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Archive for May, 2008

Presentation Analysis: Jill Bolte Taylor – My stroke of insight – a neuroanatomist experiences her own stroke from the inside

This is an analysis of Jill Bolte Taylor’s extraordinary presentation on her experience of having a stroke.

Presentation on TED.com:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

This presentation is possibly my favourite presentation of all time.

Jill is a neuroanatomist who experienced a stroke in her left hemisphere, and was able to map what was happening to her from the inside.

Things to note about Jill Bolte Taylor’s presentation on a technical level include:

Establishing credibility
Creating curiosity
Storytelling
Systematically using the space, her physicality and the voice
Visual aids

This is how she does it. Continue reading ‘Presentation Analysis: Jill Bolte Taylor – My stroke of insight – a neuroanatomist experiences her own stroke from the inside’

The president of East Timor is a great speaker

Published May 27, 2008 Building curiosity , Effective communication , Establishing credibility , Presentations , Storytelling Leave a Comment
Tags: anecdote, assassination attempt, East Timor, Jose Ramos-Horta, Presentations, president

On Friday I went to a gala dinner hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Association of Singapore. The after-dinner speaker was Dr Jose Ramos-Horta, the president of Timor Leste, or East Timor.

In case you’re not aware, Dr Ramos-Horta survived an assassination attempt in February. This was his first trip out of the country since he returned for recuperation.

By using personal anecdotes with which we could identify, the president of the smallest country in Asia managed to make us feel like if we were only to spend a couple of hours together, we’d become good friends.

Firstly, he let us know that he had only handwritten notes for his talk rather than formal remarks. This was because, even though he has the budget for first class flight, the airline he flew with didn’t have even business class seats, and when the person in front reclined his seat, the Doctor couldn’t get his laptop open…

He told the tale of the assassination attempt beautifully, with an extraordinary amount of detail that only a skilled story-teller would give. He even talked about the dream he had during the coma, and the one nightmare he had had since.

Hello! The president of a country told us about his dreams and nightmares – you don’t get much more intimate than that.

He spoke of how he had bargained with God as a young student, letting God know that if he passed a written exam that meant he didn’t have to do the oral exam, young Jose would go to church every day, but if he had to take the oral exam, he would only attend on Sundays.

Well, even though he had not studied hardly at all, he passed the exam. Jose didn’t fulfil on his side of the bargain. Perhaps the assassination attempt all these years later was God’s revenge, he wondered.

And so it continued.

It was one of those interesting situations where showing apparent weakness, and humility, led us to see a strong man who spoke from the heart.

I have no idea of his skills as a leader (a bit of loose cannon, I wouldn’t wonder), but I left feeling he was a smart, warm man. A big part of that was his intimate conversational style of presenting and him risking showing us apparently unedited parts of his private life.

Something to think about next time we start editing our life in order to create an impression of strength…

Learning storytelling from movies

Published May 22, 2008 Effective communication , Good writing , Presentation Analysis , Presentations , Storytelling Leave a Comment
Tags: adaptive unconscious, Blake Snyder, Malcolm Gladwell, movie, presentation, Save the Cat, screenwriting, story structure, Storytelling

At the weekend, I went to see Speed Racer. Now, it’s about as fun and as serious as a Ben and Jerry’s Strawberry Cheesecake milkshake, but I learned a lot.

I’m a big believer in feeding your pattern-maker (the adaptive unconscious – the part of the mind that looks for the patterns in the data, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink). The bigger database that this part of the mind has, the better instincts (sorry, Malcolm) you have in a situation. So by pointing your attention towards the things you want more of, you can then produce those results more easily.

In terms of communication skills, this requires you to have what I call a meta-awareness, a dual awareness of both the content of what you’re experiencing and its structure.

Having this meta-awareness means you can then have a better instinct about how to tell your stories.

This is part of the reason for the presentation analysis posts on this blog (Joshua Klein’s Wisdom of Crows being the first one). My aim is for you presenters to gain the tools to be able to feed your pattern-maker with how someone does great presentations (see my article ‘How to Radically Improve your Presentation Skills Without Saying a Word’ for more details).

This meta-awareness can be applied in any context you’re interested in. I’m coming up to publish my second book, so I spent an illuminating 30 minutes with Natasha Golding the other day in Borders, going through the business section, the self-help section, the fiction section, and looking at which books caught our eye, which we picked up, which we put back. We learned a lot about titles, cover design, author photos (an author photo that doesn’t match the book can make me put it back on the shelf), text size, first line…

It’s about developing a fascination with what works, how you’re being affected unconsciously, and asking yourself how you can wake up and be conscious of those effects.

Storytelling is vital to good writing (fiction and non-fiction) as well as in presentations. Keeping an awareness of how the story is structured can be very instructive.

Now I know that some of you like to keep the magic of movies. I get that. In fact, if a movie is really magical, I just drop all the way in.

However, most movies aren’t pure gold. This way you can enjoy an okay movie, and improve your communication skills at the same time.

And personally, I find that the magic is even greater when I see the craftsmanship of the product. In short, I’m one of the nerds who enjoyed Peter Jackson’s ‘making of’ documentaries for Lord of the RIngs almost as much as the movies themselves.

You can use movies like Speed Racer, which was hardly complex, as a learning device to track how a story is set up, what draws you in, how you get to know the characters, what makes you sit up, what makes you wary, what makes you sigh.

It can be particularly interesting to notice when your sense of story is satisfied, and when it is obstructed. Notice the disappointment and frustration of a mangled ending, or the satisfaction of all the loose ends being tied together.

If you really want to get into this, THE most accessible book on movie story structure is ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder which gives you everything you need to know about why really good popular movies are so satisfying.
It’s also amazing to map how very different movies are actually the same movie when you move above the content and look at the sequence of scenes.

Quick starts for next time you’re at the movies:

First 60 seconds – What’s this movie like? What’s the tone/genre/setting? How was that done?

First 10 minutes – Who’s been introduced? What are they like? Who is this movie about? What’s the main plotline of the movie? How was that set up?

Last 5 minutes – How are the loose ends being tied up (feel your craving for that)? How does the end scene mirror the first scene? What has changed for the main character? How is this being signalled?

Notice particularly this last one. When you’re telling a story from your life, make it clear how you changed from the start to the end. That is classic storytelling straight from Aristotle’s Poetics.

Speaking slower: controlling your pace in presentations

Published May 20, 2008 Effective communication , Presentations 1 Comment
Tags: pace, presentation skills, Presentations, slowing down

Pace has been my major concern with speakers for years. Whenever
I work with people on presentations, a significant aspect that always
needs work is speaking slower.

I’m about to tell you something that will feel completely weird
to begin with, but it’s the best piece of advice I can give you
from coaching more than 3000 presentations.

I think people talk too fast because:

~ they have adrenalin flooding their system
~ they’re scared of boring people
~ they’ve heard what they’re saying before

Plus it takes some work to be able to calibrate how fast you’re
talking, and then you need to know how to actually slow down
in the heat of the moment.

Up until a couple of days ago, my best advice was to speak so
slowly you can’t believe you’re not boring people.

Well, I have something both more useful and more accurate.

My advice now is: Slow down until you can hear each individual
word that you’re saying.

I’ll say that again.

Slow down. Until you can hear.
Each. Individual. Word.
That.
You’re.
Saying.

This serves a purpose for you and a purpose for us.

For you, speaking slower than you think means you can make
sensible editing choices as you’re going along, instead of
gabbling or uhmming and erring. In addition, powerful people take
their time, so you taking your time multiplies your credibility
by 5000. Or so.

For us, your listeners, we’ve never heard what you’re saying
before, so speaking slower than *we’re* thinking gives us time to
digest what you’re saying.

Just this one practice can radically change your relationship
to presenting.

It’ll also make you stand out as someone who is interesting and
easy to listen to.

All for something so simple, huh?

Caveat: Don’t experiment with this too much at home. It’ll drive
your family nuts. Think meetings, presentations, that kind
of thing…

Don’t be manipulated – Question Five

Published May 17, 2008 Effective communication , Planning Leave a Comment
Tags: Effective communication, manipulation, planning communication

I had someone ask after reading my analysis of Josh’s session (thanks Steve) about the fifth planning question.

Question Five is: How might all of this affect how I’m going to communicate?

You’re less likely to ask yourself this one if you’re not the person doing the communicating.

However, it can be useful to even ask this before hearing someone talk or reading something, especially if they are going to try and ‘sell’ to you. Means you can evaluate what they’re doing more objectively, be less likely to be manipulated.

I wrote a 60 second article on this a while back.

60 seconds on… zebras and authors and staying awake.

There’ll be more about the Real.Smart.Now planning questions in this blog and indeed in the book. Will keep you posted as to publishing progress…

Making people care about what you’re saying

Published May 17, 2008 Effective communication , Good writing , Motivation , Presentations 1 Comment
Tags: Effective communication, Good writing, motivational communication, presentation skills, Presentations

I was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark last night for the first time in 20 years (1981, people!… I know, I know…), and it struck me that you can kill as many baddies as you want, as we don’t see them as people, but as members of a category.

There’s a danger here that writers and speakers need to be aware of.

We don’t easily care about categories (unless it’s ‘our’ category). We do care about the individuals.

That’s why filmmakers and storytellers (and politicians… Hillary and Obama, anyone?) have to make sure that the ‘bad’ individuals in their story are thoroughly evil, otherwise we care when they have bad things done to them.

Which leaves who? Indie and Marion, maybe John Rhys Davies.

In fact, one of the major flaws I see in movies and novels is not making us care about the characters. We’ll get 45 minutes into a movie and Stuart and I will turn to each other and go, ‘Who are we meant to care about?’

So, when you’re writing and speaking, it becomes obvious that if you want people to care about you, you gotta be an individual. If you’re speaking as a representative of a company, or as a role (accountant, salesperson, mother, coach), we don’t care if you get killed off in the first 5 minutes.

Don’t be a disposable extra. Be your weird strange self, and we might follow you through to the end.

Presentation analysis – Joshua Klein talks about the wisdom of crows on TED.com

Published May 16, 2008 Building curiosity , Establishing credibility , Motivation , Planning , Presentation Analysis , Presentations , Storytelling 3 Comments
Tags: effective communication skills, Joshua Klein, presentation skills, ted.com, wisdom of crows

In this Ted.com talk, Joshua Klein talks about his vending machine for crows and how it and machines like it might create mutually beneficial relationships between humans and the animals who live side-by-side with them.

This is the first in a series of articles about how good presenters do what they do.

Where Joshua is particularly strong is:

Establshing himself as a likable expert
Arousing curiosity
Answering our unspoken questions
Using story/anecdote
Use of visual aids

So how does he do that?

Continue reading ‘Presentation analysis – Joshua Klein talks about the wisdom of crows on TED.com’

Natasha Golding on being present in presentations…

Published May 15, 2008 Presentations Leave a Comment

Here’s what Natasha said when she first delivered her workshop on authentic written communication. One to watch…

http://the-right-words.blogspot.com/2008/03/being-present-during-my-presentation.html

How to start a presentation

Published May 15, 2008 Planning , Presentations 2 Comments
Tags: beginning, communication, curiosity, dealing with objections, dealing with questions, Planning, Presentations

Here’s my first blog post. It’s so exciting to be making a new beginning, and it got me a-thinkin’…

As you probably know, I’m a presentation nerd. I go to conferences just to see people present, seeing what they do well and what the trends are… And maybe to catch a slideditcher or two…

What happens in the first 3 minutes of a session are so important.

I reckon there are two things that need to be done.

The Internal Circus: Dealing with objections and questions

People have very noisy heads. If you’ve ever spent more than 60 seconds attempting to meditate, you will have noticed that the mind thinks thoughts. Constantly. And using your determination to stop thinking is like trying to stop the tide with a handful of water. Just when you think you’ve got to some stillness, you realise that your mind is not only thinking how the stillness isn’t quite as still as it could be (if only you would meditate properly…), but it’s also planning the emails you need to send when you get up.

This kind of dialogue and commentary is going on constantly for everyone who is listening to you. If you could hear how noisy it is in a room full of apparently silent people, your psychic ears would get that post-music-gig ringing sound…

Some of those thoughts will be about you and your topic. That’s what I call the internal circus. It’s loud, attention-grabbing, and designed to distract. Full of mental elephants, trapeze artists, clowns and one loud brass band. If you want people to hear you above the noise in their heads you have to become somewhat the ringmaster of their internal circus.

This means that you have to think about what objections/ questions/ concerns/ prejudices are going on for them, label them out loud and up front, then deal with them to your listeners’ satisfaction.

Honesty works really well here, as does admitting the limits of your knowledge and the limits of the session. ‘What I’m not going to be able to do today is…’

Curiosity – motivating people to listen

The other factor when you begin a talk is to get people interested in what you are going to say. People are not, in the main, waiting on tenterhooks to hear you speak. Even if they have signed up for your session of their own free will, they still have a very noisy head full of things they need to do after your session, or maybe, with Blackberries and SMS, during your session.

The only way to cut through that noise is to give them strong reasons to listen to you. And these have to be relevant to them. How will what you are recommending give them enormous amounts of what they love, or not following your recommendations have them lose shedloads of what they value?

If you can open relevant questions but not immediately answer them, you can begin to trigger curiosity, as long as it’s not in too cheesy a fashion.

It is important that you are honest and radically transparent. Any hint of selling (yuck) and out come the Blackberries.

Laying out the options and teaching from your experience are the new selling.

Starting communication well

So… If you can start your communication honestly dealing with concerns and genuinely offering valuable insights, then, maybe, people may begin to listen.

And that’s just the beginning…

Real. Smart. Now.