Have You Earned The Right to Speak

The quickest way to fail in public speaking is to try to present yourself as an expert in a subject you have not Earned the Right to Speak about.

As a professional speaker and facilitator I have sat through a lot of corporate events in the past 30 years and had the misfortune to experience some dire presentations, so bad so bad that the audience switched off or worse, got up and left during the presentation. The cause of these train wrecks was usually either where the presenter used someone else's presentation slides or created their own slides but clearly was not an expert in the subject matter.

Unfortunately many companies insist on staff using a set of slides prepared by a marketing or publicity department. Often junior members of staff have to stand in for their boss and deliver their presentation. Or the worst habit is presenters passing their PowerPoint slides around the office.  All three types of presentation result in  people using slides as a substitute for understanding the content. If you are using someone else's slides, you still have to put in the effort to understand the material sufficiently well that you could make the presentation without the slides.

I used to chair and manage a series of national road shows which involved a lot of guest speakers from sponsoring insurance and technology companies . Often the sponsors liked to make sure that their local representatives had a high profile at the local events and they were assigned to deliver the company presentation. But that was where the problem started.

Because they didn't have to bother preparing the slide presentation, often the speakers would not bother to even look though the slides before the event. Where they did look though it was usually a day or so before the event - or on the night before in their hotel room and often what they did was no more than look through the slides.  That is not enough to know and understand the material. If you have to use a corporate presentation know it and the underlying content inside out

On the day I watched so many speakers stumble through presentations, reading from the slides and even looking blankly at the slide not even sure what to say.

Dale Carnegie used to claim that a speaker should know at lest 40 times more about a subject that they were going to present. The audience is there to listen to you because they believe that you have expertise in a subject that they can use in their business or job. They want to know that you have earned the right to speak.

If you don't really know the subject - you should not speak about it. I spent a lot of my career in sales and marketing - like all professionals I am always seeking new ideas and I want to hear from people who have knowledge and experience they can share. All I want is one good idea to make it work my while listening to a speech - I can tell in a couple of minutes if the speaker is going to deliver that. These are the tell tale signs of a speaker who has not earned the right to speak.

• The speaker lacks confidence because they are unsure of themselves
• There is too much content on each slide because its really a script
• The speaker reads from the slide because they don't know the material
• The speaker has to read the slide before speaking
• There are too many slides
• The speaker speaks at the screen instead of the audience
• The speech lacks any personal stories and anecdotes
• The speaker mumbles, umms and ahhs their way through the speech. 
• The speech is monotone and dull 
• At the end of the speech I could not tell you what the speech was about

If you want to avoid giving a deadly boring presentation then make sure that you are an expert in the subject.  Make sure that you have lots of personal experience stories and anecdotes to share, make sure that you have a unique perspective and a few ideas that are your own. Most importantly tell me about the problems you have encountered and overcome -

Show me with your stories, your knowledge and your expertise that you have truly Earned the Right to Speak.

Scientific Evidence that PowerPoint can send you to Sleep

Back to the dreaded PowerPoint again which I discussed in January - I am presently taking a short course in Political theory - My Tutor Peter Ryley, who has an excellent blog (Fat Man on a Keyboard), pointed me to a recent article in the Telegraph which reports that there is now scientific evidence that our brains are unable to effectivley process information if it is spoken to us while we are reading.

So now when you fall asleep in a seminar you have scientific evidence to validate your behaviour - I shall feel much more comfortable in future when I nod off to the droning sound of a speaker reading their PowerPoint slides. However I have noted that even professional speakers are prone to using too many words on a slide.

PowerPoint is an excellent AV tool - if you need to show images that support a presentation but if you are using it to display words you really should question that. Presenting words both auditorily and visually it seems does not reinforce the message, it actually confuses the brain which starts to switch off.

I suspect that in addition to the problem with trying to assimilate the same information being received simultaneously via two senses, there is another issue. A speakers voice, I notice, tends to become more monotone when they are reading from slides and there is also far less storytelling to engage our interest.

All in all the evidence is clear that if you want to get a message across the best advice is to leave PowerPoint behind and rely on your oratory skills to get attention and be remembered.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

People should need a licence to use PowerPoint

I do a lot of voluntary work in my local community and as a result I attend a lot of "presentations" and "workshops" presented by senior executives in public, private and voluntary sector organisations and there seems to be common feature with the presenters. They all use PowerPoint but have never learned how to use PowerPoint.

Most of these senior executives spend a great deal of their time communicating with a variety of stakeholders and community representatives, yet seem never to have spent a much time learning how to communicate. Having looked a number of job specifications for these senior posts however I can confirm that in every case "Excellent communication skills" is there as an essential requirement. I think the problem is that the interviewers for these posts are not good communicators so they set the bar of "excellence" very low.

Let me give you an example of how bad it gets. This is the wording on the first slide of a workshop I attended last week. (I have changed the names and departments to avoid adding further embarrassment)

Some Introductions

• My name is John Smith, a senior officer with the City Council's Important Developments Department. I will give a short presentation.
• This is my colleague James Brown who will help with any questions you may have and with the workshop that will follow the presentation.
  
• You have probably met Jenny Jones and Peter Green of the Voluntary Council who are here to assist us all.
  

If he had actually understood PowerPoint I am sure he would have used Motion Path Animation to create a little black ball to bounce along the words as he spoke so that we could all join in :)

Inevitably the presentation was difficult to follow - because we were all trying to follow 33 slides packed with words and half way through I started asking questions and the meeting finally came to life. Unfortunately after a long and very interesting question and answer session they insisted on finishing the slides.

When I ask people why they use slides the most common answer is "I want to make sure I cover everything - and with out the slides I may forget". My response is "If you are having a problem remembering what to say, it's likely that the audience is going to have more trouble trying to remember it."

I think most presenters would be better off simply setting the scene and letting people ask questions - at least that way the audience get to hear what they came for. There is no justification whatsoever for slides full of bullet points - they destroy the presentation, make the presenter sound stilted, undermine any chance of building rapport and finally they make lousy handouts. So often the PowerPoint slides are the speakers notes or even worse their script and the speaker becomes the narrator to a boring slide presentation

Here is my advice.

1. Write down your speech objective and how you will measure that it has been successfully achieved.
2. Write your speech (and I don't mean write it out - I mean write your notes and structure - see my PEPP Talk recommendations for that)
3. Add in a couple of questions to ask the audience to get them into the habit if interacting.
4. Ask yourself - How would slides help this presentation? Be honest and then IF they are necessary, make sure you produce a professional looking presentation (hint - it takes time)
5. Create a useful standalone handout that helps you to achieve your speech objective

When I use PowerPoint the slide presentation takes me days to produce - sometimes weeks - There are few words and few slides and I switch off the slides (press B on the keyboard) when I don't need them. I invested a lot of time in learning how to use PowerPoint and make my slides part of a performance - not my notes. Most importantly the slides are there to support me and help me to communicate my message (one message) more effectively.


Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog