Understanding life

When it comes to presenting, does practice make perfect?

In a word, no.

Practice makes permanent.

Your goal should be to practice perfectly, not just practice. The more you do something, the more comfortable it feels – whether right or wrong.

So, we need to do it right when we practice our presentations.

Knowing a subject doesn’t guarantee success. The ability to articulate the message and connect with audience members is what counts – and perfect practice can make this happen.

Practice Works for Me…

A personal example that proves perfect practice works is a recent sales presentation that I was asked to deliver regarding BRODY Professional Development’s capabilities.

After structuring my presentation, I first presented it to one of my account managers. She had a few suggestions, including that I start with a story.

After I updated my presentation, I practiced it with one of our facilitators who came to the meeting with me. She suggested that I make the presentation more interactive and more responsive to the client’s specific needs and worked with me to do that. We also practiced ways that she could facilitate some of the discussion. Our practice not only included segues between the two of us – to ensure they were smooth — but also practice related to our timing. We even discussed where we would each be sitting in the room to get the maximum involvement from the audience! During our car ride to the client site in New York, we practiced it three more times.

When we arrived, we were ready, we had anticipated their questions, the timing worked, and best news of all — we got results (we made the sale)!

… Practice Will Work for You Too

Winging a presentation rarely gets the desired results. Here is the approach that works for me – dare I say – 100% of the time.

My assumption is that you have done the preparation:

• Know your PAL™ (Purpose, Audience & Logistics).
• Collect current, accurate and relevant information.
• Add examples, stories, emotional appeals, and some visuals when critical, to support the data.
• Organize materials so there is a logical flow of content, with smooth transitions connecting the ideas – creating a story.
• Have a strong opening and close already written
• Create a user-friendly final draft, making it easy to reference without reading it.

Frequently, presenters do all of the above, and then think through the presentation in their minds – where we are all eloquent.

Visualizing is great, but it doesn’t replace the actual out-loud practice.

Too frequently, practice is left until close to the date of a presentation – when it’s too late.

The goal of practice sessions is to get presenters totally comfortable with the content, the slides, and the timing – so, when they actually present, they are able to concentrate on connecting with the audience.

8 Guidelines for Presentation Practice

Here are my 8 guidelines for perfect practice:

1. Practice out loud.
   Say the presentation out loud; three to six times should do it.
2. Practice with variety.
   Every time you say your presentation, say it differently – the goal is to keep it conversational, not memorize exact phrases.
3. Be aware of timing.
   Leave time in your practice session for audience interaction, questions, etc.
4. Practice in front of a real audience, similar to your target audience.
   Practice in front of people who are similar to the “real audience.” If there are words that you are using they don’t get, or concepts that aren’t clear, it’s better to find out in front of this group, rather than the “real audience.”
5. Incorporate spontaneous Q&A into your practice.
   If you anticipate getting questions, or being interrupted during the presentation, make sure your practice audience is doing the same.
6. Spend more time on the speech opening and closing.
   Practice your opening and close more frequently – commute time is great for this.
7. Practice your timing.
   If the entire presentation is to last for 30 minutes, the practice should go no longer than 18 to 25 minutes, depending on the amount of interaction or questions you anticipate.
8. Practice by recording yourself.
   If they are very critical presentations, videotape yourself. The new Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera is easy to use. You can immediately connect to a computer via its USB port to analyze yourself.
   A good question to ask is, “Would I want to sit through this?”
   If the answer is, “No,” then what do you need to do to change the presentation?

An executive who I coach from a large pharmaceutical industry, had a large “town hall” type of meeting coming up — to introduce company policy changes. He knew that the audience would be anxious, and in some cases, hostile. When we first discussed the outline for his presentation, it was very data driven. In no way was he getting in touch with the emotions that people were feeling. Once we changed the structure of his presentation, he began to practice, and “own” the material. After the meeting, he told me that due to this practice, he was comfortable in the delivery, totally in the moment – resonating both emotionally and psychologically with the audience. He now insists that all of his direct reports use the eight practice guidelines that I coached him on.

From my perspective, practice isn’t fun. But, there is no substitute for it.

Keep in mind what Peter Drucker said, “Spontaneity is an infinite number of rehearsed possibilities.”

THANK YOU ! 

Metaphors help a skeptical or apathetic audience better embrace and value a new concept or idea.

Metaphors make the connection of that new idea to an object the audience already knows.

Read on to discover a treasure chest of metaphor speech examples.

The dictionary defines a metaphor as an implied comparison between two unlike things (e.g. human body and garage) that actually have something important in common (e.g. storage). “Your body is a garage to park your soul,” writes author Wayne Dyer.

Metaphors are Meaningful Bridges in Speeches

Think of a metaphor as a connection or a bridge between the new and the familiar. This connection provides a new perspective and a new meaning that can persuade an audience to reconsider its skeptical or apathetic attitude.

Metaphors are so powerful that Aristotle said: “The greatest thing by far is to have mastered the metaphor.” And the Spanish philosopher and writer Jose Ortega y Gasset added, “The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.”

Metaphors provide a frame of reference to more fully apply new concepts or ideas. That’s why the first trains were called horseless carriages. After all, people already knew the purpose and the premise of a carriage. So a carriage without a horse must roll on wheels.

Metaphors pique the interest of an audience to see the old in a new way. Even the students who think science is boring might reconsider if they thought that those who studied astronomy were “peeping Toms at the keyhole of eternity,” as author Arthur Koestler observed.

When Kodak invented the camera, the technology was so new and different the camera could only be valued by linking the new technology of a camera to something more familiar. Kodak called its camera a “mirror with a memory.” They connected two dissimilar things that actually have something in common. A camera’s film is the memory and the lens is the mirror. Link the two knowns to the unknown — a camera — and a metaphor is born.

Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, used his metaphorical thinking to expand the reach of his business. “In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.” Likewise Porsche pays homage to the metaphor in its advertising: “A Porsche is not a car. It is the best engineered executive toy in the world.” Metaphors are so powerful they can transform much like the antique dealer who says your trash is our treasure.

Metaphorically Speaking… More Metaphor Examples

Consider the following speech metaphor examples:

• Chances are your audiences would see more value in making an appointment to see a smile stylist rather than a dentist.
• Chances are your audiences would be more interested in learning how to purchase jewelry for their windows rather than window accessories such as curtain rods, rings, tie-backs and swag.
• Chances are your audiences would do more research if they thought of themselves as infonauts and the library as the delivery room for the birth of ideas.
• Chances are your audiences might enjoy exercise more if they thought of their treadmill as a flight simulator.
• Chances are your audiences would eat more fruit if they thought they were eating God’s candy.
• And chances are members of your audiences might more readily volunteer to become the designated driver if everyone kept calling him or her the Life of the Party.

Analogies: Close Cousins to the Metaphor

In addition to the metaphor, polished speakers show up with their “A” game to engage audiences and help them better understand a complex policy or procedure.

Use an analogy whenever you need to explain a new process or new procedure particularly to a general audience. The dictionary defines analogy as a “similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar.” To create an analogy, find an object that your audience is already familiar with. Then look for characteristics in that object that could be compared to traits or various aspects of your process.

Example of an Analogy to Open a Speech

Let’s say you are a nutritionist and you want to deliver a speech on the value of fasting for a general audience, many of whom would be completely turned off by the prospect of not eating every 4-5 hours. Let’s call up the A-team and begin your speech with an analogy that engages the audience and builds greater understanding first with something they already are familiar with.

In your research on fasting you find that one of the key benefits to fasting is that your digestive system gets a lot more efficient after a fast. During a fast it reorganizes parts and pieces of the digestive system that normally are too busy digesting food.

Is there something in your audience’s everyday lives that reorganizes itself and gets more efficient especially when you are NOT using that process as you normally would?

How about computers? Is there any way to connect computer processing to a fasting process that reorganizes the digestive system to make it work better? Consider the following analogy that opened a speech on fasting to a general audience:

My computer was running so slooooowwwwww. Defrag it, my friend told me. I thought he said “Rag it.” What! What was I supposed to do with a rag? Dust off the computer? Well after my friend had his good laugh at my expense, he explained that defragging helps the computer better digest information you feed it. And then your computer works better, faster and more efficiently, he told me.

I wondered if there was a defragging process for the human body… to make the food I eat digest more efficiently and make me feel that much better! Voila! There is! Fasting is like the defragging process for the human body.

When you fast, you make The Pit Stop of Your Life. And like that pit stop at a NASCAR race track for example, we stop briefly to reset repair, and restore. We stop. (pause) eating for several days or more.

And we free up our body’s digestive system, so that it no longer is expending 60 percent of the body’s energy on digestion. Now it can redirect that energy to reset, restore and repair itself to be that much more effective and efficient when eating resumes.

Thank you for your attention!

Recently, a new PowerPoint 2007 user from Australia contacted me about being frustrated with one of PowerPoint’s new features. You may have run across this inconspicuous feature when you attempted to move a grouped object and rather than moving the entire grouped object, you end up accidentally moving just a sub-element of that object. You may have wondered what is going on because in PowerPoint 2003 you would have to ungroup an object before you could reposition any of its sub-elements.

In PowerPoint 2007, you can now reposition any sub-element without having to ungroup the grouped object. In PowerPoint 2003, you could edit sub-elements (e.g., color fill, border thickness, etc.) but if you needed to move a sub-element, you had to ungroup the object, reposition it, and then regroup all of the elements again. I love this new “quick edit” option in PowerPoint 2007 as I find it saves a lot of time. However, I realize it can be a little frustrating if you can’t distinguish between when you are working with the sub-elements or the entire grouped object.

How to spot the quick-edit mode

When you’re working with a grouped object, the first time you click on the object you will see a solid border around the outer edge of the grouped object. When you have a solid border, you can edit or move the object as a group. If you click again within the object, a dashed border appears on the outer edge of the object and a solid border appears around one of the sub-elements. With the dashed border you can click on any of the sub-elements and move or edit them.

Watch the border to know what level you're working with. Solid = group / dashed = sub-element.

If you hold down the Shift key, you can select multiple sub-elements at the same time. If you want to go back to moving or editing the entire grouped object, just click outside the object and then click the grouped object again to get a solid outer edge.

Several times I know I have unintentionally dragged just a sub-element when I really wanted to drag the entire grouped object to a new spot. I hope this explanation helps to clarify what’s going on and what to look for.

Thank you for your attention!

“And that’s the way it is.”

Former CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite closed every nightly broadcast with that signature phrase, a signal to his viewers of not simply the conclusion of his broadcast but the authenticity of what they had just experienced.

The familiar phrase, repeated every weeknight, threw a security blanket around his viewers. His mantra — decisive on principle and incisive on purpose — made his audience feel special, that they had been part of something tailored specifically for them.

You, too, can wrap your audience in a security blanket with a signature closing phrase at any type of recurring meetings. Read on to discover examples of mantra-like closing phrases that may stimulate your creativity in fashioning your own signature close.

Create a Mantra-like Closing Phrase

Indeed, the most effective speakers know how to define and deliver mantra-like closing phrases that infuse greater significance and ritualistic memorability to their presentations.

• Zig Ziglar, a motivational speaker, always concluded his presentations with the phrase: “I’ll see you at the top.”
• Tony Robbins, another motivational speaker, would close each segment of his seminar series with: “Live each day with passion!”
• David Gregory ends each segment of Meet the Press on NBC with “If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.”
• Paul Harvey famously ended his radio broadcast with that syncopated pause: “Paul Harvey… Goooood day.”
• And as a college public speaking instructor for the last 10 years, I always end each class with my own signature close designed to infuse more relevance into the students’ learning:  “Public speaking increases your face value!”

Signature closes help your audience savor what they have just experienced. They provide the familiarity of structure even in the turbulence of changing content.

No wonder ministers end each service with an “amen.” (“So be it.”) Some church leaders even offer a Benediction, from the Latin “good saying.” As the choir concludes, the organist ends on a high note and the minister gives the Benediction: “Go now and be of good cheer…”

The most effective leaders and speakers serve their own benediction, their own brand of go forth and be of good cheer following each staff meeting or speech.

Marshaling a Magnetic Force

Sometimes that signature close becomes a rallying device, like a magnet that pulls members, customers, investors, suppliers and employees into the center of your company or organization, galvanizes diverse points of view, and sharpens the collective focus so that more consistent decisions are made over a series of meetings.

Politicians adopt a signature close to each meeting, a signature close that reinforces their mission, their vision, their sense of teamwork and their collective commitment to success. A prominent recent example is Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can.”

Project teams adopt a signature close to rekindle the creative zeal and innovative spirit to overcome challenges. e.g. “Quality is #1”

Teachers adopt a signature close to reinforce learning objectives. For example, consider a reading teacher who encouraged her students to “Book your future.”

Sometimes an entire organization can adopt a signature close to reinforce their collective commitment. Consider “The Optimist Creed” that is recited by Optimist Club members to close every meeting. Members are business leaders and professionals who wish to promote activities and programs in the community that benefit youth. The ritual closing begins when all rise and face a large banner where the words of the Optimist Creed are clearly displayed. But most recite that Optimist Creed from memory. Their closing mantra reflects who they are as an organization. Their creed is written as bold and big on their hearts as it is on the huge yellow banner in front of the room. Their voices melding in unison around a singular idea cements their relationship to each other and their collective commitment to their purpose.

Creating an Icon

Some speakers take their signature close to the next level, by creating a visual icon to represent the key theme, adding memorability and meaning with an artifact.

For example in conducting a mentoring program for a large company, I developed a recruiting speech to engage both mentors and mentees. My theme? Stay Connected. I framed mentoring as a vehicle to spark performance throughout the organization, to electrify the company, to surge energy throughout the company for greater viability.

At the end of every recruiting speech, I would hand out colorful electrical wire connectors and tell each person I handed it to “Stay Connected.” Then I turned that handout into a display for our subsequent meetings. I displayed the connectors in a large wine glass that I kept near the lectern for every subsequent collective meeting I chaired with the mentors and mentees. My mantra close then evolved into an even more memorable device to rekindle the energy and focus our attention at the next meeting.

Applying These Lessons to Your Situation

So how can you apply this signature close concept in your professional or personal life where your public speaking has to motivate more than simply educate?

Use this simple, three-step approach to determine your signature close:

1. Study the mission of the organization you represent or the project team you are leading.
2. Define your role/goal in a simple declarative sentence.
3. Write a pithy phrase that captures the key idea in #2.

Let’s see how I applied that three step approach to teaching college students public speaking.

1. First the mission of the university where I teach is “educating students to shape their lives, their professions and their societies.”
2. My role as a public speaking instructor is to help students shape their communications skills so that they can leverage their knowledge and become even more valuable and valued in society.
3. Then I linked the concept of value with the skill of speaking and my signature close becomes: “Public Speaking Increases Your Face Value.”

And that’s the way it is.

Thank you for your attention!

If you regularly use shapes and lines in your PowerPoint presentations, you should be familiar with the standard line style options such as width, dash type, and compound style. All of these options were in PowerPoint 2003 and have carried over to the latest version of PowerPoint. In PowerPoint 2007, they have added a couple of new options that you should be aware of  — join type and cap type.

Join Type

I was recently trying to create an explosion shape, and the points of the explosion just didn’t look crisp. As I started exploring in the options, I found that the join type was the culprit.

In PowerPoint 2007, your default setting for join type is round. There are two other options for join type — bevel and miter. In the image below, you can see the differences between each join type on the lightning bolt shape.

The flat and square settings are so similar, we probably didn't need both options.

The miter join works well with any shapes with sharp or right angles such as squares, rectangles, etc. For example, I used the miter join for my explosion shape, and it looked much better than the default round join. The bevel join looks like someone clipped off the corner of the angle. The differences between the join types aren’t as noticeable if you’re using a thin line width (< 1 pt), but can be very noticeable if you’re using a very thick line width (> 3 pt).

Cap Type

Once I discovered the effect of the join type setting, I became curious about the cap type setting. The cap type setting is only used with open shapes (e.g., lines), not closed shapes (e.g., squares). The cap type controls the endings of lines as well as the format of dashed lines. The default setting is flat, and you have two other settings — square and round. In the image below, you can compare the effect of each setting:

For explosions and lightning bolts (any shapes with sharp angles), the miter join is the way to go.

There’s not really a huge difference between the flat and square options. The square option lengthens the line a little beyond the end points, but that’s about it as far as I can tell. The round option creates rounded end points for a line, and if it is a dashed line then each of the dashes will be rounded as well. I wish the arrow point on a line could have been rounded as well, but it isn’t changed by the cap type setting.

How to access line style settings

If you’d like to adjust the line style settings on one of your lines or shapes, you need to right-click on the object. On the pop-up menu, select Format Shape which is at the bottom of the menu. On the subsequent menu, select the Line Style tab from the left-hand side. You’ll then see the different line style options including the new join and cap type options. Good luck!

Most of these options should be familiar.

Thank you for your attention!