Understanding life

At a recent international exhibition I spoke at a conference and received great feedback. The reason was that I managed to make myself a star in terms of presentation. At this point I’d normally thank my parents and friends, teachers and colleagues, and try not to cry with pride.

However, I can’t take all the credit (although, being a consultant I’m going to have a damn good try). My motivation was a book called Killer Presentations, by Nicholas Oulton, who runs the M62 group and who probably knows more about PowerPoint than anyone else in the universe.

I had the pleasure of meeting him recently and we chewed the fat about the success, or otherwise, of events where PowerPoint is used without control. Now, I have read many books on how to present, and often their messages are the same. Nicholas’ approach is different, as he is a man with a mission to make our presentations interesting, rather than boring already jaded audiences.

I’m not going to steal too much of his thunder. If you get the chance, go along to one of his presentations and see him use PowerPoint the way a stunt driver handles a performance car.

Us ordinary mortals could never achieve any similar level of performance, and yet he makes it seem so easy. And his book is well worth reading.

But here are a couple of useful tips for use in day to day presentation. Firstly, imagine you’ve been asked to speak for 30 minutes, and you’ve prepared your PowerPoint presentation accordingly. But just before you walk on to the stage, your host whispers that lunch is almost ready, so can you cut it to 15 minutes.

Options? Well, you could carry on as planned and see lunch go cold. You could talk faster, and whiz through your slides, leaving your delegates feeling short changed. Or you could jump through some of the slides without going through them all. Most people when asked how to do this would take the approach of pressing the ‘escape’ key to leave the presentation, click on the ‘slide sorter’ option, highlight the slide you’d like to move onto, and click the ‘presentation’ option to start again. Not exactly slick.

Alternatively, if you know you want to go from slide 12 to slide 22, you could tap 22 on the keyboard and press ‘return’. And that’s it. Your audience will never know what you’ve missed. Clever, eh?

Or, you have a graph on screen and you need to focus your audience on a particular area. Well, laser pointers often upset health and safety politicos, and you can end up feeling like an extra from Star Wars.

Instead, remember that CTRL P and CTRL A will give you on-screen pointer options that work perfectly.

Most of us assume we can use PowerPoint, and Bill Gates helpfully provides templates on most PCs – which is why most presentations are so similar, and uniformly boring. If you want something different, check out Nick’s book.

Oh, and a final point. Presentations are ‘visual support’; look closely at those two words. PowerPoint isn’t the star of your session as a speaker, you are.So remember the secret of the B or W keys. Press them, and the screen goes black (or white). Press them again, and back comes your presentation. And in those seconds, where there are no pretty pictures on the screen, that’s where the audience gets to see you. After all, isn’t that why they came?

Thank you for your attention!

As presenters, we know the importance of focusing on the information and emotional needs of our audience:

What is relevant to them?
What do they already know?
How do they feel about our topic?

When I recently spoke at two conferences in Africa, I discovered that there is another, more fundamental layer of audience needs to consider as well.

In this article, I will share the lessons I learned about basic communication issues when speaking to a culturally distinct audience.

1. Don’t assume they can understand you
2. Be cautious of cultural jargon
3. Be adaptable to local style
4. Slow down
5. Watch your body language

Tip 1: Don’t Assume They Can Understand You

Although English is the official language of business in both places I spoke (Nigeria and Kenya), their English is more formal, flowery, and structured than casual, American English where we regularly use contractions (e.g. can’t, mustn’t, would’ve) and drop the endings on words (e.g. are you comin’ to the party?).

To enhance the audience’s ability to understand you, speak clearly and articulate carefully. Minimize your use of contractions. Check with the audience to see if they understand; encourage them to interrupt you if they do not.

Tip 2: Be Cautious of Cultural Jargon

Local terminology, popular culture references, and humor likely will not translate. If they don’t, the point you’re trying to make is lost on the audience. Humor from your culture may even be offensive in other cultures. Things you are very familiar with (e.g. Starbucks, Seinfeld, online banking) may not have any meaning to your audience.

For example, in part of my presentation in Nigeria, I was talking about various social media tools and quickly found that, although Facebook is popular, LinkedIn is not widely recognized there.

If you want to use a cultural reference in your presentation, do some research and find a local one that will resonate with the audience. If you must use one local to your culture, explain it. Avoid jargon and slang. If you use acronyms, spell them out.

Tip 3: Be Adaptable to Local Style

In my presentation skills training classes I teach people not to open their presentation with the standard “I’m so happy to be here”, but instead use those precious first moments to grab the audience’s attention with a powerful, on-message opening. When I speak, I follow my own advice. However, in both Nigeria and Kenya, openings were uniformly formal and almost ceremonial.

In Nigeria, as the only Western, white person in a room of 350 people, I felt it was much more appropriate to abandon my normal style and open my remarks by telling the audience that it was my first visit to Africa and how honored I was, and grateful to the Board of Trustees, to be a part of their conference. My comments were completely sincere, but style-wise, a little over the top for me. In this case, however, it was the right decision: the audience responded with a huge, welcoming round of applause.

Tip 4: Slow Down

This is actually good advice for most presentations, but it’s particularly important in a cross-cultural context. If you have some difficulty understanding your audience speak, because of accents or cadence, they probably have the same difficulty understanding you. The faster you talk, the more difficult you are to understand. If you are being simultaneously translated, speaking quickly also makes it more difficult for the translator.

Tip 5: Watch Your Body Language

Gestures (e.g. pointing) or unconscious habits (e.g. maintaining direct eye contact) may be offensive in other cultures. Do your research to determine what’s appropriate and what’s not where you’re speaking.

A resource to check is Gestures: The Dos and Taboos of Body Language Around the World by Roger Axtell. It is available from amazon.com for just $11.53.

The Bottom Line

Speaking in another country to people from another culture is an amazing experience. Do your homework, incorporate a few modifications into your presentation, and eagerly embrace any opportunity that comes your way.

Thank you for your attention!

Give the gift of public speaking this holiday season. It’s the time to show your love and appreciation for your family and friends. Here are some tips for proposing a toast:

1. Plan your toast in advance

It might be tempting (particularly if you’ve had a a few drinks) to spontaneously stand up and propose a toast. Your toast will be immeasurably better if you put some thought to it in advance. An unplanned toast can easily turn into a long-winded ramble.

2. Use tidy notes

Too often I’ve seen people at family occasions stand up and peer at a crumpled envelope in their hand. Do use notes – but make them smart eg: a stiff 3×5 card. Make the writing large and bold so that you can read your notes easily. If you need glasses to read, practice with your notes and glasses. You may feel awkward, but if you do it smoothly no-one else will notice.

3. Use a simple three-point structure

As ever a three-part structure is your best friend. Choose three qualities or values that have been important in the lives of your family and friends. Illustrate each quality with a family event or story from the past year. Here’s a simple example:

I’ll talk about the values which have been most important to our family this year.

First perserverance. Perserverance is about keeping going in the face of obstacles. And Bob and Janine you’ve really shown us how to do that with the building of your new house. Well-done for perservering through all the obstacles you’ve had to face to get where you are now. Your perserverance has been an inspiration to us all – can’t wait for the housewarming.

Second love – Caroline and John we enjoyed your wedding so much earlier this year. Thank you for inspiring us all to focus on the love in our relationships.

Third – hard work – Emmanuel showed us the value of hard work in completing his  post-graduate degree. Emmanuel worked in his part-time job from 6 am to 11 am every weekday morning and then studied the rest of the time. Congratulations for all your hard work.

I propose a toast  – to perseverance, love and hard work.

4. Acknowledge people who are not present

If you’re missing a family member or dear friend, do acknowledge them and the fact that you miss them. Do this at the beginning of your toast, as it may sink people into a solemn mood. As you move to more joyful accomplishments the mood will lighten.

5. Show your emotion

Your family and friends will feel your emotion with you. If you’re concerned that emotion may get the better of you (for example, mentioning a family member who has passed away during the year) practice that part of your toast several times. You’ll find that this gradually reduces the level of your emotion.

6. Keep it short

A long-winded speech before your meal will make your family and friends impatient. A long-winded speech after the meal will send them to sleep. One to two minutes is ideal for a toast.

7. Don’t drink and speak

Don’t rely on alcohol to fuel your courage to speak. If you drink too much before your toast, you’ll lose your judgment. You’ll think your cleverer and funnier than you really are! And then you’re likely to ramble on for far too long. So propose your toast at the beginning of the meal and lay off the alcohol till then.

Thank you for your attention!

When I first viewed the Last Lecture months ago, I hesitated to review it because of the emotional impact. However, on the encouragement of several friends and Six Minutes readers, I asked myself: “Is the speech memorable because of the context, his delivery, or both?”

There is no denying that the context makes the speech memorable, but that quality is enhanced by five timeless presentation techniques exhibited by Randy Pausch. Each of these helps you connect with your audience and helps them remember your words into the future:

1. Introduce the elephant in the room.
2. Define the scope.
3. Conclude strong.
4. Show enthusiasm. Immerse yourself.
5. Get personal.

1. Introduce the Elephant in the Room

Randy Pausch opens his lecture in the best way possible for this lecture, this audience, and this venue — by relieving stress.

Following an easy joke about the title of the lecture series, he introduces the elephant in the room; that is, he spends a minute discussing his pancreatic cancer. Then, he raises the emotion in the room by doing a series of pushups. If he had not opened this way, the audience would have been distracted for the entire lecture, and unable to fully immerse themselves in the powerful lessons to come.

Key Lesson: If there are issues distracting your audience, address them sooner rather than later.

2. Define the Scope

Pausch then proceeds to define the scope of his lecture. He outlines what he will talk about and, more importantly, what he will not talk about. This is a classic speech outline technique.

Declaring the scope is important because it establishes the starting point and the boundaries for your presentation. It brings your audience to the starting point with you, and ensures they are in the right frame of mind to receive the message you are about to deliver.

Ideally, the scope for your presentation will be conveyed to the audience via pre-talk advertising or by your introduction. If this isn’t the case, however, it is worth addressing early in your presentation.

Key Lesson: Before you get into the heart of your talk, frame your speech for the audience.

3. Conclude Strong

As strong as the opening was, I suspect that the conclusion is far more memorable for most people who view this lecture.

Pausch follows conventional advice for a conclusion by summarizing his key points. It is a good practice for any length of speech, but especially so for longer speeches like this one (~75 minutes). He actually provides several “recaps” throughout the speech.

In addition, he reaches back to one of the concepts introduced earlier — the head fake — and reveals that his entire speech has been a pair of head fakes. It makes the audience replay the entire lecture in their heads in the context of this new revelation.

Key Lesson: Finish strong. Leave your audience thinking.

4. Show Enthusiasm. Immerse Yourself.

Randy Pausch smiles and laughs many times in this lecture. Okay, fair enough. That’s not too unusual. However, he also:

• Wears an Alice in Wonderland hat.
• Dons a football jacket.
• Does pushups.
• Gives away stuffed animals.

He could have assumed a very reserved, somber tone for this speech. He could have treated every word as if it were a matter of life or death. But that would have drawn more attention to his condition instead of his core message.

Key Lesson: The audience is more apt to have fun and cherish life if they see you doing so in your speeches.

5. Get Personal

This may seem obvious, but the last lesson I’d like to highlight is to get personal with your audience. Or, phrased in the opposite way, don’t hide your personal side from the audience.

To some extent, this entire speech is personal. Fair enough. The content of the speech are the personal lessons Randy Pausch has learned through life, and he illuminates these through personal stories.

Still, there is a way to tell personal stories while still remaining distant and somewhat clinical. You can tell a story about visiting Disneyland, but if you don’t show a glint in your eye, you’re holding something back.

Randy Pausch holds nothing back. He conveys the personal emotions in his stories. One of the most memorable moments in the lecture is when he has the audience sing Happy Birthday to his wife.

Thank you for your attention!

As a child—and as an adult as well—Bill was untidy. It has been said that in order to counteract this. Mary drew up weekly clothing plans for him. On Mondays he might go to school in blue, on Tuesdays in green, on Wednesdays in brown , on Thursdays in black, and so on , Weekend meal schedules might also be planned in detail. Everything time, at work or during his leisure time.

Dinner table discussions in the Gate’s family home were always lively and educational. “It was a rich environment in which to learn,” Bill remembered.

Bill’s contemporaries, even at the age, recognized that he was exceptional. Every year, he and his friends would go to summer camp. Bill especially liked swimming and other sports. One of his summer camp friends recalled, “He was never a nerd or a goof or the kind of kid you didn’t want your team. We all knew Bill was smarter than us. Even back then, when he was nine or ten years old, he talked like an adult and could express himself in ways that none of us understood.”

Bill was also well ahead of his classmates in mathematics and science. He needed to go to a school that challenged him to Lakeside—an all-boys’ school for exceptional students. It was Seattle’s most exclusive school and was noted for its rigorous academic demands, a place where “even the dumb kids were smart.”

Lakeside allowed students to pursue their own interests, to whatever extent they wished. The school prided itself on making conditions and facilities available that would enable all its students to reach their full potential . It was the ideal environment for someone like Bill Gates.

In 1968, the school made a decision that would change thirteen-year-old Bill Gates’s life—and that of many of others, too.

Funds were raised, mainly by parents, that enabled the school to gain access to a computer—a Program Data processor(PDP)—through a teletype machine. Type in a few instructions on the teletype machine and a few seconds later the PDP would type back its response. Bill Gates was immediately hooked— so was his best friend at the time, Kent Evans, and another student, Paul Allen, who was two years older than Bill.

Whenever they had free time, and sometimes when they didn’t, they would dash over to the computer room to use the machine. The students became so single-minded that they soon overtook their teachers in knowledge about computing and got into a lot of trouble because of their obsession. They were neglecting their other studies—every piece of word was handed in late. Classes were cut. Computer time was also proving to be very expensive. Within months, the whole budget that had been set aside for the year had been used up.

At fourteen, Bill was already writing short programs for the computer to perform. Early games programs such as Tic-Tac-Toe, or Noughts and Crosses, and Lunar Landing were written in what was to become Bill’s second language, BASIC.

One of the reasons Bill was so good at programming is because it is mathematical and logical. During his time at Lakeside, Bill scored a perfect eight hundred on a mathematics test. It was extremely important to him to get this grade-he had to take the test more than once in order to do it.

If Bill Gates was going to be good at something. It was essential to be the best.

Bill’s and Paul’s fascination with computers and the business world meant that they read a great deal. Paul enjoyed magazines like Popular Electronics, Computer time was expensive and, because both boys were desperate to get more time and because Bill already had an insight into what they could achieve financially, the two of them decided to set themselves up as a company: The Lakeside Programmers Group. “Let’s call the real world and try to sell something to it!” Bill announced.

Thank you for your attention!