Enhancing your presentation skills (english text)

Enhancing your presentation skills.

So let`s give a big hand to Doug Jefferys.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Good morning. My name is Doug Jefferys and I wanna welcome you to the reader’s digest version of “Enhancing your presentation skills” and also to warn you that after today you never gonna be able to look at another presenter or be able to sit through another presentation in quite the same way.

Some of you might be familiar with this list, this actually comes from the “Book of Lists 1977”, but when asked, when humans were asked what is the thing they are most afraid of… Since they’ve been asking this question, actually, “speaking before a group” becomes… always filters to the top. It is human’s number one fear. And there’s good reason for that. But it’s very interesting when you look at some of these other fears. You look at “speaking before the group” - 41% of all people say it’s their number one fear. And you come down insects and money… And then you get down to death at 19%. Seinfeld actually said of this list, it suggests that at a funeral the person giving the eulogy would rather be in the box.

 

Make people comfortable.

To impart any new information to people, to a group, you first have to make them comfortable. Nobody listens to anything unless all the basic needs are taken care of. And you know this to be true, right? Sitting in the audience, if you are cold, if you are hot - you are thinking about that. If the program has been going on too long and you are hungry, or you are thirsty, you are thinking about that. If your bladder’s full, that’s number one priority. Number one priority… It’s  “When is this going to be over so I can hit the rest room?” Correct? And that’s what happens, so…  Anything you do to make the audience uncomfortable gets them thinking about something other then your program. You, the speaker, and every individual in the audience have to be on the same page, on the same wavelength every step of the way. You can’t give them any reason to be thinking of things other than your message. Unfortunately, most of the behaviors that speakers engage in, send audience members off on what we call “journeys of self discovery”. Most of the time we’re just shipping you off from the dock, saying “Hey, you know… Have a great time. There’s all kind of things you can discover on your own”.

 

Eye contact.

I’m back up here. Would you not agree that in western cultures we tend to associate eye contact with veracity? Yes? If we want to know if somebody is telling the truth, we ask him to look us in the eyes. Did you.. Pal! Did you take the last cookie from the cookie-jar? Look me in the eyes! Tell me! Did you take that last cookie? We expect people to look us in the eyes. We associate eye contact with telling the truth. With the possible exception of presidents of the United States, it’s very difficult for humans to just look someone in the eyes - I did not... -  and lie. We don't do it very well.

 

Pauses.

In order to get your audience to really take in what you have to say you’ve got to learn to stop talking. Stop talking long enough for them to ingest the last thing you said, get a picture of it,  try to put it into a context that they know before moving on to the next thing you are going to say. The pauses are absolutely the most important thing you can do.

 

Key changers.

One of those common things you see they are the key changers. And again, men probably more than women are more comfortable when they have their hands in the pockets.  Johnny Carson used to have his hand in the pocket. Is anybody old enough to remember Johnny Carson? And he would often talk like this with one hand in his pocket. Carson is a great example of what I told you before - you’ll never look at the presenter in the same way again. The problem is that all the rules we talk about, all the ways to do things right are often broken by people who can. Those people who can, can  break rules because they have a “we - don’t”, and that’s called charisma.

But the point is, hands in your pockets is not a great thing. First of all, you notice if I would  shake my pockets, you notice that you don’t hear anything. Often when someone is shaking his pockets, the audience go “Hey, sounds like couple of quarters, dime… He’s got 85 cents in there I think. What do you think? So if I would shake mines, you wouldn’t hear anything, cause as a professional what I do is I empty my pockets before the speaking, but again problem is that you need to have as much air on your wings as possible. So you try to talk about getting our sales up, getting our costs down, bringing the whole company, bringing them all together… You limit the impact of what you can say when you have hands in your pocket.

 

Gestures.

Bill Clinton used to speak like this. All the time he was governor, all the time he ran for office, he would speak like this. And as effective as he was, this was a problem. They could never get him to stop doing these total motions. So what they did is they got him to bring his finger in like this, lock it down with his thumb. Now, I did not have relations with that woman, that Monica Levinski…

Podiums go back to an era back when people were considered orators and they were separated from the audience. And that’s what a podium does. Think about this. This is my little castle, isn’t it? I’ve got this turret here, where I can fire off stuff at you all. But I’m protected, you know. If you are going to hit me, I’ve got this.

 

Effective Content.

The name of the second slide is “Let’s talk a bit about the history of our firm”. We are very proud about our history. It’s started back in 1920. It’s two guys, Harry and Bill, came together, and had a great idea … Bla, bla, bla. And what happens is: for the first 15 minutes of a presentation we  talk about… oh, that’s right, first we start out, because we are working with all that… Tell them how you are going to bore them, bore them and tell them how you bored them. That’s it. That’s the agenda slide. Then we get into the history. The history of our company…  because I’ve got to tell you all, that our company, and you understand that, well, you are very proud about your company, you might even be proud of that fact that you are number one in your area. Who’s the number one company out there? In fact, we are number one! Meaning that if you go with us as a customer you’re going to meet much less tasks than you would with any of our competitors. Cause we are the biggest one out there. Last year our profits, pre-tax profits increased by 25%. We took everybody else’s money, this year we are after yours.

 

And if you can tie back with the beginning, who here is going to go out today and not look at the presenter in the same way again? Thank you!