Gerry Sandusky's Blog, page 14

PowerPoint Isn’t Your Presentation

When PowerPoint was first it came on the market it debuted as program called “presenter”, but a trademark violation led its developers to change the name to PowerPoint before MicroSoft bought it. The software giant put the software on the market as a presentation tool, not as a presentation. Over the years, too many professionals overlook that simple, but powerful concept. PowerPoint and Mac’s Keynote are tools designed to help improve your presentation, not tools that should become your presentation.

You and your content are the soul of your presentation. PowerPoint serves you—not the other way around.

Too many people, when facing the task of building a presentation start with building their PowerPoint. Try a different approach next time. Start with these questions instead:

What’s the purpose of this presentation?
How will I know if this presentation succeeded? Will it lead to more sales, better morale, increased involvement? Set specific measureable goals.
What does my audience look like? What are the points of commonality shared by the people in the audience? Are they all from Texas, all managers, all Ivy League grads, etc.?

After you have that framed up, then dive into the content, beginning with the three key points, the key concepts you want to build your presentation around.

Once you have your presentation outlined, ask yourself how you would deliver the presentation if PowerPoint didn’t exist:

Would you use models, posters, props and other low-tech support?
Would you get more people in your audience involved in the presentation?
Would you spend more time making eye contact with your audience?

I call those low-tech, high-touch multi-media. PowerPoint is high-tech, low-touch. They both have value, but if you rely too much on high-tech, low-touch you’ll find it very hard to make an emotional connection with your audience.

Once you’ve done that, then start determining where PowerPoint slides help support your presentation.

Finally, try cutting the number of your PowerPoint slides in half, and watch your results improve.

There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint, but most people either use it incorrectly or use it too much. The soul of your presentation is about ideas, actions, and measureable outcomes, not the next slide.

The Difference Between Listening and Hearing

Listening is when you allow other people’s words to go into your ears. Hearing is when you allow their words to go into your heart.

You can listen without hearing, but you can’t hear without listening.

They both have their place. Sometimes you don’t want other people’s words in your heart—and neither do they. You don’t want words of pain, anger, frustration, irritation in your heart. Sometimes people need to get those words off their chest. So you lend an ear, but you don’t invest your heart.

Sometimes an important person in your life, let’s say your boss who you respect, shares with you changes he would like to see you make. You listen. And you hear. You feel the depth and importance of his message. The more you hear, the more you also discover the words he didn’t say: “If you want to keep working here then you need to hear me.”

Hearing takes us far deeper than listening. Listening, after all, we can accomplish with as little exertion as facing the person who has something to say.

Listening is a courtesy; hearing is a commitment.

Listening is a surface level activity. Hearing plumbs greater depths. That explains why people say things like, “I really took his words to heart.”

Listening will build your reputation. “I like Jim, he’s a good listener.” Hearing, however, will build your relationships. “I love Jim. He really understands me.”

Part of your personal power lies in how you exercise your choice of who to listen to and who to hear. I know people who can’t stand to listen to Rush Limbaugh. Others can’t stand to listen to the President. I also know people who hear one of those men as if they were the personal soundtrack of their soul.

Listening takes more time than energy. Hearing takes more energy than time. When you hear someone, their words, what they said and what they didn’t say, continues to sink in and you continue to mull them over long after you stop listening.

When you listen, another person’s words move through you or over you or around you. When you hear, another person’s words move into you. You absorb them the way you absorb a meal. It becomes part of you—maybe a small part, maybe a large part, but a part nonetheless.

The ultimate choice remains yours. You decide who to listen to and who to hear. Becoming a better listener will involve more of your time. Becoming better at hearing others will involve more of your heart. Choose wisely.

Be Quick. Attention Spans are Shrinking.

Last year Microsoft released research that impacts everyone who makes presentations, holds meetings, or needs to hold someone else’s attention. Be quick. Attention spans are shrinking.

The research shows that the attention span of the average North American has shrunk to eight seconds. Not coincidently that’s about how long a typical soundbite lasts on a network TV news program. Here’s the truly alarming part. In 2000 the average North American had a 12 second attention span. In the late 21st century average attention spans hovered around 15 seconds. It has shrunk by almost half in a little more than fifteen years down to a skinny eight seconds. To give you a reference for how poor that attention span is, goldfish have an attention span of nine seconds!

The implication is pretty clear. Most audiences won’t give you their attention for very long if you don’t do something to grab it quickly and through out the course of your presentation, your meeting, your conversation, do some things that pull their attention back to you. After all you are now competing with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, news feeds, YouTube, texting, and the endless sea of apps that promise instant gratification.

Still not sold that people’s attention spans have shrunk to that scrawny size of eight seconds? Watch people’s eyes. Notice how most people can’t hold eye contact for even a few seconds before they shift their eyes. That shift has several different reasons, but the biggest one is habit. Short attention spans lead to the endless search for stimulation, and the search begins with our eyes.

Here’s a link to an article about the Microsoft research. But I will warn you: It will take you more than eight seconds to read.

The post Be Quick. Attention Spans are Shrinking. appeared first on Presentation Skills Training | Gerry Sandusky.

How to Introduce a Speaker

I have sat in the audience and stood on the stage when the person introducing a guest speaker spoke longer than the speaker. It’s brutal.

The audience came to hear the speaker, not the introduction, a long, rambling discourse filled with detours of mispronunciations, stumbles, and an awkward pauses.

It doesn’t have to be so hard.

A few years ago, I spoke to a group and the individual who introduced me not only used my name a dozen times in the introduction but he also pronounced my name differently and incorrectly every time. I had to spend the first few minutes of my talk trying to smooth over the awkwardness created by someone who didn’t even bother asking me how to pronounce my name. Brutal.

Here are seven, simple steps to guide you when you have to introduce a speaker, whether you do it at a business meeting, a convention, a book club, for an audience of a few people or a stadium filled with thousands people.

Keep it short.
Make it personal. Tell the audience why you’re doing the introduction. For example: “I met tonight’s speaker at a convention two years ago while we both waited in a buffet line that never seemed to move an inch…”
Tell the audience a few, brief highlights of the speakers career, not every award he has won over the past twenty years and every company he has consulted with. Highlights, just a few.
Share with the audience how the speaker’s knowledge will benefit them. For example: “As a master communicator, he will help all of us deliver more effective presentations that increase our ability to close deals.”
Practice. If the speaker has a tricky name, make sure you know how to pronounce it. Become comfortable with your comments. You don’t have to memorize them, but don’t stumble into an awkward pause because you can’t read your own hand writing or because you come across a word you’ve never seen before.
Use large font type for any notes and names you have to read. That makes it far easier to look up from you notes, make eye contact with the audience, and then look back down at your notes without losing your place.
Finally, begin with the spirit you set out with at the beginning: Keep it short.

The Gettysburg address runs 272 words. It took Abraham Lincoln about two minutes to deliver it. Use it as a guide. If you can’t introduce a speaker in less time than Lincoln delivered history, then you need to cut down your introduction.

Appearance Either Supports or Becomes Your Message

Appearance matters in presentations. It helps to look the part. That doesn’t mean you have to look beautiful. It means you have to look like the message you’re trying to send. If a construction site supervisor shows up in an expensive tuxedo at the job, his crew won’t hear a word he says. Instead they’ll all wonder, “What’s up with him?” If a prima ballerina shows up to opening night looking like a middle age man in leotards well that performance had better be a comedy otherwise the audience is going to wonder, “What in the hell is going on here?”

Too often presenters think they have to dress for the prom: new suit, new dress, new hairstyle. And sometimes that works. Some times. A more effective approach revolves around these three questions:

Who is my audience?
What is my brand?
What is my message?

If you pull together your appearance, your overall look in a way that supports your brand, helps deliver your message and relates to your audience, then you’ll find your appearance is a winning look. That’s a big difference from just “looking like a winner” or “dressing for success.”

Let’s put this into practice. You’re delivering a sales presentation for a cutting edge software company to a group of doctors at the end of their day, just outside of their surgical suite. Your product will help doctors increase their profits and save them time.

audience: doctors who are wearing scrubs
brand: cutting edge
message: We can make you more money and save you time.

Can you see how wearing a Jos. A. Banks or Brooks Brothers conservative suit for a man or a Lord & Taylor dress for a woman would be all wrong in this setting? Those are classics, traditional, not cutting edge. You would want something a little funky in your attire: edgy hair cut, red sport coat with a white tee-shirt, expensive jeans, Stacey Adams shoes for guys, rockin’ pair of heels for women, something like that, something that says cutting edge and successful.

Now, take that look we just created and try walking into a bankers convention to sell them software to increase the efficiency of mobile banking. Probably wouldn’t work because it would be a little too out there for the audience.

I like to tell audiences and clients that I’m not Moses and I’m not holding tablets with laws. This requires intelligent flexibility on your part. Build that flexibility around audience, brand, and message and make sure your appearance helps you relate to the audience, support your brand, and deliver the message. When you can do that then you have the right look—even if the look is a middle aged man wearing leotards. Just make sure you are selling out of the box thinking or a really versatile pair of leotards.

Act Quickly. Attention Spans are Shrinking.

I recently came across some research on attention spans that shocked me. It essentially says that most of the people in your audience—whether that’s the audience for a keynote, a presentation, a sales pitch, or a meeting—have a shorter attention span than goldfish. Goldfish!

Microsoft conducted a research study in 2015 that found the attention span of the average North American has shrunk to eight seconds. That’s down from 12 seconds at the turn of the century. Down from 15 seconds late in the 21st century.

Goldfish, on the other hand, continue to hold steady at a nine second attention span. The implication is that unless you present to goldfish you probably have to grab your audience’s attention quickly and find ways to grab it again and again as your talk, presentation, meeting continues.

That doesn’t mean you need an endless fireworks show. What it means is you have to keep mixing things up. Change your pace. Change what they’re looking at. Change your intonations. Change.

Goldfish and your parent’s generation didn’t grow up with Twitter, texting, Facebook, smart phones, and constant interaction from dozens of different angles along with an endless deluge of new apps that promise to make everything easier.

If you don’t believe that people’s attention spans have shrunk to a scrawny eight seconds, notice the eyes of the people you interact with. Notice how often people move their eyes. Then notice how rarely they hold eye contact, unbroken, for eight seconds or longer. Almost never! The eyes of the people we communicate are often in perpetual motion out of habit. You can blame social media, technology, and the expanding world of entertainment if you want. Sure, they all play a role. But the bottom line remind the same: a smaller attention span for the people we want to and need to communicate with.

Look at young couples—and some not so young couples—on a date. They’ll sit at a table at a bar or restaurant and both be on their phones, surfing, texting, or tweeting. You’ll see that more often than you’ll see two people staring into each others eyes for longer than eight seconds.

Watch a network TV news program. Soundbites, the edited portion of an interview, run in the neighborhood of, you guessed it, eight seconds.

It’s the new reality, the reality of eyes in perpetual motion, searching for new stimulation, new gratification. So as the speaker, presenter, or meeting leader you have a few options: Mix things up and provide some change—visual, auditory, or sensory—or start talking to goldfish.

The 20-60-20 Rule From the Front of the Room

Anyone who has ever delivered a speech, made a presentation, or performed in front of an audience knows how different the room looks from the front than from the back. It takes real courage to stand in the front of the room—whether you stand behind a podium, next to a projector, or on a stage with your bandmates. And no matter what you do in the front of the room, you have to get your head wrapped around two crucial ideas:

You can’t please everyone.
Don’t try.

Recently the popular band OAR performed at halftime of a Baltimore Ravens game at M&T Bank Stadium. I considered it a real treat. I’m a big OAR fan. My son, Zack, who is a musician turned me on to the group a couple of years ago. So I really soaked up the halftime show, singing along as the band performed. After the performance I put up out a tweet saying what a treat it was seeing the band in the middle of a football game. Sure enough about 20-percent of the responses I got came in on the super negative side. Not a big enough name band. Audio in the stadium wasn’t good. Band was too loud. Why couldn’t they get U2 to play. Really? A fun, change of pace halftime show and people go for the negative? Yup. You can count on it—whether you are the lead guitarist for OAR, or making a sales presentation in a conference room in Boise, Idaho.

I learned about this many years ago from a professional speaker and over the years I have found it to hold pretty true. The 20-60-20 rule. It goes like this: When you walk to the front of the room 20% of the crowd will love you, no matter what. They’ll relate to you. They’ll connect with you. For any number of reasons they are instant fans. A different 20% will dislike you—for reasons you can’t control (the color of your hair, the way you remind someone of their ex-spouse, the sound of your voice). And 60% of the people in the audience will fall in the middle between love and dislike. That’s the group you want to win over. That’s where the success or failure of your performance will really come in to play. Win over the majority of that 60% and you own the room. Fail to win over that core 60% of the audience and you’ll wish you had never seen that room.

The 20% who love you as soon as they see you are on board no matter what. You would have to go way out of bounds to lose them. The 20% who dislike you usually dislike everything and everyone. That’s about them not you. You can’t really do much to win over that group. Don’t waste time worrying about them. The 60% who show up undecided are the people you can influence with your performance. They want to love you. After all it’s in their best interest. If you’re outstanding you improve their experience. They’re all for that. You just have to give them a reason to love you. You do that by giving them your best, most authentic self in your performance.

Nothing wastes more time and energy than trying to please everyone. Spend enough time in the front of the room and you’ll learn that some people don’t want to be pleased. That’s their choice. You have the choice of whether or not you let that bother you.

The Power of Eye Contact in Presentations

How you use your eyes during your presentation can have a dramatic impact on the success or failure of that presentation. One of the keys to turning a presentation into a conversation is using your eyes in a way that connects to the audience and makes the audience feel more comfortable. To do that, you have to know what to do with your eyes and how to practice using better eye contact. I’ll show you both in this video:

Present from the Heart. The Results will Astound You.

I was speaking to a group of bank branch managers recently, delivering a keynote called The Crooked Yardstick. The title comes from a lesson my mom taught me years ago that if you measure material using a crooked yardstick, the finished garment will still look like it’s the right size but something will feel off to the person who puts it on—and they won’t be able to figure out what’s wrong because it looks right. My mom was a tremendously talented seamstress and a person of amazing intuition and insight.

The idea of the Crooked Yardstick talk is to help people examine the parts of their life, personally, professionally, and organizationally that look right but don’t feel quite right—something is off. And it doesn’t have to be something huge or off by much. It’s about learning to trust our intuitions.

During the talk I reference my father’s battle with Alzheimer’s at the end of his life and a powerful, indelible moment that happened in the final conversation we had. It sounds risky to put things like that in a talk—or a presentation. After all, I got choked up at a time when I didn’t expect it, but I just went with it. The audience did too.

After my talk, I had a couple of remarkable conversations with members of the audience. One was a woman who came up to me and choking back tears she said to me, “I lost my child a couple of years ago and today you reminded me to listen to my intuition. Thank you.” She took my breath away. I showed up that morning intending to talk to bankers about some of the challenges they faced with technological changes happening at a furious pace in their industry—as well as the rest of our industries. And I wound up getting a hug from a mother who had lost a child. Whoa.

No sooner had that conversation ended than another woman, about my age, walked up to me. She couldn’t talk through a veil of tears she was holding back at the rim of her eyes. She just walked up to me and gave me the biggest hug a stranger has ever wrapped around me.

I left that conference feeling a powerful connection—not just the connection we all want as speakers and presenters, but the connection of one human soul to another, the kind of connection that transcends words or descriptions but is so real we all feel it.

I made a decision at the start of that talk that I was going to share things from my heart, not just my head. In speeches and presentations we connect on one level when we share information and knowledge. I call that head communication. But we put ourselves in position to connect at a level that goes so far deeper than job descriptions and paychecks when we also dare to share from our heart. Sure it’s risky. It might not be seen as “appropriate” by everyone. I get that. But the hugs, the looks, and the emotions those two women shared with me reminded me of the importance of going beyond words and concepts and daring to peel back the layers of life and protection we all build up over time and sharing from our essential self, our heart, our unprotected, unfiltered genuine self.

Try it. Next meeting. Next presentation. Next speech. Go a little off course and dare to speak from the heart. I already hear your protests. What if I get fired for doing it? Then you didn’t belong there in the first place. Simple as that.

This world needs more heart, your heart. After all, yours is the only heart you can put out there. Pretty simple choice when you distill it down to the essentials. Either you share you, the real you, or you don’t. If you don’t share the real you, who will?

Seeing Past the Wheelchair—a Powerful Perspective

I know a young man named Rakeem Bowdry who wants to become a public speaker, and I plan on helping him do it. Rakeem already has a powerful message. He wants to help people see past the wheelchair he sits in and see the person that he is. He wants to do that for everyone in a wheelchair.

We’ve had several conversations in recent weeks in which Rakeem has shared with me his frustration that when people first meet him or first see him they see the chair. They don’t see him. The photo that you see is Rakeem, his brother Tim—his caregiver, and me after a night out together at Cheesecake Factory. Rakeem loves cheesecake! I’ll bet you didn’t think of that when you first saw the photo. Don’t beat yourself up. Neither did I when I first met Rakeem.

He has already taught me many powerful lessons about life, like the gift of mobility that we all take for granted. And I have never met anyone who does a better job of holding eye contact in a conversation than Rakeem. He has powerful presence and spirit that is so joyful. I have no doubt he will have a amazing presence in time in front of the room because he has a focus that I want to share with you. He wants to help others see a condition in a new way. He wants to help others. Before he has even begun the journey to the front of the room, Rakeem already gets it. Public speaking isn’t about the speaker. It’s about what the speaker brings to and for the audience. The same holds for any presentation—in person, on video, in small groups or large.

A drunk driver left Rakeem a quadriplegic four years ago in an accident in Mississippi. He came to Baltimore for advanced care and treatment and he would like to call Baltimore home. He told me, “If ever there is going to be a breakthrough in spinal chord research, it’s going to happen here and I want to be as close to that as possible.” But until then, Rakeem wants to help others see past wheelchairs and understand that wheelchairs help some people but they don’t define them.

I was so moved by Rakeem’s insight and understanding of human nature, not to mention his courage. In the coming weeks and months I will tell you more about the team I plan to help assemble with Rakeem and his brother Tim so they can live independent lives in their adopted home town with the support they’ll need to do that. But first I wanted you to meet Rakeem and Tim. Rakeem is 23. Tim, 24. Tim, a talented artist has put his own life on hold so he can be his brother’s caregiver.

And I wanted you to receive the gift of insight that Rakeem has, a gift we can all use in front of the room: Be very clear what you want to give the audience. And have the courage to help others see the world in a different way. The rest is details.