I’m still planning on doing something with this. I recently flipped the switch so you can go to LeanPub and buy a copy for your kindle – and get any future improvements for free.
# Public Speaking For Quiet People
Public Speaking is a skill which I believe makes fantastic use of introvert’s hidden talents – and which allows introverts the opportunity to sell themselves, their needs and their ideas on their own terms.
As an introvert I know things are not always that easy. This book will address the problems – internal and external – that introverts face. It will cover common problems (such as fear and shyness). It will provide an action plan for someone who has never given a presentation before. And it will guide you step by step towards success – not just in public speaking, but in living a life which you, as an introvert, enjoy. Unlike some other attempts to help introverts this is not about learning how to act like an extravert, it is about making the most of the skills that you, an introvert, find the most enjoyable and rewarding – the things you are best at. And it will show you, with just a little thought and planning, you can use them to win the game the extraverts play, without stressing, tiring, or being untrue to yourself.
#Are You An Introvert? – Am I An Introvert?
There seems to be a standard definition of what makes someone an introvert “You are an introvert if socialising drains you of energy, and an extravert (or extrovert) if socialising gives you energy”
The way they test if you are introverted or extroverted tends to be along the lines of asking you if a number of statements like “I have a small group of close friends” are true or false. The more you answer true, the more of an introvert you are.
This doesn’t work for me.
First off, a confession, hell, a declaration: “I am an introvert”
I am an introvert. If you give me one of those introvert tests, I score as highly as it is possible to score. I’m a class A certified introvert.
And yet, on occasion, I am lonely. I crave company. the thought of not seeing anyone drives me insane. Also, I love public speaking – and I hardly ever have stage fright.
Am I an outlier? Is there a reason those tests don’t work for me?
No. I’m an introvert. Its just that the tests are testing behaviours – the ways that many introverts learn to act. It isn’t testing anything innate about an individuals introversion. Everyone is different, and I happen to have mastered the art of public speaking – mastered it in a way which takes advantage of all of my learned introvert behaviours. There is nothing about introversion which means you can’t speak in public!
And when do I find myself lonely? Its when I’ve had no company for a particularly long time. When I’m finding myself falling out of my regularly scheduled social engagements because too much of my time is being taken up with something else.
What this means to me is that – on very rare occasions – I can be an extravert.
The question isn’t ‘Are you, or are you not an introvert?’, the questions are ‘Are you an introvert at the moment? Right now, does the idea of meeting new people fill you with dread or excitement?’ and ‘If you are frequently an introvert, has this affected your behaviour? Do you frequently act in ways which avoid excessive social interaction to maintain your energy?’
The idea of an introvert is a stereotype. We think of thin, pale, people who hide away indoors, in libraries, generally away from all the fun. And there are introverts who fit this stereotype – but there are many who do not. It is like the difference between asking ‘Am I a man?’, which is a question about a fact, something which can be examined and given a definite answer, and asking ‘Am I manly? Am I masculine?’ – a question of whether you fit into a particular cultural stereotype.
There is no shame in being an introvert. It is merely a statement of how, right now, you work best. Once you know you are an introvert, you can begin to question how to use this knowledge to achieve your potential in an extroverted world.
# The Extravert World
It’s a busy world outside. We take crowded public transport: overflowing tube trains, bulging busses full of iPhoning executives and chattering school kids. Walking down the street, dodging the hen parties and tourists, you spot someone talking to himself – not a sign of insanity, just a mobile bluetooth head set. Everyone is talking. And they want you to be part of the conversation.
They are suspicious of you if you decline. What exactly are you hiding?
It’s tiring, isn’t it?
It’s an extravert world. There are more extraverts than introverts according to most studies, and even if there weren’t, extraverts tend to shout louder, they tend to get noticed. And herein lies the problem: getting noticed. Getting noticed is the key to success, and introverts, naturally, tend to shy away from the spotlight. They know that the more they put themselves forwards, the more people will ask them to put themselves forwards, and the more energy they will keep having to spend. They also know if they put themselves forwards, they face the possibility of criticism and rejection. The extravert world views criticism and rejection as somebody else’s opinion – there are always more people to love. But the introvert takes it to heart and holds on to it deep inside. And dealing with criticism – that too is draining.
Perhaps the introvert, in his quest to get noticed decides to excel – in the office or classroom. Surely people will notice the quality of his work? Perhaps. But the schoolroom, and the workplace are domains created to make the best out of the majority – the extraverts. Gone are the days of rows of desks and working in silence. Gone are individual offices with doors which can shut, and the peaceful solitude they offer. Now we have group working, brainstorming, meeting after meeting after meeting. And we have the open plan office where the introvert can never retreat fully into his own mind, because there is always an extravert about to walk up behind him and ask another unimportant question.
It doesn’t matter that introverts may be known for being able to produce better work (they are). It doesn’t matter that open plan offices are known to be huge productivity killers (they are). What matters is that the extraverts are in charge – they are making the decisions: decisions which suit them.
The extravert doesn’t really understand the introvert. when the introvert shys away from having to talk to someone, the extravert becomes suspicious – what is the introvert trying to hide? When the introvert looks for solitude, the extravert suspects them of skiving off and leaving the work for everybody else. The extravert can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to work with other people – unless you were clearly inferior to them. Indeed, the thought of being alone for too long to an extravert is akin to a death sentence. The extravert likes the open plan office, because the alternative, silence and solitude, is terrifying to him – and the extravert believes everyone else agrees.
Introverts scare extroverts. The most damning thing said when a neighbour turns out to be a serial killer is “He was very quiet. He always kept himself to himself”. Even introverts are taught from birth than introversion is wrong, and can be overcome. Dale Carnigie’s “How to Make Friends and Influence People” has been the surefire way to success for the best part of a century. Introverts have been trying to make themselves heard. They’ve been trying to act like extraverts.
And they’ve been failing. Because acting like an extravert is tiring. Eventually you burn out, give up, and return to the peace and quiet of the library.
There must be another way.
# The Introvert Mind
To understand what it is that makes us introvert’s tick (and run away screaming from extraverts), we need to look at what goes on inside the introvert’s mind.
Introverts are more easily stimulated by external stimuli than extraverts. This isn’t just about people, talking, or loud noises – this is about everything. If you put a drop of lemon juice on 100 people’s tongues, and measure how much saliva is produced – those people producing the most will be introverts. Even the stimuli of lemon juice on the tongue stimulates an introvert more than an extravert.
We can see it in babies too. Some babies are placid and content, whereas others are easily agitated – scared by almost everything around them. Those louder, more agitated babies are the ones most likely to grow up to be introverted. The reason is the same – it seems they are more stimulated by the environment than their extraverted brethren, and react more strongly to it.
So if babies predict our introversion, it it something we are born with, an inescapable fate of genetics? The answer is a definite maybe. Studies on twins have shown that about half our chance of being introverted in inherited from our parents, whereas the other half comes from our environment growing up. It would seem that we inherit not introversion, but a proclivity towards it, and that even a child born from an extraverted line may, in the right circumstances, discover their inner introvert as they grow up.
The stimuli most introverts face is fear. Fear is your essential reaction to whenever something happens that you don’t expect. A slight, passing, fear, perhaps, but enough to make you weary or startled. This can be when a car passes you on the street, when a stranger talks to you, when you hear an unfamiliar piece of music.
The introvert’s mind reacts to the stimuli of other people with an emotional response akin to fear.
The introvert’s brain has to manage this fear. We don’t all go along each day jumping out of our skin at each and every thing that happens to us (though, I’m sure the most introverted amongst us – myself included – have days when everything that happens just seems to be too much, and we would really rather roll up into a ball and hope the world goes away). Its the job of the brain to make all of this bearable – to take away these negative responses and manage them.
The brain does this by learning – the more familiar he situation, the more times the brain has handled similar experiences without suffering, the more we are able to let them pass. In effect it uses a low level of something akin to willpower be able to say to the initial reaction of fear -albeit subconsciously – “Thanks but no thanks”. But even this is slightly tiring.
Moreover, we still experience lots of new unknowns in our lives. Things we have not yet become used to.
Take social interactions, for example – they are inherently unpredictable. People have a habit of doing different things each time you meet them. They’re annoying like that. So people are setting our fear alert’s buzzing, and its our brain’s job to quieten itself down again. Now some introverts – those who have had a lot of social experience – may do a good job of drowning out the fear buzzer. but others – especially those who may have had less pleasant social experiences in their youth, may not drown the fear buzzer so much. And they will begin to consciously find the more difficult of social situations (meeting new people, for example) actively unpleasant. They need to consciously expend willpower to get through. These introverts are drained of energy far faster.
This is why introverts (who still crave some human interaction), tend to have smaller groups of friends – and closer friends. Introverts build up strong bonds of trust with a few people – all of whom act reliably and predictably. Their social interactions within this group are far less of a drain and introverts are able enjoy this form of socialising more.
But there is more to an introvert than this. The introvert, knowing the difficulty of interacting with other people, learns techniques that help him to manage this. Specifically the introvert learns a method to avoid frequent failure: Abstract Thought. Fearing rejection – or whatever sort of pain the introvert has learned to associate with the feelings their fear buzzer raises – the introvert becomes a planning machine. When thoughts arise in the introvert’s mind, the introvert examines them, and looks them over to see if any of the thoughts may have particular merit. They seek out any flaws in their intended actions. Only having looked at a thought from all sides does the introvert feel happy with it, does it become particularly real to him. At this point, the introvert is willing to express his thought to others.
This leads to problems socially. In conversations, introverts will often have to hold back as they fully absorb and take in the ideas that other people are throwing about. To the extravert, it might look like the introvert is not playing his part, is sitting on the sidelines, perhaps not even understanding what is going on. Either way, the introvert may appear arrogant, rude or stupid. However, in the introvert’s mind, he is engaging fully. Not with the people, but with the ideas. Give an introvert time, and, when he has finished incubating them, the ideas he comes up with are likely to be fully formed and ready to be used.
Throughout this book, I have made the assumption that extraverts don’t realise that introverts are different and think in a whole different way from them – but from talking to introverts, I find that introverts also don’t understand the difference in how extraverts interact with the world.
# The Extravert Mind
To understand the extravert, first consider, that if they have a something like a fear buzzer that rings somewhere deep in their brain when there is a new and potentially dangerous situation, it doesn’t sound as loudly as it does in the introvert’s. As such, the extravert spends less concentration, less mental energy, suppressing its sound.
So the extravert has more energy to do more things, and fewer warning signs blaring inside his mind telling him to stop.
Whereas the introvert toddler might worry about venturing forth into a noisy playgroup full of unfamiliar children dashing about, screaming, and clattering their strange, alien, toys, the extrovert simply walks into the middle of the chaos, grabs something that looks appealing (or perhaps later on in life, in a noisy nightclub, grabs someone who looks appealing) and begins to play, a big smile beaming on his face.
Sometimes the extravert gets themselves into trouble – but without the warning sign of a fear buzzer to create a commonality, there is less chance of the extravert noticing a pattern. Sure, the extravert might realise not to touch the hot stove, having done it once, but this doesn’t stop them from reaching out to grab a biscuit later on. The extravert learns from the results of his actions – not from calculating what responses those actions are going to have.
The extravert has far less motivation to learn to play with ideas before trying them out. While the introvert lives in the world of his ideas, and occasionally putting the best of those ideas into practice in the real world, the extravert has no patience with this. He wants things to happen now, and quickly, as much and as often as possible, to fulfil his need for more and more stimulation. So the extravert sets out to try often, and to fail often. The extravert learns, not through planning, but through watching the results of his actions, and repeating those that work.
This is also true in social situations – while the introvert is trying to figure out the best idea in order to say it, and be right, the extravert says the first thing that comes to his mind, and then, by watching the responses of the crowd modifies his responses until he finds something which sounds right both to him and to the outside world.
When the introvert thinks, he has many ideas, and constantly refines and rejects them until he has crafted the perfect diamond. The one true real idea. the idea that is worthy of being spoken. When the extravert thinks, his ideas are not realised – don’t have meaning or value to him – until they have been shared – until he knows not only what he thinks of it, but also what the world thinks.
I once (rather uncharitably – but nevertheless with a modicum of truth) put it “The introvert finishes thinking before he talks. The extravert talks before he finishes thinking”
If the curse of the introvert is overstimulation, the curse of the extravert is understimulation – and of loneliness. Introverts know that – despite everything – they require some stimulation – it is quite possible for an introvert to back of from society too fully, and to be left craving some quantity of attention. Now consider the extravert – someone who is stimulated far less by the ordinary world. Someone who needs people to fully enjoy the fruits of their own mind. for an extravert solitude isn’t a break – its a prison sentence.
And so, the extravert, being the more active and more risk taking type of person – not to mention the majority, has built a world which provides the stimulation they need. It isn’t a deliberate attack on the introvert but rather, it’s a genuine desire to create a world where people are stimulated, able to think, talk and enjoy life.
Just as extraverts need to understand that introverts need their time and space to function, introverts need to understand that the world, as it is: extroverted and a little too loud, suits the minds of the majority perfectly. For all its flaws, the majority are unaware there is even a problem, because for them, there is no problem at all.
# How Introverts Can Speak Up
It is – for introverts – an unfortunate fact that the world is oriented towards extraverts. There is no getting away from this. It is unlikely to change, no matter how hard we wish, if only because the thought of introverts all wanting to gather together in the same place and mount a noisy protest is bordering on the laughable.
Moreover, the world is fundamentally social. Success, in whatever form, relies on us convincing others to do things for us – even if all we want to convince them to do is leave us alone to be quiet. As introverts we all have much to offer: we are abuzz with ideas, we think deeper, are able to concentrate harder for longer, and notice details which extraverts consider unimportant. Introverts are responsible for many of the great works of art, of literature, of science and of technology. It is no exaggeration to say that without introverts the modern world would be a much different, and far less advanced place. Nevertheless for an introvert’s ideas to be valued to others, they have to be communicated.
Communication is difficult. Perhaps the ideal form of communication for an introvert is writing. Writing is a solitary activity, a creative activity, something that takes time and dedication and relies on all the skills which introverts exhibit in droves. However, reading your writing is also a fundamentally solitary activity – and an activity which introverts enjoy far more than their extrovert brethren. There are many reasons to write – and indeed writing can change the world. But if you want to be heard by extroverts, by the majority of people in the world, by the people who can hear your ideas and work together with others to make them happen you have to do something else: you have to speak up. You have to be heard.
Talking is difficult. We’ve examined why before: talking is putting yourself into a situation, which for introverts continually raises their sense of danger. Conversations are unpredictable. You never know what people are going to say, or when they’ll say it. There is little or no time to prepare answers, because talking requires quick, often unconsidered responses. And for many introverts, because socialising has these problems, there has been no incentive to learn these skills at any point in their lives. Less time has been spent in conversation. So even an introvert who is prepared to put himself into a conversation situation and go with whatever blows may follow is likely to be a less able performer than an extrovert.
We introverts need a different approach.
This is where public speaking comes in. At first it may seem to be an abhorrent idea to the introvert – lets take something you don’t like, talking, and put you on display doing it in front of a large crowd. But as this book aims to show, public speaking will play to all your strengths as an introvert – it will make you look like a socially skilled extrovert (which is important to establish status in the extravert world), it will let you communicate your ideas, and it will establish you not just as a great thinker, but as a thought leader.
The secret is that public speaking is a skill. It can be learned. And most people are so unskilled at public speaking, that with only a little knowledge – just what you get from reading the contents of this book – and a little practice, you will be a better speaker than most of your colleagues. By comparison with your peers, your presentations – and your ideas – will outshine the others.
# Introverts Have A Head Start When It Comes To Public Speaking
Imagine two people, each are due to give an important presentation in a day’s time. One is an introvert, the other an extravert.
The extravert looks forward to the presentation – he enjoys talking, and meeting with the crowd of people afterwards is something he loves. He likes to be the centre of attention, and by being the presenter can be sure that there will be a throng ready to engage with him and discuss the ideas they have – related, or unrelated, it doesn’t matter.
The introvert would really rather the presentation was over. She knows that she is good at presenting, but also understands that the room is going to contain quite a lot of people – people she might like to talk to, on occasion, in one two one chats, perhaps. But handling them all at once is something she would rather avoid.
One of these people is happy right now. And it isn’t the extravert.
Prior to a presentation, everyone needs to prepare. Introverts know this. Extraverts – if they don’t know this, soon find it out after one or two of their presentations are received with warm indifference. And so in the days and hours prior to a presentation both the introvert and extravert have to put the presentation together. This combines determining both what they are going to say and how they are going to say it, and then putting together a slide deck – or other presentation materials – with sufficient pizzazz to wow the crowd.
Writing is a solitary activity.
When the introvert and the extravert set out to prepare their presentations, they both have very different strategies. The introvert can take themselves away to a quiet room, and begin the process of honing their ideas – first shaping ideas in their heads, then getting them down onto paper, and finally building a presentation around them that they are happy meets all of their goals. They can do all of this alone, without needing any assistance (Assuming they know – or have access to – all the information necessary for the presentation). Moreover, this is the sort of environment where an introvert thrives – reading, researching, creating and constructing ideas and texts alone.
The extravert stumbles at the beginning: what should the presentation be about? The first thought is to ask someone else – but if they are busy, then the extravert has to push on alone. He will have ideas – many of them will be good ideas, but there is a nagging doubt at the back of his mind “What will other people think of this?”. The extravert finds this uncertainty uncomfortable. Just as the presence of people drains the introvert, the extravert is drained by the incompleteness he feels without external approval. Eventually, the lack of stimulation is too much for the extravert, and he is forced to leave his preparation to go out to talk to somebody. To talk to anybody. This process repeats, with the extravert less and less wanting to return to his office to carry on with the planning. Eventually, he breaks down – hammers out a rough idea and says “Thats good enough – I’m good at talking, I can wing it from here”
As the introvert passes by the extravert’s office, she sees him leaving with the boys for the office football game. It doesn’t look like there is a problem in the world bothering him – indeed, there isn’t, he is back in his own domain: with people. Tomorrow’s presentation will be however it turns out to be. The introvert knows, however, exactly how her presentation will be. She can’t be sure of the outcome, but she is prepared. Totally prepared. She has followed a set of rules she discovered years ago, and has developed for herself ever since. She knows they work, and she knows why they work.
There may be a crowd of people tomorrow, but they don’t faze her. She is prepared. This is no longer down to her social skills, but to how good her preparation has been.
For the introvert presenter, there is nothing more important than preparation – it lets you put together all the hard parts of communication without anybody looking at you. It lets you shape ideas in your own time and your own space. When you spend as much time as you can on the preparation, the presentation will take care of itself. Indeed, some introverts, myself included, now find extraverts coming to them asking for help with presentation preparation, because the extraverts know that the introvert can give them a finished product better than they could construct on their own. Meanwhile it is the introvert gets to be the thought leader – and to do the sort of work that they – and indeed that I – love the most.
To prepare the perfect presentation, I generally follow a system which I have developed as a result of years of researching the subject, watching others present and experimenting in both my presentations – and the presentations I have written on behalf of extraverts. In the following pages, I will describe my system, and explain why it works so well for me.
# Finding Your Message
What is your presentation about?
I don’t mean the title.
I don’t mean a brief summary.
I don’t even mean “Why did your boss ask you to give this presentation”
What I mean is “What do you want to get out of the presentation?”
What you want to get out of the presentation is often vastly different from why you’ve been asked to give it. For instance, maybe you’ve been asked to give the presentation because you’re the only person who knows about the new grommet ordering system. That’s fine. I’m sure your boss is really keen to get everybody on board with the new system.
But perhaps you have a different aim. You may not care that much about grommet ordering. But perhaps you want to give the presentation because you want to be noticed, or because you want people to see you as someone who can have ideas that work – or someone who can see a difficult project through to completion.
When it comes to presentations, there are always three aims you need to consider:
What do you hope to get out of giving the presentation?
What does the person asking you to speak hope to get out of you giving the presentation?
What does the audience hope to get out of listening to your presentation?
Allow me let you into a secret. In almost all cases, what the audience want is to be entertained. Sure, the audience may think they want to know the information conveyed in your presentation – hell, you might think they _need_ to know the information – but if its a boring presentation, the majority won’t remember or act on it anyway. So when it comes to setting the message for the presentation, I urge you not to consider your audience . Most of constructing a presentation comes down to thinking about your audiences needs, and how to keep them on board, however this first step is about you.
What the person asking for the presentation wants is more complicated. Often people asking for presentations have a number of motives – sometimes they genuinely want you to share information, but other times they want to put their team on show, or even just fill a space in a schedule. You might be able to guess their true desire, you might not. But what is important is that they set the theme for your presentation – no matter how much you want to get the message out “Look how wonderful I am” or “Promote me” or “Send me on that sales trip to Hawaii”, you have to wrap the message up inside the question they set. So listen to what you are asked to present about – use this to inspire your title, and even the things you are going to choose to talk about, but unless your desires align entirely with the person asking you to speak, make sure your message is at the heart – and the conclusion of what you are going to say.
What you hope to get out of giving the presentation is the real message. This is what we are going to be working on throughout the rest of this book. So sit down and ask yourself the following question: ‘What really motivates me to want to stand up in front of a crowd of people and tell them about something? What do I hope or dream will come out of this?’
It may be your presentation is to sell something other than yourself: maybe you have an idea to sell, perhaps you can think of a change in how your workplace works that will make your life easier. Maybe you even have a product to sell (and the benefit is the commission you’ll get from selling it). In any case, think about what it is you really want your audience to do. And remember: while there might be one hundred people sitting in the room listening to you, sometimes the number of people who can make the change you want is much smaller. They are the people you want to take away your message when they leave the room.
Right now, before you move on, answer these questions:
Why were you asked to give this presentation?
Why to people think they are coming to your presentation? What do they expect to get out of it?
What do you really, deep down, want people to do once they have heard your presentation?
The final answer is your message. This is the one thing you want people to take away from your presentation (if you think you have more than one message, try again. get it down to one, most important thing that you – not someone listening to you or someone paying you – wants to get some of the people listening to do as a result of the presentation?)
Now you have your message, you need to get people to want to listen to it, and take it onboard.
# Making Your Message Memorable
Once you have determined the message you wish your presentation to convey, everything else is about getting people to listen to the message, remember it and act on it.
Lets try an experiment – think back for a moment about the ten best lessons you had at school, or college. The really memorable ones. The ones that stuck with you for life. Perhaps you might want to write down a list of the lessons what you learned, why you remember them. Now think back to ten films you enjoyed. Don’t just think of recent films, think of films you watched as a child. Remember who the key characters were. Think about the plot. Was there message that the film was trying to convey?
I bet, unless you happen to absolutely hate the cinema (in which case, think about ten books that you love and try again) that you found it easier to remember ten films, in quite a lot of detail, than you did to remember 10 lectures or lessons. I’m also willing to bet that the ten lectures or lessons you remembered were absolutely outstanding for one reason or other, whereas some of the ten films might have been fairly run of the mill. Odds on, you have probably spent more of your life in lectures and lessons than you have in the cinema. You had far more lecture or lessons than films to choose from.
So why was it easier to remember the films?
The answer is simple: film makers put all of their effort into grabbing you and pulling you into the film, keeping hold of your interest, and taking you with them all the way to the conclusion. Films are expensive to make. If a movie maker loses his audiences’ attention before the big finish – if they start drifting off, or worse, walking out – then he has made a very expensive mistake.
The Hollywood studios try to avoid expensive mistakes (please ignore Waterworld. So they follow tried and trusted rules which keep hold of your attention. These are rules which you can choose to apply to your presentations – they are rules which, if you follow this framework, you will find easy to apply to almost any subject.
There is nothing new about these rules. In fact, thats sort of the point. The rules I’m going to teach you have been used for thousands of years – six thousand at least – all the way back to the first story ever known to have been written down (The Epic of Gilgamesh). Because the rules are the rules which have underlaid storytelling throughout recorded human history.
Lots of people have tried to work out what the rules of a good story are. We’re going to follow the same rules that the Hollywood studios use. For these rules, we go back to a historian and anthropologist, Joseph Campbell. Campbell specialised in the study of myths and legends. By collecting a vast range of myths and legends from cultures all over the world, Campbell tried to tease out the common characteristics of each story – the thing he described as the Meta-Myth. Campbell’s work became famous. But it wasn’t Campbell who convinced Hollywood. For that we need to look at another studio executive – Christopher Vogel. Vogel was a fan of Campbell’s, and noticed that the meta-myth which Campbell identified wasn’t just there in the ancient stories of cultures gone. The same structures were present in the films which were topping the box office charts. Moreover, Vogel noticed that many of the films which were failing to do as well were missing some of the key elements that Campbell had identified. Vogel realised he didn’t just have an interesting pan-cultural anthropological theory on his hands, he also had a blueprint for box office success. He wrote a memo about it, which quickly became widely circulated amongst the Hollywood studios, and which you can see influencing much of modern cinema.
Joseph Campbell published his meta-myth theory in his book “The Hero’s Journey”
Christopher Vogel extended his memo into a screenwriting book “The Writer’s Journey”
Both books are well worth reading.
But you don’t need to read them in order to improve your presentation preparation skills. In the articles which follow, I shall be describing how to use a simplified version of the meta-myth story structure to take the dry facts, figures and calls to action and turn them into a story. To turn them into something which will worm its way into your listener’s minds, and stay with them long after they leave your presentation.
# Lets Start At The End
When I write a story, I always like to start at the ending. Starting by deciding where you will finish means that, for the rest of your writing, you have something to aim at. You know where you are going. You know if you are going off track and have to reign yourself back. So right now, lets come up with the conclusion.
We want to achieve three things from the conclusion:
1. We want to inspire people. We want people to leave your presentation thinking that they have a chance of making a difference by doing the things you say. If people aren’t inspired to give your ideas a go, then all you’ve done is shower them with some facts which, gradually, over time, they will learn to ignore.
2. We want to tell people exactly what to do next. This is the call to action. We do it because people are dumb. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. but if you don’t actually spell out to people how they can put your ideas into motion, quite often they won’t be prepared to think of ways of applying them for themselves. So you have to give them one example of something you want them to do.
3. We want to satisfy people. Have you ever watched a film which finishes and you’re left thinking ‘but that plot point never came up again’ or ‘Will they get back together, it’s unclear’. You leave the cinema feeling as if something is missing. And when you look back on the film, you don’t tend to regard it as a fulfilling experience – you’re more inclined to dismiss it. The same is true of any story – even the story you’re going to be telling in your presentation.
To pick your conclusion you need to look back at your message. Your message and your conclusion are tightly related, but they are not always the same thing. Lets say you have been asked to give a speech entitled “What Our Local Cats Home Does For the Community”, it is quite possible, depending on who you are, and who you know your audience are, you might settle on any one of many possible messages – for example, here are three
Message 1: “I’m good at presentations – I should speak at the next international conference”
Message 2: “I led a complicated project which was hugely successful”
Message 3: “I want you to sign up to give our charity 10 pounds a month”
Now let’s take the subject, and the message, and try to come up with a conclusion.
For Message 1, the conclusion happens when the crowd give you a standing ovation. When the audience respond to your story. When they have been thoroughly entertained. The conclusion needs to be a twist – something which surprises and delights the audience. Something with a bit of showmanship. Thinking of a cats home, my first though would be that, if you had earlier in the story described rescuing a badly treated cat – shown pictures of a flea ridden cat on deaths door – perhaps even described how your home kept on looking after the cat, even though it looked certain it was going to die, then a big ending would be to arrange to have someone bring the, now healthy, cat onto the stage. This is unexpected, adorably cute, and satisfyingly ties up a story, which the audience might have otherwise expected to be unfinished or unhappy, with a very happy ending. That the cat is healthy (along with the other good deeds you have discussed) is inspiring. Moreover, it makes you look so much better than the previous presented with 50 powerpoint slides and no adorable kitten. Your call to action here isn’t in the presentation – it’s in the conversation you have with your boss (or whoever decides who speaks at the international conference) when you ask them if they enjoyed your presentation – and if they did, if they think there might be more opportunities for you to talk elsewhere?
For Message 2, you will have been describing a particular project in a lot of detail. A project that had a conclusion which you were intimately involved in. So as you tell your story, you want to insure it features you, there, at the very end, enjoying the success. If the end can be right there, on the stage, in front of everybody (“The current figure – which I took from our computer this morning – is that we have inoculated 239 cats – thats 20% more inoculations than we set out to achieve. But we can do more – we’ve understood the problems and overcome them, and now we know how to go back and do this better”) Then emphasise all the complications that you overcame again. The call to action is for people to believe you led this to success – ending on success achieves this. The success story provides satisfaction, and again, the good work is inspiring, but not so much as the knowledge that it can be done better and simpler.
Message 3 is simpler. Message three has a straight forward call to action. But even in message three, notice that the subject “What we do in the community” is not the same as the call to action “Give us your money”. So I would look at your story as being a sob story – a story of all the things that could be done – if only we had the money. When you start from here, your conclusion can be big and strong “There are all of these things we could do, if only we had some money. We do have some money – we have a number of generous donors – and we’ve managed to use it to home 900 cats, and to treat another 800 unwell cats. But there is so much more that, right now we are unable to do. We are making a difference to the cats in your community, but we need your help. 10 pounds a month with save 12 cats a year. So I’m offering you the change to help us now. Bill and Mary will be wandering around the room to sign you up to help save a cat – no wait – twelve cat’s lives.” The call to action is obvious. The fact we are achieving so much on so little is inspiring. And the fact we are overcoming many of our problems, and that you can be a part of a happier ending is satisfying.
You’ll see that, in coming to the conclusion, we have already had to figure out the first steps of how we will reach it. So far, we haven’t added much detail, and there is a lot of scope to change our plan. Only our ending is firm.
# Turning Your Facts into a Story
As you prepare your presentation, you are probably aware of a list of facts you want to convey to the audience. You are also, probably very aware that these facts don’t look much like a story. How they’ll help you build up to a big conclusion, the sort of conclusion we talked about previously, probably seems very unclear.
So lets start by describing what a story is. What I’m going to described is shamelessly adapted from the works of Campbell and Vogel, however its a simplified version – a version I’ve developed for the purpose of using as a backbone for presentations. Time and time again, whenever I’m stuck for how to present some information, I return to this backbone and it always provides me with the tools I need to create a story that works.
Every story starts with a hero (or heroine). A character that the story focuses on.
The hero starts off in the ordinary world. A story is as much about the world the hero is in as it is about the hero himself, so its important to describe the world.
The hero sets out for adventure. There is a call to action which is too big for him to refuse.
The hero faces a number of challenging situations. The hero may also meet a number of friends and associates who are going to aid him on his journey.
As the hero keeps bumping into more and more challenges, things seem insurmountable. The hero reaches a point where it seems all is lost.
But the hero isn’t just a man, he is a hero. He triumphs over the problems and returns home, to the ordinary world.
But the ordinary world has been changed by the hero’s actions.
[In my simplification of the meta-myth, we have left out several parts of the story structure which movies and novel normally employ. For example, in a Movie, the hero usually rejects the initial call to action, and has to be given an even stronger call before he accepts. Similarly, in a movie, there is usually a mentor figure who guides the hero through his early struggles. I've found these characteristics are hard to weave into a presentation, and don't seem to add much. So, unless there is an obvious counterpoint in the reality the story is based upon, I tend to ignore them. You may wish to consider them when you've got the hang of using the basic model I provide]
# But I Don’t Have A Hero?
Its quite possible, as you look at your presentation about this quarter’s results in the widget folding industries of south east somewhere-or-other that you don’t see an obvious hero jumping out at you. perhaps, you think, my presentation will work without there being a hero?
In my experience, every story needs a hero. And you can always find a hero for any story you wish to tell.
I’m going to describe the three most common ways to find heroes that you can use to build a presentation around:
1. Pick someone real. Some presentations have a character at their heart; they are about a particular person. If they are not about a particular person, they might be about a particular department or organisation – in which case, you can use a real person (the founder, perhaps) to represent the organisation. Instead of telling us that ‘Flumph Food Inc.’ changed their marketing strategy, tell us about how ‘F. F. Flumph, food fanatic and self made millionaire founder of Flumph Food’ decided that the marketing strategy needed to be changed – how he changed it and why it worked.
2: If you can’t pick someone real, pick someone fictional (So, for example, it turns out that I invented F. F. Flumph when I wrote the last paragraph). A large number of presentations seem to be about problems someone faces, and what we are doing to fix them. The problems might be wide ranging – immigration, animal cruelty, usability (or lack of usability) of computer software, inducting new people into your organisation, selling refrigerated cooling devices to the inuit people of northern America, ensuring you meet high standards of political correctness in constructing examples. But in each case those problems are happening to someone. Lets go through the problems again, but lets look at the fictional characters who might be facing them
Mihai is a Romanian computer programmer, coming to the UK because of the increased employment opportunities and higher pay in his field. He is legally entitled to do this, and will be paying well above the average amount of tax for a UK worker, yet he faces discrimination for “Coming over here and taking our jobs”
Buck is a Yorkshire terrier. He used to have a happy family – but when he noticed that one of the older humans stopped going out of the house every day, and instead sat at home watching TV, things began to get worse. Soon Buck found he was getting less and less food. Then one day, Buck was taken outside, his owner removed Buck’s collar, and then he was left alone, in a strange place that Buck didn’t know. Now Buck has to search through bins to try to find food.
Mavis used to always keep up with technology. But doesn’t it move so fast these days. her grandkids all have these new computers, and Mavis’s kids suggested that Mavis might want to get one herself so that she can keep in touch with them while they are at university. Now Mavis has a new computer tablet. But she doesn’t know what to do with it, and frankly she is a bit scared that she might catch a virus from it.
Sam is a new starter at BigCo. It’s his first day, and fresh out of college Sam is a bit intimidated. Especially since no-one appears to be expecting him. He has a piece of paper which says he should report to his manager ‘Jim’, but Jim doesn’t even seem to be in the office today.
Aipaloovik is tired by the challenges of living a traditional life in the modern world. Moreover he has a lot of trouble when it comes to replacing his old, malfunctioning fridge. It isn’t that people won’t sell one to him – but he lives in a reasonably remote area, and the difficulty in transporting the fridge and installing it generally makes such a purchase expensive and complicated.
Ben – the absolutely fictional and not at all related to a real author of this book – author made a two pronged joke around the idea of selling fridges to eskimos and political correctness. He then backed himself into a corner when he realised he had to come up with convincing story characters for potential presentations. Luckily inuit names are easily discovered thanks to the magic of Google (he hopes he hasn’t offended anyone by his own lack of cultural knowledge) and his own recent issues with getting a fridge to his house made him suspect that the problems that the inuit face are probably more mundane than we might imagine.
3: Use Yourself. Sometimes its just very hard to come up with a convincing fictional character, and there isn’t an obvious person to hang a story onto. In these cases, you’re generally missing one person. You. You’re the person who has researched all the things in the presentation – you are also the person who has done all the work. Instead of telling us about the work, tell us the story of what happened to you while you were doing the work, or while you were researching it. For some really good examples of this, watch how Al Gore tells about how he found out about global warning, in An Inconvenient Truth – and watch ‘Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure’ for a funnier approach, which, nevertheless puts him as the star.
# Giving Your Presentation A Mythic Structure
The mythic structure I described earlier is all about your hero meeting greater and greater challenges and overcoming them until, eventually, he meets his greatest challenge, defeats it, and returns home to the better world that he has created.
You already know what the better world is – it is the world of your conclusion. The world in which you show you have already achieved all of your goals, and are a success, or the world where you are inspiring others to go out and change the world. This is your destination.
You have already established who your hero is – it is the person who is facing the challenges.
The ordinary world – the place where the hero begins his story is the world that you want to change. It’s a place of uncertainty. And a place where, if you stay, everything stays the same – or potentially gets worse. This is where you begin to tell your tale.
Let’s imagine, for example, that I was going to give a presentation discussing the new release of a software product to a group of salesmen. I know that my message is “we’ve done all this hard work to make your lives easier”. I know my conclusion is going to be “it’s so much easier to sell this software now – so go out there and sell more of it”. I know my hero – in this story – is going to be a fictional salesman character that I’m creating, one who is going to be facing all the problems with selling the last version of our software. So what is my ordinary world?
In this case, the ordinary world is where the salesman goes to meet his customer. It’s still a place where he doesn’t quite know what he is going to face. He is prepared, but he knows that there are some imperfections in the software he is going to sell, and he is worried the customer might ask him about them, because that is where he could potentially lose the deal. He psyches himself up, raises his chin, puts on his best smile and walks through his customer’s office door.
Now, we need to move on to the challenges the hero faces.
Think of all the points you wish to convey in your presentation. They might be about how your product is better than the last version – or better than the competition. They may be about how a set of processes improves performance. They may be about news laws and the impact on a charity. in short, these are the things that, in a traditional powerpoint presentation, would be written on slides as bullet points.
Stop
Do not write them on the slides as bullet points.
That is exactly what this presentation technique is trying to avoid.
No one remembers bullet points. Everyone remembers stories.
But consider your list of points. Each point describes either:
* Something you want someone to do – or know
or
* Something that has (or is going to) change, and its impact
or
* Facts which supports one of the above
We can ignore the supporting facts for now: we’ll use them when we come to tell our story. Instead let’s consider the other types of point on your list, and consider how to turn them into challenges for your hero:
###Something you want someone to do, or to know.
If you want someone to do something, or you want someone to know something, then there is a reason why you want this. And specifically there has to be a benefit for the person you want to change. Or a cost if they don’t change.
We can show this, in our story, by setting our hero a challenge. For example, consider our salesman from earlier: one thing I want him to change is the way he sells our product. I want him to sell, not just the product, but our full range of consultancy services too. So I want to set up a challenge where, if he sells the consultancy product, he would benefit. Perhaps something like : “The customer looks at the brochure and says ‘I’m not sure. This all seems very complicated. I don’t think a small company like ours would be able to work out where to begin integrating it’. The benefit is clear: if the salesman sells consultancy services, he is more likely to win the deal. If the salesman doesn’t sell the consultancy services he has more, and harder, work to do in order to win (and his commission is probably smaller to boot)
###Something that has changed (or is about to change)
Is there something external to the person in question (a law, the economic climate, a customer’s product – even our salesman’s companies product, since the salesman in not involved in determining its features) that has changed – or is about to change? If so, then the challenge you need to add to your story is a challenge in which the hero’s behaviour has to change as a result of the new situation.
Let’s say I want to get the salesman to know that we redesigned some of the windows and buttons in our software and that the new version is now easier to use than our competition’s. For this, I might want to show the challenge of selling the old software to someone used to the competitor’s system.
By translating each of the points you listed above into a challenge, you should now have a list of challenges for your hero to face.
Now order them. There are two things to consider when ordering the challenges. The first is to try to order them by size. Make each challenge bigger. The second is that you are trying to lead up to your conclusion.
Between your chalenges and your conclusion are two parts of the story. The point of biggest failure – when all seems lost, and the victory and return home. The point where all seems lost is the largest challenge – the challenge that, without following the message contained in the conclusion, your heros will never succeed. So for our salesman, the conclusion is “The new software will make your lives easier”. So the challenge needs to show the salesman’s life being really difficult. Because we want to show it being difficult, it is probably best that for this challenge, and all those challenges preceding them, he has been trying to sell the old version of the product. Maybe at the critical moment, where is customer is about to turn him down we have his boss calling up to ask how the pitch is going, and a text come in from his wife asking if she can book the family vacation he promised if he got a good bonus from the sale.
The victory, is then about the path between this impossibly bad situation and the conclusion. In my example, I might have the boss ask “You did explain about all the features in the new version of the product?” And then have the salesman explain all the new features to the customer. The features that solve all the problems.
You now have a structure. But before we move onto the tricks of storytelling which will turn it into a presentation, there is one more point I would like to make: When your hero faces each of the challenges you have set, he should not succeed – or at least not succeed in the best possible way. In each of the challenges I give my salesman, the way an ideal salesman would succeed is by saying “The new version of the product has that feature. Aren’t we brilliant?” – however, the way our salesman succeeds will be by bluster and just about getting the customer to stay in the same room… in short, every challenge is got past, but failed until we get to the point where all is lost.
# Storytelling Techniques For Public Speakers : The Three Rules Of Three
Once you have a structure for your story, its time to start refining exactly how you are going to tell it. Again, we can learn from the vast history of oral tradition and storytelling the techniques which make speeches easy for the speaker to remember and easy for the audience to take in. the first set of techniques I’mm going to pass on, I have come to call the three rules of three.
Three is a magic number. Give someone two things, and they are unlikely to see the pattern – or at least the pattern you want them to see. Give them four things and there is too much to take in – something will be forgotton – there is space for bordom. No, three is where its at, which it comes to storytelling. Thats why there were three bears. And three wishes. And three men in a boat.
You can use this to your advantage
Rule 1: the first rule of three is repetition, repetition, repetition. If you want something to stick in the mind say it three times. Three? Yes three. Tony Blair – the former british prime minister – got elected with his soundbite stressing the importance of “Education education education” (he then proceeded to introduce university fees.). When you want to make a point, if you can repeat that pont another two times, you cam make it memorable, memorable memorable. Of course you don’t alway have to say the same words to make ideas stick. You can use different words and get good results. Varied words, making the same point, work just as well.
Rule 2: Make the third thing different. This is what I consider to be the goldilocks rule. Or the englishman, irishman, scotsman rule (another rule of three based joke – this is why the welsh are always removed from this particular branch of humour). This rule is people come to expect you to say things in threes. They expect you to say the same thing three times. But saying something different the third time is totally unexpected.
“Sarah was a good mother. She did everything she could for her children. She made them breakfast before school. She listened to them read every evening. And she sent them to bed early so they didn’t hear her sobbing about how she had given up the freedom of being childless every evening”
Note that the second rule of three works well with the first rule of three. breaking the story above down into 3 sections, morning, afternoon and evening gives people a pattern they can follow – a pattern they expect to repeat. But then making the first two things things we expect every good mother to do, but the third to be a question as to whether sarah really ever wanted to be a mother adds an extra element of shock. Which grabs the attention of the audience, and elicits an emotional reaction.
Rule 3: If you have some points to make, consider making 3 of them. People are good with threes, so if you have some number of points to make about a subject – some number of things you want the audience to do after the presentation, some number of reasons to back up a statement, some number of new rules to be introduced, try to make there be three things. (in particular this is a very handy tip when it comes to making impromptu speeches in meetings, start by saying something like “This is a really good idea for three reasons,” then come up with three things to say about why its a great idea. It will put you on the spot, but it will lodge your support in your audiences mind, and you’ll find they usually give you time to finish making all three points – which is good, because in meetings people judge how useful you are not by the quality of your ideas, but by how long you talk for)
Is it surprising there are three rules of three. Could I have come up with more? Possibly. but with three of them, you’ll remember them and put them into use when constructing your speech.
# “But My Content Is Boring…”
Its possible you’re thinking about your presentation and as far as you can tell, what you’ve got to say is boring. At this point, may I suggest you go back and check that
You know the message you want your audience to take home?
You have identified a conclusion?
You’ve found (or invented a person) to be your hero?
You’ve found some challenges for your hero to come across?
If so, then you probably already have a presentation which is less boring than most. Don’t worry about it being boring – work through the rest of these articles on presentations, and you’ll be fine.
The people remaining, who think their presentation is boring tend to be people who haven’t identified a hero. Lets look at why this happens:
“My presentation is all about facts and figures”
Let me tell you something: No one cares about facts and figures. Firstly, people don’t really understand numbers (thats why whenever the news talks about sizes and distances, they always say things like “An area of rainforest the size of belgium” or “a depth equal to 500 double decker busses” or “enough soup to fill 10 olympic swimming pools”). Secondly, even when people understand the size of the numbers you are talking about, they don’t care about the numbers, they care about what the numbers mean.
So if you’re reporting a 10% growth in profits, don’t just say that – tell people how much of a bonus they’ll be taking home – or, even better, tell people the stories about the key things that made this growth in profits happen. If you’re talking about domestic violence, don’t tell us the number of women who suffer it – tell us how likely it is that someone suffering from domestic violence lives in our street. And tell us the story of what someone can do about it.
Everything becomes interesting when you can build a story about it, and when you can help people relate to what you’re saying.
If your content is boring, pick a hero. Any hero. Pick someone affected by these numbers, or someone who was responsible for finding the numbers. Tell us how they did it. Teach us something we don’t know.
# How To Write A Presentation
Everyone has their own way of writing presentations, you’ve just seen the start of my process. Now I’m going to take you through what I do next. The following stages differ for different people, my suggestion is to follow my ideas the first time you have to prepare a presentation, and then, if you find something isn’t working for you, play around with it, try something different, mix it up and identify your own style.
The first thing I do is come up with a structure. Its the structure we’ve already seen. Its a pathway through the presentation from the beginning through to the end. The pathway guides a hero, overcoming challenges, leading the hero (and the audience) to the conclusion.
Now, I begin to think. I have the framework of a story, but not yet the full picture. I mull it about a bit – does anything jump out at me. Are there any ideas that I need to highlight, or group together. Am I always moving towards my conclusion? This can be done in the back of your mind, as your driving. It can be done alone in your office – or alone in a bathroom cubicle. Its a quiet, solitary time of playing with ideas – the sort of thing introverts are born to do. Don’t skimp on this – this is where you -as an introvert – are going to be at your best. It should be a recharging cathartic time of building mental palaces – then knocking them down and rebuilding them until you have everythign organised in your mind.
The next thing I do is write a first draft of the presentation. I start from scratch, remembering to cover each point – each challenge – each scene in turn. Right now its about getting something on paper (or in my case, generally something on the screen of a word processor). It doesn’t have to be perfect – indeed, one of the secrets of m system is it never has to be perfect. All you’re trying to do is make sure that each scene flows into the next, and that you have everything written down.
This is the time, by the way, to reinsert some of that supporting information you pulled off your list of bullet points. Now, when your hero is facing a challenge, you can quote some of those facts and figures, throw in some of that trivia, to make sure your audience are as informed about the hero’s world as they can be.
When you’ve got to the end, reread what you’ve written.
Are there any phrases you particularly like? highlight them.
Are there any phrases you think you could say better? rewrite them.
Are your facts and figures couched in ways that mean your audience can relate to them, and understand what they really mean?
Are there any places you can take advantage of storytelling techniques such as one of the three rules of three?
Now I’ve done this, I read through again, and I find each point that I’ve written – each important thing i have to say, and I note it down as a bullet point. I also note down any great turns of phrase – ways I want to say things on stage. Eventually I’m left with a list of buller points – these are my speakers notes – this is my presentation. these notes are what I’ll try to learn, and what I’ll use to jog my memory when I want to know where to go next.
This is the point where my presentation is written. From here on in, its all about the practice and the performance.
# The Presentation Handout
There is a problem with presentations. Sometimes you just have to get across large numbers of facts or figures. Sometimes you want people to take away ten idea or ten rules so badly it seems that you just have to put them on a bullet pointed list. Those web links, or books you want people to remember – they too have to be written down so that people can find them hours or days after the presentation.
The solution – for most people – is the slide deck. Put your data on the slides, and people can copy down the details. You might actually decide to make the slides available to your audience for later perusal. This is not my solution.
I will be addressing the horrors of the slide deck later. For now, it suffices to say that no hollywood movie tells you the plot by use of bullet points and clip art. And there is no need – or reason to tell your story this way. I will also remind you that the job of your presentation is to get your message across. And every time people are distracted from the message – by stopping to note down things they see on slides, for instance – you are losing your chance to convey the message as effectively as possible. You are losing the audiences attention. And you are probably losing the audience.
My solution is the handout.
Early on in your presentation pick up a handful of handouts and wave them at the audience. Tell them you’ve put down all the key points – and a few you won’t get to – in the handout. Tell them that every web address, email address and reference is in the handout. And tell them that you’ll distribute it after the talk.
After? Yes. if you hand out the handout during the talk, you’ll find your audience reading it, rather than listening to you. And if you could best convey your presentation by having it read, what are you doing on stage – a round robin email would have done the job.
So what goes in the handout?
My suggestion is that you take your presentation bullet points – the ones you wrote down in order to generate the challenges for your presentation’s hero and put them on paper. Then elaborate on them to make the handout readable.
the advantage of the handout is, unlike the presentation, it doesn’t need to tell a story. It’s a reference document and a reminder. Quite possibly its main job isn’t even to convey information, but rather to stop your audience from note talking. It can be dry and uninteresting. Stick to the facts. Add in all the information, and lists you think you need.
If you’ve cut any bullet points out of your presentation – because they didn’t fit into the story, or because you didn’t feel you had enough time to squeeze everything in – they can be put in the handout.
Add any diagrams you may need. Graphs. Flowcharts. Though you can probably avoid clip art.
Ensure you include your name and your email address – after all, this is still a self publicity document. Some people will use it for reference, and if you want those people to get in touch, they have to have the means to contact you – and to remember who you are if they only get around to taking action on your presentation weeks or months after you have presented it.
The handout isn’t meant to be high quality work. We are not talking about a book here. It isn’t meant to be a magazine article or a convincing essay. If it contains enough information to be better than most people’s notes, it has more than served its purpose. And if it avoids people contacting you to ask for information you have already given them in the presentation, you may well find it saves you some energy later on too.
# I’m Too Shy To Speak In Public
Not all introverts are shy. Not all shy people are introverts. Introversion is the feeling of being drained by being around people. It is an oversensitivity to stimulation. Being shy is a fear. It can be a fear of the judgement of others, or a fear of the judgement of yourself. But it is a fear – a fear which can be crippling, and which can prevent people from standing up and speaking.
I don’t claim I can cure everyone of shyness. But I do claim that some people are able to get over their shyness and speak with confidence and aplomb.
Shyness is a common problem for introverts. There can be many reasons why an introvert may – or may not – be shy, and several are worth examining:
We know from studies of twins that introversion is about 50% genetic, and about 50% environmental. Which is to say we know that, while you may be predisposed to being an introvert, something in your upbringing may well lead you into full blown introversion. Alternatively, you may not be genetically predisposed to introversion – but something in your upbringing may have so great an effect that you find yourself preferring peace and quiet to high stimulation environments. In both these cases, something external is required to tell the young, still developing, you that stimulation needs to be hidden from. A large number – if not all introverts are a product of their environment, and such environmental factors may not only lead to a need to retreat from the world occasionally, but also lead to a fear of engaging with it.
Introverts, as they grow up, will naturally attempt to spend less time in social situations than extroverts. The more introverted you are, the less time you are able to spend socially without becoming exhausted. Many introverts opt to spend their spare time doing something other than socialising. And what this means is that while introverts are busy reading, thinking, and growing their interior lives, extroverts are practising their social and relationship skills. Even by the time a child begins school, it is likely that an extrovert will be much more practised at making friends than an introvert. The learned behaviours in these early days can last a lifetime.
The extravert world itself can also play a part in making the introvert feel small and unworthy. Extroverts shout their ideas out loud, whereas introverts tend to hone their ideas quietly, then express them softly. Introverts ideas can be drowned out, or dismissed by a domineering extrovert crowd. An already shy introvert may feel rejected – or lacking in value. Such reinforcement (which can occur over and over, not just in the workplace, but in other worlds such as teenage relationships and social and religious groupings) can link speaking up witha whole range of other internal fears.
No. It is no surprise that many introverts are shy.
However, for many, shyness is something you can conquer, especially once you know what it is you are dealing with.
It is fair to say “I am an introvert”. It seems introversion is a key part of our personality makeup. It is unlikely to change. To say “I am shy” is, however, not entirely a reasonable statement. Shyness is not something you are, it is something you feel, a reaction to a particular circumstance.
There are many times in your life that you are confident.
Almost no one (over the age of 4) says “I am too shy to walk”. For the physically able, walking is something we all do with confidence. No-one is too shy to breath, or too shy to blink. The idea of not being confient in your ability to blink sounds faintly ridiculous. So you are not shy about everything you do. You are shy about very particular things. This is a powerful lesson – you are not shy. Rather shyness is something you sometimes experience.
With that shift in understanding, shyness – and the particular times you experience it – becomes something you can handle.
Before we go on, I want to remind you that overcoming shyness for an introvert can be a powerful change – but while it will open many doors, it does not remove the fact that for an introvert socialising is tiring. Overcoming shyness will, at times, take some amount of will power – this too is tiring. It is unwise to try tos overcome all of your shyness by willpower at once. People are tiring, you are just setting yourself up for failure. Keep very much in tune with your energy levels – only push when you have a lot of energy. Continue to make use of quiet times to recharge – indeed, if you want to be more social, you need to get better at looking out for opportunities to rechange, and to take more of them.
[As the articles on public speaking grow, I will be adding more information about overcoming shyness - look at the sidebar, and come back over the next few days to find out more]
# Shyness – Rational and Irrational Fears
When it comes to fears, the fears we hold deep inside us, we need to distinguish between two types.
We have the rational fears – the fears of real, possible consequences – the fears of genuine danger. A person with a fear of heights would never jump off a high cliff: in this case, his fear is real, such a jump would be hugely dangerous. A person with a fear of spiders has less of a rational fear… while there are dangerous spiders in the world, for the most part they are few and far between, and once you have identified a spider as being – rationally – harmless, any remaining fear is irrational.
Irrational fears are no less real. They affect us physically, make us jump or quake, sweat or shiver. I’m not saying that irrational fears are bad fears – fears that it should be in any way embarrassing to have. Everybody has irrational fears. They are normal, and perfectly acceptable. However in approaching irrational fears we need to take a different tactic from approaching the rational.
Shyness is a complaint which crosses the boundary between the irrational and rational. The bullied schoolchild might be perfectly rational in is fear of talking to a classmate – not just fear, but experience might suggest it never ends well. A bullied office employee might feel the same about their manager. However, what may have once been rational arguments have, over time, turned into irrational patterns of behaviour. That many people fear public speaking more than they fear death is clearly irrational. Uncontrollable shaking before speaking – the sort of shaking which might, perhaps be rational before a parachute jump – is clearly not a rational – or particularly helpful response.
To begin with, lets deal with the rational fears of public speaking. In short they all amount to one big issue: the idea that in front of someone (or a group of people) who are able to play an influential part in your future life, you might perform in such a way as to make those people want to influence your future negatively. You may also worry about worrying about this – which is essentially what embarrassment is. And you may worry about receiving criticism – in short you may worry that your speaking may lead them to act in such a way as to trigger your fear of rejection. (Both embarrassment and fear of rejection are also a combination of the rational and irrational – you can approach those, and indeed other fears by following the processes I will be providing in this and future articles)
There are a few ways you can manage yourself – or your situation – to rid yourself of all these rational fears.
1. You can choose to speak in a safe environment. Not all public speaking needs to be in a dangerous situation. It is possible to take small steps in a far friendlier setting – public speaking courses, public speaking self help groups and organisations like Toastmasters International all offer this sort of chance.
2. You can realise that to produce an impressive presentation, you don’t need to be great, you only need to look good by comparison. If you prepare well, and use the techniques I am offering, you will be a better speaker than the majority of your competition. Reasonably simple techniques – techniques like moving around the stage and not saying ‘err’, which we will discuss later – will make you look exceptionally good at speaking.
3. You can test your environment to see how dangerous it actually is. Ask a few people who have been in the situation what usually happens. To be honest, the most common complaint of someone who gives a presentation is not that it had a negative impact, but that it had no impact at all. By asking around (and by all means do this by email, if you don’t feel you can manage it face to face), you may realise the danger of the situation is far less than you imagined.
4. Ask yourself ‘What is the worst that can happen? The absolute worst? How bad could ti possibly be?’ Than ask yourself, how hard would it be to actually cause that sort of result. Them become more realistic. What is a realistic worst outcome? Is that likely? What would you do in that situation? How bad would that situation really be? How long would it take to get over it and back to normal? Then ask yourself ‘What is the best, most amazing outcome of giving this presentation?’ Is it worth taking the opportunity?
None of this matters if you still have irrational fears. Irrational fears can’t be reasoned with.
The way to handle irrational fears that I have found effective are:
Control your energy. If you are tired, stressed, angry, or over socialised, you won’t be in a good situation to face your fear head on. So make sure you are able to be in a good place before facing the challenge. Meditate. Listen to motivational tapes. Do whatever you need.
Practice, practice, practice. Join a speaking group. Become a member of Toastmasters. Every time you can speak in a place you know is safe, no matter how much it scares you, you will be teaching yourself that you can face an audience. Repeated exposure to your fear – and repeatedly overcoming it in a supportive atmosphere will do wonders for when you need to face it in the real world.
Prepare. Learn your presentation word for word. While I generally don’t recommend repeating your presentation off pat, if you’re worried, make sure you know it. Bring notes with you – bring the whole presentation written out if you really need too. Being prepared provides a sense of confidence, a sense of control. As you get experience in public speaking, you will learn that you are far more in control than you might expect. But for now, the control preparation gives you will act as a reliable safety blanket as you take to the stage.
Mindfulness. What was once a far eastern practice, is now a well established psychological practice. Mindfulness involves getting to know your fear. Feel where your fear is in your body – think about what that feeling of fear is in your mind. Pay attention to it, keep observing it, thinking how interesting it is your body feels this way. Don’t stop watching it. Don’t do anything else. Don’t try to get rid of it, don’t try to control it. Just notice that it is there, and keep watching it. Anything you observe for tool long becomes boring – you’ll be shocked at how much this helps you take control of your fear – so long as you don’t get frustrated at the fear for remaining. Love your fear – it is only your mind trying to protect you. Thank it. And if it goes – when it goes, just let it go.
# 4 Reasons To Be Confident About Your Presentation
As you prepare to go up to the stage, it is good to reflect on the reasons you have to be confident that your presentation is likely to succeed and impress its message upon the audience.
#### The Bar Is Set Low
The majority of presentations are awful. I’ve sat through them, you’ve sat through them, everyone in the audience has sat through them. Awful is what your audience is expecting. If a presentation is ‘reasonable’ your audience will be happy. A good, solid, well structured, entertaining presentation is beyond their normal hopes – such presentations are few and far between. I’ve known good presenters who get told years later that someone remembers them speaking – and I’ve known bad presenters who I haven’t recognised in the hallway outside their presentation. All you have to do to be remembered – and for your message to be remembered – is to aim above the bar. Its an easy target.
#### You Are Prepared
The most obvious flaw in other people’s presentations is under preparation. We’ve already discussed the main reason why: for the extravert the presentation, the act of presenting, is the thing. When an extravert is asked to present, he thinks a little about what his slides should look like, and a lot about the energy he will get from being on stage. The extravert doesn’t like the hours spent planning, researching and crafting his presentation – so frequently he decides to shorten this time and wing it. In most cases this leads to poor results.
As an introvert, you (and I) are not going to want to think about being on stage – indeed, we keep that to the back of our minds while we do the prep work. It is the time we spend before the presentation that allows us to be confident we are going to say exactly what we want to say in exactly the manner we want the audience to hear it.
Planning is only part of the presentation (an important part – and we will talk about the performance – the other part – later), but it is part you can be certain you have nailed, because it is the part of presenting that fits an introverts nature.
#### You Are In Control
You may not realise this, but when you give a presentation, you are in control.
The presenter is in a position of authority, and the audience, sitting in their chairs, waiting to hear what you have to say, innately respect this. You get to set the ground rules early on. If I know I’m going to face a barrage of questions about the subject of my speech – and I know I have already put work into leading the audience to where I found the correct answers – then I start my speech by telling them:
“I’m going to lead you through the process that led to this particular design. I know you’re going to have questions, so I ask you to wait until the end, by which time I hope that I’ll have answered them”.
If I don’t want people taking notes, I tell them ahead of time
“I’ve put down all the details in a handout we’ll pass out after the presentation, so there is no need to take notes. You’ve all got my email address in case there are any details you want to clarify later”
But this is’t the only control you have. On stage you have the right to speak. You have the right to express your ideas. You don’t have to think about what the next guy is going to say, or worry about making yourself heard. You may be talking – but you have been given the platform, and the time to prepare your thoughts into finely honed, well polished perfection. You don’t often get this chance – an opportunity to express yourself and your ideas safely. Normally if you want to get an extravert to hear you (which requires talking to them… extraverts don’t like to hole themselves away and read like you or I might), you’re fighting against your natural instincts. When you are on stage, it is your once chance to be yourself.
#### You Are An Actor
Lots of actors are introverts. This shocks many people, but it never shocked me. I always knew I was an actor. Not a stage actor, mind you, nor was I a big star of hollywood movies, yet I acted every day and a good number of people found the character I portrayed believable.
I am not my body. I am not the person people outside know as Ben. I’m an introvert – my life is an interior one – the person I am lives inside my head, this is where I enjoy playing with ideas, thinking, creating, learning and relaxing. Outside my head, the ‘real world’ is a foreign place, but its a place I have learned to live in and interact with.
But I never feel anyone in the real world has met the real me, the whole me.
They meet the character I portray.
And I’ve grown to be a damn good actor.
I play a number of roles – Work Ben – the guy I am in the office, Home Ben – the loving husband and deep thinker, and Social Ben who enjoys a few pints and bullshitting with a select group of cose friends.
When I step onto the stage, I’ve learned to play a different character. My on stage character is a lot like me – his voice is slightly different – he uses more gestures and holds stronger, more confident beliefs about himself. I’ve started to call him ‘Presentation Ben’ because I’ve realised that is the act I put on when I speak.
All the tricks we as introverts have used to get by in the real world, we can use on stage. While an extravert goes on stage and tries to be themselves, we have the option of going on stage and portraying a skilled and brilliant presenter.
Your motivation is to convey your message. The houselights are dimmed, ad you hear your cue. Its time for your scene. Break a leg.
# Your Performance : Using The Stage
Giving a presentation isn’t (unfortunately) only about the preparation – at some point, you are also going to have to perform. The performance is a show – its a bout being a character, someone other than yourself, and its about keeping in control. It is a situation which, rather counter-intuitively gives you all the power. What you have to learn is how to hold on to the power and how to use it to add to the impact of your presentation.
Your first tool, in giving a performance, is the stage.
The stage can vary. Sometimes you are up on a platform, at other times you stand on the floor amongst a horseshoe of seated people. often you will simply be standing up from your seat at a meeting table. But in all these situations, you have a stage, you have an area of space which you use to perform.
Think, for a moment, about presentations you have attended. How often do the boring speakers stand in one place, hiding behind something – perhaps behind a desk, or behind a lectern? When faced with public speaking, many people naturally and instinctively look for somewhere to hide. Rationally, we all know that hiding isn’t going to save us – you will be giving the same presentation, no matter what you put between yourself and the audience. But there is the rub, by putting things between yourself and the audience, you are not only hiding yourself – but you are also hiding your presentation – you are putting physical and mental barriers between the audience and your message.
So when you take to the stage, stand where you can be seen. Clearly, unobstructed, open.
Look around you – you have an audience, but you also have space. They are penned into their seats, often sat tightly, shoulder to shoulder, without much room to move. You, on the other hand, have room in which to move around. Feel the space, and be willing to move around into it, because my moving, you are – no matter how you feel inside – projecting an image of confidence and dominance.
Lets look at how the stage works:
First, consider the obstacles: there might be a podium or a desk. Ideally you want to move these out of the way. If you can’t do that, the next best action is to stand in front of them – to consider them the back of your working area. In short, don’t let the things on the stage get in the way of how you want to work – and certainly don’t let the fact that there is a lectern, pulpit, or chair determine how you are going to stand or sit when presenting to your audience.
On stage, you can move in four directions – left and right, forwards and backwards. Some people, when they present, have a habit of striding back and forth from the left to the right of the stage – this is a nervous habit, and isn’t what I mean when I say ‘use the space’. Rather, pick a spot on which to base yourself – a place to start your presentation. Don’t move from left to right, rather turn to the left, or to the right to engage with a certain section of your audience. As a speaker, it is your job to connect with everybody you are speaking to, so take time to look out towards your audience – turn to make eye contact with the people at the far left, the far right, the front and the back. When you want to make a point, make a connection with someone – anyone – in the audience.
Moving forwards and backwards is different. Moving forwards has an impact. Move forwards when you want to shock, when you want to impress a point, or when you want to share something. Moving forward brings you closer to your audience.
A while ago I was giving a technical presentation – one of many the audience had listened to that day. Like the other speakers, I started standing near a desk which was being used by the engineers controlling the various demos. Immediately I moved in front of the desk, so as not to let it obstruct me, and I began to talk – my talk was on the subject of ‘new features in a particular product’, however I was spinning it as ‘our journey to find ways of making your life easier’. The talk was going well, I was getting the key concepts across, but I reached a point where I had to explain a very tricky technical concept to the audience. Now I had prepared for this – I knew exactly how I was going to get it across: I had developed a metaphor to explain everything. But I also knew that I needed to have the audiences unswerving attention. So while previously I had been moving around a small space – mainly using the space to support my expressive body language, I chose this point to expand the space I was using. I stepped much close the the audience, and rather than talking about the technical subjects, I began talking about them, including the audience in my presentation.
Suffice to say, the presentation worked, and the audience (who had been grilling the guys before me on the most minor of details) gave me an easy ride through the question and anser session which followed.
By moving around the stage, I had kept hold of their interest – distracting them fromt he screens, and indeed from their notes – and, at the crucial point, I had moved towards them, drawing them in. This is what stage movement is all about.
Use the stage. Don’t use it to find somewhere to hide. Don’t use it to walk off your nervous energy. But take advantage of the space. Use it to show that you are confident. Use it to bring people closer to you. And perhaps use it like an actor – stepping to one side to share a secretive ‘aside’ with the audience.
To finish, leaving the presentation centred, you can draw back to your home, centred position, and, if applause follows, you can move forwards again to accept it.
The important thing to remember is, the stage will let you own it, if you take it. The power is there for you to control, your job is to grab it.
# Your Performance : Using Your Body
Two men walk out onto the stage.
One holds back. His hands are clasped in front of him, protecting him (at least symbolically) from the audience. He looks down, reads from his notes, doesn’t really catch our eyes.
The other stands up straight. He looks out over the audience, acknowledging the people whose faces he brushes with his eyes. His hands are sometimes by his sides, but often in front of him, making strong broad gestures to emphasise his points. He is dymanic.
Which is the more confident?
You might be tempted to say the latter. The second man seems more confident, and the audience will trust his because he is confident of what he is saying. But actually, the second man is simply aware of what he is doing on the stage and aware of what looks good to his audience.
Its all about being aware of your body. And there is nothing new about what a confident looking speaker does.
“Stand up straight” you were probably admonished by an older relative, perhaps a grandmother or great aunt.
“Hands out of your pockets”
“Don’t scowl”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you” (well, more like when you’re talking to me – talking, even from a stage, is a two way street, a two way communication”
These are the things you need to be aware of. Think of how you walk onto the stage. Do you stride on proudly? Do you rush on? Do you slink on, hoping (despite being in front of everybody) that no-one will notice you – because you’re slightly embarrassed to be there?
How would it feel if you were being called onto the stage to be given a medal for some act of heroism? To come onto stage to the applause of everyone in the room – people who are all here because they want to hear everything you have to say, because possibly they just want to be near a man like you. Can you feel that? Would it be different from how you currently walk onto the stage? Would you walk taller? Perhaps throw your shoulders back? Grin at the audience, with a strong knowing smile. Pause and enjoy the moment?
Then perhaps that is how you should begin. Your body is sending signals to the audience. It is saying “I deserve to be hear. Treat me like a hero”. But it is also saying the same things to you. You’ll feel not just the butterflies that the adrenaline gives you, but also the warmth of inner confidence – and, however brief that might be, it is better for it to be there than not. It is necessary to tap into the inner reservoir of speaking talent you may otherwise never reach.
the next thing to be aware of is what you do with your body
Do you rock from side to side?
Do you clasp your hands in front of you? Or play with your fingers.
Do you stand deadly still, worried that if you move lions (or the audience – who may be just as dangerous) will see you?
Stop it.
How? that is the rub. You can’t just stand still. The answer is to throw yourself into your words. Start simple. Walk around and use the stage. That will stop you rocking. If you are talking about emotions, mime those emotions – don’t worry about over acting – from a stage, all actors have to overact to get their message across to the back of the room, and any acting is more than most people hearing a speaker expect to receive. If you are talking about something big, mime ‘big’ with your hands – or with your body. If you are taking about something small, mime small with your hands, or crouch down into a little ball.
Now the audience – and you – are not just hearing your presentation, they are beginning to feel it.
If you’re counting “There are three things you need to know” then show people one, two three on your fingers. If you have a choice between this and that, then this is on one side of you and that is on the other. You can move between the two spots you show your audience as you talk about them.
And thats just the beginning. If you feel it, do it.
You’ll always have a few bad habits. Me, I bunch my hands into fists. I punch with them to make my points. This can be a good thing in small doses, but I do it too much. Just be vigilant to what actions you repeatedly make, and try to control them the next time you talk to a crowd. In time, you’ll gain control over your body, and your presentations will gain from it.
# Your Performance : Using Your Voice
You use your voice to speak, and the heart of your presentation comes from what you say. So your voice is very important.
It isn’t all about projecting your voice – these days microphones mean that vocal projection isn’t as important as it used to be – but projection is still a skill which is worth exploring, as knowing how to project your voice gives you lots of opportunities to alter how you use your voice – and to make your presentation more memorable.
The way to project your voice is like this:
1. Stand up straight.
2. Feel yourself breathing. Try to breath from deep down, blow your chest. Imagine the air is coming in and out of your belly button. Breath slowly and feel the breath. Feel your stomach rising as you breath in and falling as you breath out.
3. Smile. This raised your cheekbones, which gives the inside of your mouth more volume, and lets your voice echo inside – we all know we sound better singing in the bathroom – the echo adds a tonality to your voice which makes it sound richer.
4. Look at people at the back of the audience, your voice is going to have to carry to them, so make sure you are connecting with them
5. Wait until you have breathed all the way in, and your stomach has risen, then begin talking. When you talk, imagine your voice is coming from inside your stomach.
6. Speak clearly. Annunciate every syllable of every word.
This doesn’t take much practice. Follow these instructions and your voice will carry better the next time you speak.
Now people can hear your voice, lets look at the things you can do to make it sound better. First, lets consider speed. Many people speak too fast. Much like the use of the body, speaking quickly is something you have to notice if you’re guilty of, then slow down. As a tip for most speakers: if it sounds like you are speaking too slowly, you’re probably speaking at the right speed. Slow, careful diction sounds considered and will thought out, whereas the fast ramblings – even of the genius mind – sound distant and confusing. As you have more practice speaking, try varying to speed at which you speak. I go faster when I want something to sound complicated and technical – or when I want to sound very excited, and slower when I really want to ram. a. point. home.
Now you need to consider the tonality of your voice. There is nothing more boring than listening to someone speaking to an audience in a monotone (well, actually there is: someone reading there speech to an audience in a monoton). The monotone makes whatever you say lack humanity and emotion. To avoid this, really try to emote when you are speaking. If you are happy smile, if you are discussing something sad, scowl – your voice will carry the emotions with you. As with your body, don’t be afraid to overact.
You can also adapt your volume. If you are following the advice I gave earlier on projection, it is quite possible to speak quietly and still be heard at the back of the room. You can use this to share secrets (its the old stage whisper), to show humility or fear. Speaking loudly adds confidence, and switching from quiet to loud can scare the audience – making them jump and take note of what you’re saying. Its a trick countless head teachers have used in school assemblies (and of course, along with stand up comics, teachers are some of the most practiced public speakers you will come across)
The are to sounding good when you speak is mixing up all of the techniques above, matching them with the things you have to say. You can plan this in advance, but also, you can do it on the spot, taking in what you feel from the audiences reaction. If you both feel what your audience feel, and you also feel the meaning of the words, and then you bring this feeling out when you speak, you’ll have created a sound people want to pay attention to.
# Your Performance : Using Other People
Having looked at yourself – how you use the stage, your body language and non-verbal gestures and even the tone of your voice, its time to think about one more part of your performance, one you might not have considered:
Other people.
When you perform – when you present – even when you talk to someone else, there are always more than one person involved. You may be there presenting, but everyone else is there listening. A great presentation – a great performance not only delivers the message to them – it engages your audience and mankes them take the message in.
How does one do that?
We’ve talked about lots of the tricks and techniques of speakers in other articles – but a good example is one I’ve just given. Ask your audience a question. Asking a question is simple, but anyone who hears the question begins – automatically – to come up with a response. They are not just hearing what you’re saying, but listening to it. A rhetorical question is a great start – and perhaps easy for people who are nervous of their crowd, but better still can be to ask for a show of hands – something that really makes people stand up and pay attention (and – if you want, you can always ask people to stand up rather than raising their hands – that really makes them pay attention)
A lot of speakers like to keep their audience by making them laugh. While the art of humour in speeches would require a book on its own, I’m sure you’re used to the experience of telling a joke – and then not getting the laugh you want. Don’t be afraid of this, every audience is different. and as a speaker you have to get to learn the sort of crowd you are playing to. If a joke doesn’t work, tell another. A small titter is enough, once a crowd are laughing, they wil carry on giggling more and more as you continue. And because they are being entertained, information is sneaking into their heads without them noticing (which is, perhaps, the aim of the most cunning presenter). Feel you audience, read their laughs, and, if after a while the jokes arn’t working, go onto something else.
Try to shock your audience. Do something they don’t expect. If you need to jump in the air, to shout suddenly, to hit yourself, or to fall to the ground, don’t be afraid. If you think your audience are fearing your presentation is going to be dull and boring, make sure they’re wrong. Use things out of context – talking about going to the pub in a work presentation can really shift the mood. Telling a story about someone else, then revealing it was you that the event happened to can make a room full of people side with you. Sharing something from your history that most people would keep hidden is an easy way to grab attention (and sometimes sympathy) – I started a presentation with the phrase “I escaped from the mental hospital fifteen years ago – and so far I haven’t been caught” – the speech was about overcoming depression, but the opening sentence certainly drew the crowds attention.
Finally, as well as considering your audience, consider the other people that will have been speaking to them. I’ve seen a lot of people speak in a lot of different contexts, and I’m sure you’ll agree, most people who speak – even some professional public speakers – are pretty terrible.
Your job is not to be the best public speaker in the world. It isn’t even to be the best public speaker at an event. Your job is to be in the top quarter. The top twenty-five percent. And this is easy. A little practise and the information I’ve provided is enough to get anybody to this level in almost any situation. On’ve you’re in the top quarter, people will compare you to the other speakers and be so glad that you’re someone who knows what they are doing, someone who appreciates that performance is as importance as information content in a speach, that they will listen to you – they will want to be your friend.
Entertaining your crowd will get them on your side. And once you’ve got the crowd on your side, you really can’t lose. You will make a presentation everybody wants to talk about.
# Dangerous Distractions
In most social situations, the last thing I want to do is draw attention to myself – such is the curse of shyness. I already feel – secretly believe – that people pay far more attention to me than they really do.
Public speaking isn’t like that.
When you are performing in front of a crowd, speaking in public, presenting to the board, what you want is for people to hear your message. And that means you want people to pay attention to you. In previous articles I’ve written about grabbing the attention, and using stagecraft to keep people interested, but there is one more thing we need to do – and that is avoid anybody, or anything else becoming more interesting that you.
There are a variety of things which will distract people. Phones are distracting – not just because they buzz in someone’s packet causing that person to (hopefully) leave the room in order to take the call – but also because the ring tone can irritate others in the room, and because these days phones are themselves attention magnets, allowing the crowd to text, tweet, and surf the web. So where it is possible, please encourage to set phones to silent and put them away.
In other settings, it is increasingly common to see people using their laptops while you’re talking. And if your crowd are anything like, me, they will soon be drawn away from the ostensible use of note taking, to surfing the web. This is why I always try to make sure people are aware that full notes will be available after the session.
The notes are available after the session, because notes are distracting too. If you hand out notes before you speak, not only will people be tempted to annotate them, they’ll also choose to read the note rather than actually listen to what you’re saying. So while a handout is important, handing it out after the session (but making sure people know it will be available before you start talking) is a must.
If notes are bad, so too are slides. The moment you put slides up on a screen behind you, people’s attention is grabbed away from what you’re saying and onto whatever you’ve written. We can’t help but read. If you’ve filled a slide with bullet points, or covered it with text, we are going to read everything – and we’ll certainly read it faster than you’re going to say them. We’ll miss any extras you’re adding – and we’ll be borded by you, because we’ll always be ahead.
In short, don’t write things on slides.
Sometimes you can’t avoid slides. And sometimes a lack of slides will make you look unprepared. So my solution is simple: Think of your presentation like a magazine article. Only use slides where a magazine article would put something that isn’t in the main body of the text: perhaps a graph. Perhaps a title. Maybe, if you really have to, a quote. Photos are great. If you can find a photo (or take a photo) which illustrates some aspect of what you’re talking about, put it up there, then ignore it (other than maybe to say who the photo shows) – after all, if you’re telling a story with a hero, there is nothing wrong with letting people get a picture of what the hero looks like.
Diagrams can go on slides – sometimes diagrams can be really useful to help explain what is going on – and you have the chance to animate things, which helps further. But when you’re done with the diagram, get rid of it. And make sure you recapture the crowds attention.
Beyond slides, there are other things that can lose the attention of the audience. Technical problems are the most frequent – so be prepared – make sure you’re not relying on technology. If you’ve followed my advice about slides, everything will work, even without them, so you should be fine. If you’ve followed my advice about speaking, you should be able to project your voice so a microphone won’t be necessary. Sometimes you have to rely on technology – in videoconferences and webinars, for instance. In these cases, get everything checked out before you start. Have a test drive. When technology fails, you’re not just wasting your own time, and losing all the benefits you have gained from cleverly designing your speech, you’re also wasting the valuable time of all of your audience. In my view, that isn’t just lazy or incompetent behaviour, it is outright rude.
If you are using technology, also, get somebody else to control it (except for the slide clicker, which you should never let anybody control – as telling someone to change to the next slide is also very distracting). You should rehearse your presentation, so that the person controlling the technology knows what to do without being told.
One time I failed to do this, I was demonstrating a piece of software, while also controlling it. I had failed to realise I would be speaking with a hand held microphone. So there I was, on stage, mouse in one hand, microphone in another. I was thinking about the microphone and mouse so much, and worrying about what was on the screen to such an extent, that I forgot to look up and engage with the audience. Right there I learned my lesson – please learn it too, so that you never make the same mistake.
# Answering Questions
I like to leave questions to the end of any presentation I give – or, in a long presentation or training session I like to leave questions until before a break. I let the audience know this ahead of time, as I genuinely want them to think about things and ask me the things they need me to expand on – if for no other reason, than this helps me work out what I need to spend more effort on next time.
For an introvert answering questions on stage can be daunting. But personally I find it easier than answering questions in a one-to-one setting – here is why:
When you’re on stage, you are in control. You can decide how you want to answer a question, and how you want to frame it. The person in the audience generally won’t be interrupting – they’ll wait for you to finish saying you piece before asking any further points. This lets you take the question where you want to go, and explain everything you can about it before you need to fear another question. Moreover, the questioner won’t be able to come back and ask more and more detailed questions too often – the other members of the audience become irritated with someone who is asking too many questions – and having everyone else on your side reinforces you’re ability to take charge of the situation.
The best way to answer questions is – I find – to follow the formula below:
1. Stand up straight, pause and take a breath. Think about the question.
2. Repeat the question. This is often important if you’re being recorded (because the questioner is likely not to have used the microphone well), but more important if you’re not using a microphone (because the speaker may not project their voice well and even if they do, they are unlikely to be projecting it towards the audience). While you repeat the question, you have more time to think about how you will answer it, and also, you are ensuring you’ll be answering the question that was asked. (it is easy to think you’re being asked a different question, and then not pay attention to what the questioner actually says)
3. Remember to be in your speaking personality. I at least, differentiate between my speaking personality and my usual day to day personality. The speaker is someone I become when on stage. I have to actively remember to be the speaker when I answer questions, it is too easy to slip into being my less confident, less skilled self.
4. Treat answering the question as a mini speech. Try, if you can to structure it. The rule of 3 is a great thing to use here. Even if you don’t know exactly where your answer is going, you can start off by saying “There were three factors which led to our decision:” then go through three important factors one at a time.
You might also want to consider telling a brief story of what happened in a meeting, or what led to a decision if one springs to mind. Even if the story isn’t totally relevant it will give you a structure to hang your answer off.
5. Don’t be afraid to pause briefly and gather your thoughts. These pauses will feel like an eternity to you, but to the audience they feel brief – and make you look like you are calm and in control.
6. Don’t take things personally – if you’re taking about your work, or even about someone else’s work, you might feel it is your jod to defend it – or worse that people asking questions are attacking you personally. This isn’t true, your job is to explain the background, and why you’ve made the decisions you made, and to understand any problems the questioner might have so that you can address them in the future.
7. Be prepared to suggest meeting after the presentation to talk about something if you don’t feel you’ve managed to satisfy a questioner and want to move on.
You will often find people wanting to talk to you after a presentation. For some of my extravert friends, this is the reason why they give presentations – so they can be the centre of attention. For me, its not so good. Once a presentation is finished, I tend to feel overstimulated. So I try to keep post-presentation chats short, and instead arrange times later in the week – if possible – to discuss matters in more depth.
# Coming Back To Earth
Introverts are more easily stimulated than extraverts, thats why social activities are so tiring, we have to manage so much more stimulation and excitement than extraverts. Public speaking of any kind is therefore likely to leave most introverts in a state of hyper-stimulation. When I feel this, I feel somewhat detached from reality, with adrenaline flowing and everything feeling very fast and very big.
It is a tiring state – and while it seems to be a valuable state when it comes to speaking in public, it isn’t a state I would want to stay in for too long following a presentation – I worry it would lead to me making snap decisions and using poor judgement. Moreover, the longer I spend being hyper stimulated, the longer it takes me to come down, and the more tired I get.
So following a presentation, and perhaps spoken to all the people I need to speak to afterwards (and perhaps got their contact details, so I can follow up with them later), I like to take myself somewhere quiet – where I’m not going to be found. A toilet cubical is a very good choice, as is your car (though I wouldn’t recommend driving straight away). What you want to do is calm down, so I suggest the following exercises:
Mindfulness – when preparing to speak, I suggested paying attention to your body, and everything it was feeling. Not trying to suppress, or deny any feeling, but just noticing it, and noticing the physical affects it is having on you. Also notice the other sensations you are feeling (which can include the feeling of the toilet seat underneath you, and the smell of the bleach blocks in the urinals if you are hiding out in a WC). This is a very useful first thing to do to calm down, when you’re heard is beating, or your brain is rushing too fast because of how stimulated you are.
Breathing. Once you have taken control of yourself through mindfulness, slow breathing is very calming. Again, be mindful of your breathing, feeling the sensation (it can be shockingly pleasurable – even sensual). Breath in for a count of three, hold your breath for a count of three, then breath out for a count of three, and repeat for as long as you need.
Centre yourself. Imagine all the physical feelings of nervousness and stimulation flowing down from your head, through your body and out of your feet. If you need a bit of help doing this, stroke yourself from your face, down your chest, over your stomach and down your legs to you feet, imagining the feeling is a black liquid, washing all your stresses away.
Once you’re done with this, and calm, go and find something to eat and drink. You may well have dehydrated yourself slightly and you’ve certainly used up a decent amount of energy (especially if you’ve been jumping all over the stage, like I recommend), so if you have to treat yourself to a chocolate bar, feel free. You deserve it. Some people like to treat eating as another grounding ritual – it is certainly worth eating slowly and mindfully rather than just gulping it down to quench any emotional eating urge you may have.
Finally, go and find somewhere quiet to be, and do something non-stressful which doesn’t involve people for an hour or two. Something you enjoy is best, alone. Reading, perhaps writing or listening to another speaker, but not communicating.
Recovering from presenting can be hard for an introvert – and this isn’t unusual. Because of this, I would seriously suggest that it is a bad idea to have too many speaking engagements on the same day. If you do, you want to keep them next to one another with no gap, so you don’t hit the second speech while you are on the way down from the hyper-stimulation of the first.
# Taking Your Speaking Forwards
Once you’ve given your first presentation or speech, you’ll be looking to find out how to improve, so that your next presentation goes even better, and you’re ideas can be spread further and wider.
My first suggestion is to practice. Practice Practice Practice. It isn’t only how you get to Carnegie Hall, it is also how you get to be better – at speaking or almost anything else you may care to think off. As you’ve read some of the stories I’ve told, one way you learn is through making mistakes. Where possible, it is nice to make those mistakes in a friendly, forgiving environment. And while your workplace is probably more friendly and forgiving than you might imagine, it is worth looking for other places to practice speaking.
One suggestion is to take public speaking lessons – either one to one, or as part of a small group. My recommendation is to find a teacher who encourages everybody to practise as much as possible during the training, rather than someone who simply teaches from a presentation deck. I’m biased here, but I would recommend you contact
adelina@presentinggoodpractice.co.uk
and see how she is able to help you take your public speaking forwards.
Alternatively, for regular practice, repetition and notes on how to improve your speaking, you can’t beat going to meetings of Toastmasters International. Toastmasters groups have helped millions of people, all over the world, improve their public speaking and presentation skills. There is almost certainly a toastmasters group near you who will long to have you as a member. And the pricing is shockingly reasonable – far cheaper than most presentation training courses. You can come out of Toastmasters not only with improves speaking skills, but with widely recognised qualifications and a new group of friends and business contacts.
see
www.toastmasters.org
for more details.
Beyond practicing, you can also look to see how your messages can be carried further. In a very short time, you can get a reputation for writing good speeches – so much so that other people will ask you to help with theirs. This is a great opportunity, as it lets you influence what they are going to say and allows you to communicate with an audience without having to exert yourself socially.
For many introverts the role of being the power behind the throne is much more desirable than always being in the spotlight. So if you can find yourself one or two extraverts who long for the limelight, but don’t like to spend the time researching and writing their speeches, encourage them to work with you. You’ll get a lot of thanks, and you’ll get to do the sort of work you love while remaining peaceful and quiet.
Finally, don’t take on too much. Right now it is possible that you are excited. Your speaking is going well, you are progressing in your career faster than ever before. Everybody wants a piece of you. Remember to relax. Remember to honour your energy. There is only one of you, and you can only do so much. If it means rejecting things, saying no, turning down offers in order to keep your sanity, do it. You are more valuable than your speeches, don’t let yourself get burned out.
And enjoy yourself.
Public speaking can be a pathway to success for introverts, and you’ve taken your first step.