Planning « Real. Smart. Now.

Posts Tagged 'Planning'

Never how you planned it

People often try to complain to me that their presentation wasn’t how they planned it.

They forgot a point/story/clever thingy, or something.

If you’re doing it well, it should never be exactly how you planned it.

If a presentation is exactly how you planned it, you’re working from a script and aren’t responding to the people in front of you.

This is the Presentations As Classical Music paradigm: presentations are a piece of Mozart (yuh – you should be so lucky) that need rehearsing and rehearsing and rehearsing until you remember the whole ‘script’. You can tell someone from this school as they talk about ‘writing a speech’.

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Speaking It Real – A Challenge For Professional Speakers

Published July 6, 2009 Establishing credibility , Planning , Presentations , Presentations=conversations 2 Comments
Tags: authenticity, communication, Planning, planning communication, presentation skills, Presentations, public speaking

How important is authenticity for speakers?

On Tuesday night, I was asked to speak to the members of Asia Professional Speakers – Singapore. (Here’s the blurb, if you’re interested – pdf - scroll down…). It was (bizarrely) my first meeting as a member – they turn out to be a lovely bunch of people!
I chose to speak about authenticity as I’m increasingly aware that rehearsed, polished talks aren’t necessarily the way to go.
Here are my thoughts – in ascending (decending?) order of weirdness.

(Bear in mind these thoughts were aimed at people who make a living at speaking – I tend to hold them to a higher standard as they are being paid for their speaking expertise. And this isn’t a transcript of what I said – no script, see? – but the same thoughts expressed again.)

If you really want to make a difference, is a talk the best way?

I am pretty strong about focusing on behavioural outcomes – specifying in advance what you want people able and motivated to do as a result of your communication. Most professional speakers declare that they are in it to make a real difference in the world, but I’m not sure if delivering a speech is the most effective way of doing that.

Continue reading ‘Speaking It Real – A Challenge For Professional Speakers’

Structure your presentation to answer their questions

Published June 22, 2009 dealing with questions , Planning , Presentation Analysis , Presentations 3 Comments
Tags: dealing with objections, effective communication skills, Planning, presentation skills, Presentations, technical presentations, technical to non-technical

Do you wonder how to structure your presentation? What sequence to use? If you’re dealing with contentious issues, you might find this useful….

Smart presentation choice three: Answer their (unspoken) questions about how your recommendations solve their urgent problems

(This is part of a series of posts about how to develop presentation superpowers by making eight smart choices. This is choice number three.)

There aren’t that many problems with presentation structure that this choice doesn’t answer. Done well, people won’t notice that this is the process you’re using. You’ll just come across as clear and relevant.

Continue reading ‘Structure your presentation to answer their questions’

8 simple steps to developing tech presentation superpowers

Published March 27, 2009 Planning , PowerPoint , Presentations 3 Comments
Tags: Planning, presentation skills, Presentations, technical presentations, technical to non-technical

Want to move from mild-mannered geek to awe-inspiring tech presentation superhero?

Developing Technical Presentation Superpowers - RealSmartNow.net

After coaching almost 4000 presentations, I’ve realised that it’s quite simple to stand head, shoulders, abs and knees above the mediocre standards of most technical presenters.

Over the next 8 weeks or so, I’ll take you through what’s needed to become interesting, talked about, clear, relevant, clever and credible. Maybe even a little bit suave.

Here, then, is an overview of the 8 simple secrets to becoming a technical presentation superhero. Each step builds on the previous one, so you get the biggest bang for your buck implementing them in sequence.

1. Focus your presentation on sincere recommendations

A recommendation implies that:

you are focusing on an action
that action will benefit the people you are recommending it to
you are not ‘selling’ this idea, or doing anything underhand or manipulative
it’s out of your control whether we take you up or not
you have a genuine desire to connect

In this way, your presentation becomes useful. (Don’t know how to decide what to put into a presention and what to leave out? This step will help you.) Read some more about this here.

2. Speak so slowly you can hear each word you’re saying

Never have I ever had to get a presenter to speak faster. Never. Ever.

Nervous, subordinate people speak fast. Tricksy salespeople speak fast (‘fast-talker’ anyone?). People with status take their time.

Until you get this down, all that advice about using active verbs and pointing at yourself when you say ‘Fabulous’ ( you are, but please don’t) is useless. You can’t change the way you’re expressing yourself until you can hear the way you’re expressing yourself. That sensation of the sentences just falling out of your mouth goes away when you slow down. (Don’t worry if you think you are an irretrievable motor-mouth. Help is on the way.) More about this here.

Planning a sincere recommendation and slowing down until you hear each word

corrects 90% of what’s wrong with modern presentations. Read them again.

The next steps are the magic.

3. Systematically answer our questions about how your recommendation solves our urgent problems

Structuring your session around our (silent, mental) questions is the key to being relevant. We have a few ‘what’ questions, but way more ‘how?’ and ‘Why?’ questions. Follow what’s going inside our heads, and we’ll wonder how you read our minds. Not as hard as it sounds. We won’t even notice this is what you’re doing – we’ll just think you’re smart. More here.

4. Keep your energy 5% above ours

Speakers often confuse high energy with fast pace. The key is raised energy but slow pace.

Speakers also confuse passion with ridiculously high energy. 50% above where we are is too much of a mismatch, unless you want to be some weird ‘motivational’ evangelist. 5% gently wakes us up. As we wake up, you move 5% higher. This is how you warm a group up – gently and at our pace. More here.

5. Separate the slides, handouts and prompts

I have so much to say on this topic I can barely contain myself. Suffice it to say that the visuals we need to follow your talk are so radically different from the reference we’ll need afterwards and from the notes you need to remember your points that it is madness to combine them. Don’t worry – I’ll walk you through this. (And by handouts I mean all post-presentation reference material – but that’s a little less pithy.)

6. Don’t plan a presentation, plan a conversation.

I know, I know, a presentation is a pretty strange type of conversation. However, all sorts of questions about calibration (level of detail, of formality, of jargon) are answered when you think: ‘If I were in conversation with someone from this group, how would I speak?’

7. Plan to speak for half the time

If you think it’s going to take 15 minutes, it will take at least 23. You can use what’s left over to expand, to answer questions, or just to delight people with an early finish. Running out of things to say is so rarely the problem… And when you’re done, you’re done. People will love you for it.

8. Separate the situation from your thoughts about the situation

Almost all of the fear about presenting comes from our thoughts about the situation. Speaking to groups is totally safe. And you don’t need hypnosis, NLP or beta-blockers to sort this one out.

***

What do you think? What’s number nine? And ten?

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Continue reading ’8 simple steps to developing tech presentation superpowers’

Marinading the big lump of clay – getting presentation material together

Published August 29, 2008 Presentations 4 Comments
Tags: Planning, preparation, Presentations

photo via Eqqman

Someone on our Sunday class asked about how I decide to include things in presentations, where to put stories, and so on. Getting ready to speak at a conference this week, I was watching my process.

Here’s what I noticed. Continue reading ‘Marinading the big lump of clay – getting presentation material together’

3 reasons why you should plan conversations, not presentations

Published July 15, 2008 Establishing credibility , Planning , Presentations , Presentations=conversations 3 Comments
Tags: conversation, formality, Planning, presentation

There are three main ways why it’s useful to prepare a business presentation like it’s a conversation.

It stops you missing the mark by being overly formal, you don’t expect to be able to completely control the interaction, and it helps prevent moronic overstatement.

Continue reading ’3 reasons why you should plan conversations, not presentations’

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.