lot of people, you suddenly wonder why you have hands, why they feel so awkward, so out of place, so heavy. What do you do with them?

Believe it or not, you probably have to trick them.

Your hands are one of the ways adrenaline gets out of your body. That’s why when you get to the front of the room, they can suddenly seem to have a mind, an energy, and a weight of their own. It feels like your hands have started to mutiny. They suddenly seem to take up way too much space and far too much of your attention.

If this happens to you here are a few simple strategies to help get your hands under control and make sure your hand movements come across as natural and not over-rehearsed and mechanical.

Walk around a little.

Adrenaline gets out of your body through your hands, but it also gets out through your feet. By walking around a little, you can redirect the adrenaline to exit through your feet. It takes some of the energy out of your hands if you have overactive hands in a presentation.
Walking around puts your entire body in motion. When everything is moving, your hands won’t feel quite as distracting as they can when they’re the only part of your body that moving.


Hold something.

If your hands feel fidgety, hold a pen, a marker, or if you’re using PowerPoint, a remote.
If you are using a flipchart in your presentation, it makes sense for you to use a marker or dry erase marker. Squeeze the marker as you first get started. No one will notice and you’ll actually help calm down your hands by giving one of them something to do.
Be careful of how you hold the remote. If your hands get twitchy, you might start hitting the advance or return buttons and get out of sync with your slides.


Use your hands to get the audience involved.

Take the attention off your hands and put the attention on your audience. Use your hands to poll the audience: “How many of you have had this type of situation…” And as you ask the question, raise your hand.
Use your hands to direct traffic in the room. “A couple of housekeeping items, restrooms are down the hallway (indicate which direction with one of your hands).”
Use  your hands the way a conductor uses a baton. “I want everyone to stand up (raise both of your hands from your waist to over your head). “How about a show of hands (raise yours); how many of you have…”

If you can get your hands—along with the rest of your body—moving early in your presentation, your hands will soon feel more natural and less distracting. One note of caution: when moving and using your hands be careful to keep them away from your face. Touching or blocking your face with your hands can become irritating to the audience.

Here’s a fun article from the Washington Post that points to the distraction that hand gestures can become if they’re overdone and insincere.

Give it a try. Turn your hands into an ally instead of an enemy. Put them to use. If you do, they’ll stop pestering you for attention.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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How to Breathe Past Presentation Stress

Everyone feels anxiety before a presentation or a speech. Everyone. But the people who know how to shine in front of the room understand how to manage that anxiety and put it to use for them instead of against them. In this video I’ll share with you two simple, but powerful, techniques that will help you breathe past presentation stress so you settle into your presentation faster and more effectively.

The key isn’t figuring out some magical way to avoid anxiety before a presentation or a speech. Experience will help lessen it a bit, but you will always feel some. The key is figuring out what to do about it so you look and sound your best in front of the room. These techniques will help you do just that.

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What Spiders, Snakes, Flying, and Public Speaking Have in Common

Stage fright, performance anxiety, fear of public speaking, or glossophobia. Different words; same feelings. This infographic, provided by Lydia Bailey at mastersprogramsguide.com, helps break it down from several different angles. See which part of it speaks to you—especially if you get anxious before public speaking.

Remember that snakes, spiders (certain kinds), and even planes can cause death. I’ve never heard of anyone who actually died by public speaking or giving a presentation. Sure, you might think you’re going to die, but that’s far, far different from actually dying.

Source: MastersProgramsGuide.com

Get my Free Report, Stage Fright: Simple Strategies to Overcome It and Perform Better Under Pressure

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How to Know How Much to Move in a Presentation

There is no magic formula for how much you should—or shouldn’t—move in a presentation, but there are a few variables to consider and work with. Your personal preference of how much to move while delivering a presentation is only one of the variables you should consider. The room and your space in front of the room where you deliver also have a lot of impact on your movement—or at least they should.

You move in a presentation to make yourself comfortable and to make your audience comfortable. The more comfortable you look, the more comfortable the audience feels. Appropriate movement helps you achieve both of those goals.

In this video I’ll walk you through a couple of the considerations so you can find your comfort level and shine!

Get my Free Report, Stage Fright: Simple Strategies to Overcome It and Perform Better Under Pressure

 

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Stage Fright: Why You Get It & What To Do With It

State fright, performance anxiety, pre-game jitters, a case of the “nerves.” We call it by many different names but it’s all the same thing. And it happens to everyone. Yes, even the biggest music stars, political stars, business icons, and sports stars feel performance anxiety before stepping on stage, stepping into a debate, or stepping over a three-foot putt that could win the Masters. Sir Richard Branson and Warren Buffett both say they had enormous stage fright early in their careers. Barbara Streisand felt paralyzed by it much of her career. Hip Hop star Jay Z says he had such stage fright he felt naked on stage. That’s why he puts his hand over his crotch. So don’t feel like you’re the only person who suffers before getting to the front of the room, the stage, the opportunity.

Here’s the big difference between the people who thrive and the people who shrivel under the weight of stage fright: The people who thrive make it work for them. They control it. The people who shrivel allow it to work against them. It controls them.

You will always feel a measure of performance anxiety, pre-game jitters, stage fright before a big presentation, important speech, major media interview. The key isn’t eliminating performance anxiety because you can’t eliminate it. The key is understanding what’s going on in your body and learning how to put that to use for you instead of against you.

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll call it performance anxiety. There are two parts to it:

Psychological triggers—what you think
Physiological reactions—how our body reacts

Let’s walk through the process. It’s a week out before a major presentation you have to deliver. The program isn’t fully together and you have a busy week ahead. You start to worry that you won’t even have time to finish the presentation, no less have time to practice it. Your thoughts start sprinting down a very dark alley. See if these sound familiar:

“This is going to look terrible.”

“I’m going to look terrible.”

“If I bomb this presentation than (fill in your negative consequence)”

“If that happens, I’m out of a job. In this economy I can’t be out of a job.”

Before you know it, you feel awful. Your breathing gets shallow. Your stomach is in knots. Your heart rate has accelerated. Your palms feel sweaty. You have cotton mouth. You try to push thoughts of the presentation out of your mind. But the thoughts and your physical reactions only multiply the next time they come up as the presentation grows closer.

Even if you pull together the presentation—and you usually do—the same symptoms show up: shallow breathing, stomach in knots, you feel bent over, sweaty palms, cotton mouth. The morning of the presentation you feel so bad, your thoughts convince you that the audience isn’t going to like it. You feel awful. So the only thing you can think of doing is just get through it.

When you do just get through it, you are out of breath, feel like your major organs went through a food processor, and you either want to lay down or vomit. And after all the sweat that has poured across your body you definitely need a shower!

You are not alone. Millions of people around the world share the same experience, the same performance anxiety.

The key is learning how to control it.

To do that you have to understand the role your mind and your body play in the process.

Get my Free Report, Stage Fright: Simple Strategies to Overcome It and Perform Better Under Pressure

Any time we have to get up in front of other people and talk, play, or perform, we face the potential that something could go wrong. The key word here is “could.” Your brain identifies the presentation, the opportunity, as a perceived threat. And that starts a three-part chain reaction:

The amygdala, two small, almond shaped masses of cells at the base of your central nervous system trigger a fight or flight response from your body to prepare your body for a perceived

threat. This is a survival mechanism passed along to you from your most ancient ancestors who faced threats from saber-tooth cats to Huns and Visigoths. And while you will likely never face a saber-tooth cat, Hun, or Visigoth in one of your presentations your body reacts the same way your ancestor’s did when they did have to face those threats.
A flood of hormones races through your blood stream: adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrin among others. These hormones create added energy and a heightened sense of awareness. Your ancestors needed those to avoid the saber-toothed cats and to fight the Huns and Visigoths. We’ll call these The Visigoth hormones.
The Visigoth hormones cause a series of physiological responses:

Your neck and back muscles contract because your body is trying to force itself into the fetal position to defend your organs. This body slouches—good for hiding from Huns, bad for addressing an audience. This is called a low-power position. And at the moment you feel extreme stage fright you feel powerless.


Your blood vessels constrict so your body can focus on feeding the organs. Your hands and legs might start to shake. Your fingers tingle. Your palms get sweaty. This is just because your body thinks it’s preparing for an impending attack. “Visigoth’s 200 yards. Take cover!”


Your digestive system goes into energy conservation mode. Who knows how long you’ll have to hide from those damned Huns? Your body begins to maximize efficient delivery of nutrients and oxygen to your vital organs. This is why you feel dry mouth and butterflies.


Your heart rate increases. Adrenaline causes this. Ever try to out run a saber-tooth? You’ll need a strong heart pumping very fast. This can create the sensation that your heart is moving up into your throat.


Your Pupils dilate. Your ancestors didn’t have night-vision goggles. They needed to be able to scan the horizon and figure out how many Huns and Visigoths were heading their way. Only a couple? Stay and fight! There’s two thousand of them? Run! Your body automatically shifts into long distance view at the expense of your short-distance vision. Handy tool for the ancestors. Total suck for you because it makes it much harder to read your presentation notes.

Is it any wonder we call it stage fright? Performance anxiety is caused by the most primitive part of your brain mis-perceiving an opportunity as a threat.

Now that your eyes are wide open, your heart is racing, your palms are sweaty, your breathing is shallow and your mouth is parched do you feel like doing a presentation? I didn’t think so.

But you have to so you do your best to just get through it. You race. You mumble. You stumble. You get out of sync with your slides. You notice someone yawning. That guy over there, the one who’s ancestor was probably a Visigoth, is looking at his phone. Oh my God, you think, I’ve lost the audience. This is coming apart. Bam! Your amygdala sees the audience as an even bigger  threat. A threat to your reputation, career, and earning potential triggers the exact same three-part process that saber-tooth cats, Huns, and Visigoths triggered in your ancestors. You’re off to the races again, going through the same three-part process that now exacerbates all of the physiological responses to the psychological mis-perception of danger.

So you talk faster. You avoid eye contact with the audience. You do your best to just get through it. You’re happy you survived, but that’s all you did. The Huns have ransacked your opportunity. The Visigoths have run off with your pride, and the saber-tooth cat is busy eating what was left of the promotion you were hoping to get. Of course you don’t want to do any more presentations. The flood of The Visigoth hormones have run through you and torn you apart.

Here’s the good news. There is a way out of this vicious cycle.

You can’t control the triggering mechanism that starts with the amygdala identifying your speech, presentation, game, testimony, or media interview as a perceived threat. You can control what your brain does next. The next step is to get your brain to release elevated levels of three helpful hormones: endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. I call these The Advocate hormones.

Endorphins are your bodies natural pain medication. Think of them as instant aspirin. They make you feel better and they reduce both real and perceived pain. They lower stress—which you really need right now—and they increase your sense of well-being.

Dopamine motivates us to take action toward our goals, desires, and needs. Think of them as a friendly nudge that makes you want to get in front of the audience. When you increase the dopamine in your system, you will reduce your feelings of self-doubt. Think of dopamine as the “Yes You Can!” hormone.

Serotonin increases in your system when you feel important or significant and it makes you feel more important and significant. To produce more serotonin all you have to do is think about past achievements that made you feel, you guessed it, important or significant. It turns out our brains don’t differentiate very well between in-the-moment achievement and re-living past achievements. Think of serotonin as your mom in hormone form. Yes, you are wonderful and important! Thanks Mom. Love you too. The other thing that helps us pump more serotonin is sunshine. Wear sunscreen, but get outdoors and grab a little sunlight. You will feel better.

In the end, the way you feel in front of the room has a lot to do with the balance between the Visigoth hormones: adrenaline, cortisol, and epinephrine leading the charge because your brain thinks it sees Visigoths, and The Advocate hormones: endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin—that make you feel like you are Mr. or Ms. I can do this!

It’s a little like a three-on-three basketball game. Visigoths vs. Advocates. The team with the most hormones in your body wins and you either feel hunched over waiting for that saber-tooth cat to eat you alive or you stand tall ready to shine and conquer the room.

Up until now, the Visigoths have been killing it, winning with one shut out after another. It’s not even a rivalry. It’s a route. But the time has arrived for you to even the score and let The Advocates win. When you do that something amazing will happen: adrenaline—team captain for The Visigoths—switches sides and becomes a key player on The Advocates. Adrenaline starts to help you think on your feet, have powerful body language, project your voice, and energize your audience. When that happens, it’s game over. The Advocates win in lopsided fashion, a total blow out. You start feeling more important and significant—serotonin, incoming! Your sense of stress vanishes—open floodgate number one and let all those endorphins in! And you start to stretch yourself both in the moment and into the future because you realize you can do this, and you can do even more—hello, anyone home? Dopamine delivery. No signature needed.

Now that you know and understand the key players in the starting lineups of the Visigoths and the Advocates, it’s time to fully understand the rules of the game:

You can’t control—and shouldn’t even try to control—the release of the Visigoth’s hormones. Blame your ancestors if you like, but this bunch is beyond your control.
You can—and should—control the release of the Advocates. The more you release, the better you feel. Pretty simple.
Your emotions will tell you who is winning at any given time. Feeling confident? Advantage Advocates. Pretty sure you suck? Visigoths starting to run away with the day.
Visigoths strike with instant and overwhelming power; Advocates work more slowly. Be patient. Life is a long game.
Everyone responds differently to behaviors designed to release the Advocate hormones. You have to find the one or the ones that work for you. And there is always at least one that will work for you.

So now that you understand how the game works and the rules of the game, you only have one thing left to do: learn how to play the game so the Advocates always win and you perform better under pressure and always shine in the face of performance anxiety. To do that, download my free cheat sheet: Get my Free Report, Stage Fright: Simple Strategies to Overcome It and Perform Better Under Pressure

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We Are All in the Pain Relief Business

It’s almost a cliche’ question at a party when you meet someone at a social function and ask, “What do you do?” or “What business are you in?” Most people actually struggle with the answer. They either go all in with inane details or gloss over it. But a recent experience reminded me that in the end, we’re all in the pain relief business.

Here’s what happened: I woke up in the middle of the night feeling some discomfort and noticing swelling along my jaw line. I did what most men do. I pushed on it. Winced. Then ignored it and went back to bed. In the morning it felt worse. So I took two Tylenol. By mid-day it was throbbing. And after the six o’clock news I was in agony. Finally, I called my dentist, Dr. Thomas Weiss. He was still in the office and told me to come in.

Sure enough, I had an abscess on a tooth, deep at the bottom of the root. Dr. Weiss did an emergency root canal, but couldn’t save the tooth. He relieved the pressure and pain and put me in touch with a specialist who a few days later took the tooth out and performed a bone graph—yes, this went way past root canal—to prepare my jaw for a tooth implant.

After the specialists procedure, the office administrator presented me with the bill with the warning, “If you thought your tooth hurt, brace yourself for looking at this!”

It was a big number, but as I looked at it I thought, hell, I would’ve paid just about anything to get out of the pain I was in, and because both of the dentists were so good at what they did, they got me out of pain and back on track in a relatively short period of time.

When I’m teaching one of our Presenters Training Camps or coaching an executive on his or her public speaking, I’m doing the same thing. I’m taking someone from a high level of discomfort and getting them to a much higher level of comfort. Doctors do the same thing. So do cab drivers, priests, chefs, news anchors, and so many other professionals. They replace the pain of not being able to do something, not being able to get somewhere, not being satisfied with the pain relief of getting it done, getting there, getting satisfied.

So if you struggle with letting people know what you do for a living the easiest way to express it is to say, “I’m in the pain relief business.” Then ask them what kind of pain they’re experiencing. You never know. You might find a match and a new client.

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How to Get Your Audience More Energized

We have all had those presentations where for whatever reason the audience didn’t show up feeling very engaged or energized. It does make your life a little tougher as a presenter, but you can over come it with a few simple tips. Try them out and let me know how they work for you. Here’s to getting your next audience pumped up—even if they aren’t when they show up.

Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when facing a lethargic audience:

Are the room conditions ideal? A room that’s too hot will put an audience to sleep before you open your mouth.
What time of day is it? Just after lunch beware of the food coma. Also around 4pm people’s energy starts to dissipate. Get them up and moving. Don’t just let them sit.
Avoid too many distractions. If you load up a low-energy crowd with handouts, they’ll start sifting through the handouts and tune you out.
Recruit volunteers. Get someone to help you with writing on the whiteboard. Get someone else to recruit people for an exercise. Give the audience members a stake in the program and they’ll feel more connected.
Move your tone around. If you reflect an audience’s lack of energy with a lack of energy in your voice or a monotone delivery, you might as well call the coroners office because the room will feel like death—and you will wish you had died. The audience will take its cues from you. Don’t make the mistake of taking your energy cues from the audience if it’s a low-energy group.
Ask questions.
Do something outside the box and off-format. Use an ice-breaker exercise where the audience isn’t expecting it.
Move to the back of the room—or a different part of the room—and catch your audience by surprise. Sometimes that will create just enough of a spark to wake people up.
Remember that energy is contagious. You don’t have to ignite the entire room at once. Find a few faces that show a glimmer of life and start there. Energy spreads quickly.
Hold a contest. It can be something as simple as pushups or jumping jacks, naming all the presidents, anything, just make sure you create a competition so half the room is rooting for one contestant and half is rooting for the other contestant. Once you get people rooting, the energy starts flowing.
Play the soundbite game. Ask questions and tell the audience members they have to answer in the length of a TV soundbite: seven to 12 seconds long. If they answer too short or too long, give them a buzzer sound. If they hit the sweet spot, ring a bell or make a dinging sound. Keep score and crown a soundbite king or queen. It will energize even the most dull bunch.

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Why You Should Speak in Soundbites in Media Interviews

Many executives and professionals I media coach feel unfairly constrained by speaking in soundbites. I understand. You should still use them.

TV soundbites have three basic characteristics:

They’re short, anywhere from about seven to fifteen seconds long.
They use ordinary, easy to understand language.
Excellent soundbites add a third characteristic: They’re visual. They help the audience see your point. Don’t just say “Ten million people fall into this category.” Say, “This affects 10-million people. Ten million. That’s the population of Georgia.”

The brevity of soundbites has more to do with what the audience can handle than with what the speaker has to say. TV audiences have surprisingly short attention spans for the most part. Effective interviewees hit the target by putting a key point they want to get across into a soundbite. Simple.

After reporters do an interview, they’ll go through the interview and look for the best soundbites to include in the story. If you’re keeping track, you now have two good reasons for using soundbites: Audiences look for them and reporters look for them.

A good soundbite will help you get a key point across and it will help you create a desired impression. It won’t give the audience all of the information you know about a subject. You obviously can’t convey that in a 12-second answer. Ironically, you also can’t convey that in a five-minute answer or a fifteen-minute answer because those answers in a taped interview won’t get on the air. They’ll get edited down to, you guessed it, a soundbite. Outrageously long answers won’t go unchecked in a live interview either because the interviewer will interrupt you to regain control of the conversation.

If you travel to France you will spend euros because that’s the currency they use there. In England they use the pound. That’s their currency. In the US we use the dollar. That’s our currency. And in TV interviews, the currency is soundbites. That’s how we exchange information on television.

Soundbites apply to all forms of media: TV, radio, print, internet, multi-media. Read most quotes in publications. They tend to run along the length of a TV or radio soundbite.

Soundbites aren’t a hard and fast rule. If you only speak in 12 second answers you’ll feel robotic. Just know that your 40-second answer to a reporter’s question will likely get distilled down to a seven to 12 second soundbite. The better you become at delivering your key points in soundbites, the more you will feel in control in any media interview setting.

If you want to exchange information effectively, get your point across, and make a positive, desired impression speak in soundbites in a TV interview. If you want to know how long a soundbite is, read this paragraph out loud. That’s a soundbite.

How to Shorten a Speech or Presentation

Abraham Lincoln used only 272 words when wrote the Gettysburg Address. It remains not only one of America’s most famous presentations but also a seminar in delivering big ideas in a small amount of time. It took him about two minutes to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

When was the last time you heard someone say at the end of a speech or presentation, “Wow, I wish that had been longer?” Probably never. The challenge with speeches and presentations isn’t making them longer. It’s making them shorter.

Legend has it Mark Twain once wrote a friend a three-page letter then added the post script, “Sorry I wrote such a long letter. Didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” Mark Twain understood an essential principle: Making things shorter requires editing, and that takes time.

Here are three ways (that won’t take too much time) that will help you shorten your speech or presentation:

Use Word Count

If you wrote out your speech or presentation, use your word processor’s word count tool. Whatever number you get, cut it in half. That smaller word count number is the ideal length of the speech or presentation. Cut out as much as possible to get down to that smaller word count without cutting out any essential ideas.

2.  Build Around Three Big Ideas

Ask yourself, when this speech or presentation is finished what are the three big ideas I want people to remember and talk about? Three. Not four. Not five. Three. I originally set out to share five ways to shorten a speech or presentation. Once I began writing this section, I followed my own advice and made it three. Most people can remember one, two, or three things from watching a TV show, seeing a movie, reading an article, or sitting through a speech or presentation. Limit your big picture target to three things. If you currently have more than three in your speech/presentation, do what I did: Take them out.

3. Eliminate the Overview Slide

Great movies don’t start with a PowerPoint slide that outlines everything you’ll see in the movie. Why should presentations? Probably because either your boss told you to do that or because you’ve seen so many other presentations that did that. It doesn’t work. It bores people. Just get started. If you’re compelling the audience will follow you. If you’re not compelling you’ll lose the audience at the opening slide because they’ll see how much you’re going to cover, exhale, and start looking at their phone. Just get going. You speech or presentation will get up to speed much quicker and your audience will appreciate it.

At first, like Mark Twain, you’ll discover that it takes a little longer to come in a little tighter, but here’s something Mark Twain never got around to mentioning: As these practices become a habit, they’ll shave time off of preparation because you will think more freely at first, knowing you’ll cut it down. You’ll build around three ideas in the first place, and you’ll start to uncouple the beginning of your program from PowerPoint.

Force 3

Thanks for attending the Force 3 Presenters Training Camp seminar. To have the follow-up notes e-mailed to you, just click on the Force 3 logo below.

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