When should you use story in a presentation?

Story is the difference between drenching and quenching

Some people like visual diagrams, others like lists and stats.

Some people prefer processes and games.

Others want evidence and case studies.

But everyone love stories.

Why?

Because the story container provides a structure that can contain statistics, metaphors, visual images and more: stuff that appeal to the left and right brain. Moreover, our brains are hard-wired to learn through storytelling.

Story should be given before the information, for the same reason that you give someone a glass before you pour the water into it. Story is the container for information. By rushing to give information without a container, we not only waste our information – but we make the recipient of it unhappy.

If you rush to inform, those listening to you, whether one-on-one or one-on-one-hundred will experience the information on the outside where it drenches, not take it inside where it quenches. How many people do you know who communicate only for information and have exactly this effect on people? But it is not their fault – they were never told the correct sequence.

Stories have particular structures and rules which can be learnt, and which make a profound difference to how memorable you will be. Patricia Fripp, the first ever female president of National American Speakers Association, says that the formula for a successful story is “character, dialogue and dramatic-lesson-learned”.

Fripp points out that most people don’t remember information, they remember “the story and the picture that is created in their minds while they listen to you.” See  Fripp in action on this point.

So when do you tell your story? Before you tell them any information. This way you can be sure that you will quench tem and their thirst, not drench them while they curse.

“And then… in the middle of the keynote… I forgot what I was going to say”

Pausing is powerful and practical at the same time.

If you had been with me in summer of 2005 – you would have seen something surprising that caused my accidental discovery.

I’d been invited to open the conference as a keynote speaker at this beautiful resort on the edge of Lake Taupo. They even paid for my wife to be there, and we had this secluded chalet where we could walk down this path to the lake. We could see the snow-crusted peak of Ruapehu. I was so excited because it was my first ever keynote speaking engagement … and everything was going very well. And people were getting inspired – you can tell when this happens because the eyes light up. People were nodding their heads in agreement and laughing in all the right places … and then I completely forgot what I was going to say.

I thought “never mind…I’ll remember”.

But I didn’t.

10 seconds later, I thought, “Surely there are some useful ideas in my head that I can verbalise”.

There wasn’t.

After a total of 20 seconds later – I thought “Please – thoughts come!”. And finally they did.

And when I spoke again, it felt like the power of what I said next had been magnified by the length of pause before. People came up to me afterwards and said time after time after time, “wow – how powerful it was in the middle of the talk when you paused for what seemed an eternity … I will carry with meforever what you said next”.

I was thinking “it felt like an eternity to you, just imagine how long it felt to me! – I’d completely forgotten what I was going to say”. And the other funny thing was that even though I wasn’t even doing speaking coaching at that stage, a large number of people contacted me afterwards to say they wanted me to train them. And quite a few said “I want you to train me in how to use pausing effectively in conversation.”

But not only is there a hidden power in pause – you know the other great thing about pausing? It gives you time to work out what you’re going to say next. Which if you are like me and your brain moves just a little bit slower than your mouth – is a good thing. It gives you time to sound more articulate AND it greats the vacuum that magnifies the intensity of what you do articulate.

Pausing is both powerful and practical.

How to be more charismatic

According to original research done by Professor Richard Wiseman at the University of Hartfordshire UK, charisma can be described. In fact, found 5 elements to be the basis for charisma

General: Open body posture, hands away from face when talking, stand up straight, relax, hands apart with palms forwards or upwards

To an individual: Let people know they matter and you enjoy being around them, develop a genuine smile, nod when they talk, briefly touch them on the upper arm, and maintain eye contact

To a group: Be comfortable as leader, move around to appear enthusiastic, lean slightly forward and look at all parts of the group

Message: Move beyond status quo and make a difference, be controversial, new, simple to understand, counter-intuitive

Speech: Be clear, fluent, forceful and articulate, evoke imagery, use an upbeat tempo, occasionally slow for tension or emphasis

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4579681.stm

I agree, you can’t be charismatic when your body is communicating lack of confidence.

Every state in the mind has a corresponding and congruent posture in the body. Are all postures in the body going to help you create a positive state of mind? Absolutely not. So if you want to have an influential aura about you about you – remember that half the battle is won before you even open your mouth – you must train your body to avoid postures that place you in a state of under-confidence.

Presenting with Powerpoint

People often ask me what I think of powerpoint – and are surprised when I say “It’s a great tool” – expecting me to say “You are better off without it, all you need is your own incredible influencing skills”.

The problem is, most people render themselves a tool to powerpoint. Powerpoint goes centre-stage, and they play a bit part, drawing attention to the slides and images. The slides and images should draw attention to you! How to do this? – here are some tips

1. One high-res picture (not clipart) + one title + one declarative statement. And no bulletpoints. Bullet points are so named because they describe what your audience is imagining going through your torso when they see a big boring list.  Add “black slides” – slides with not white, but a black image, so that the “limelight goes back on you”

2. never look at the powerpoint. What a great way to break your connection with the audience, and tell them you don’t know your material at the same time.

3. Make your powerpoints reinforce points you’ve already made through key choices of words, quotes, graphs, and images: your powerpoint supports you that way rather than you being a bit-part to the all-powerful powerpoint.

Use these tips well, and you have a great tool. PS: check out this “Life After Death By Powerpoint”: best presentation on powerpoint I’ve seen! More cool links on powerpoint do’s and don’ts:

• good stuff from Microsoft itself!
• the 10/20/30 rule: short & sweet
• comprehensive and authoratative – esp. the bulletpoints point.

Why experts fail to connect & how to fix it

I’ve met a few people who can do this – but generally not…mentored a few people on how to do this , and convinced that anyone can learn to convey their vision, no matter how much jargon, zealousness and subject-philia they have. On seeing “Inconvenient Truth” I knew that one guy who could convey a message mattered more than 928 scientists telling us the same message.

So 3 tips for the unwary about the things that stop subject-experts conveying vision- all of which are curable! :

1. the more expert you are – the more risk of jargon. Jargon isn’t just “best to avoid” it kills your pitch like a landmine if you don’t avoid it – because you are showing you can’t customise your message for an audience and is interpreted as excluding the person you are trying to invite in.

2. The more expert/passionate you are, the more you forget that others don’t (yet) share your passion or knowledge and talk too much about the product – not enough about the “so what?”. The more you say – the less the person will understand, or want to understand.

3. The more passionate you get, the more the tendency to worry “Am I coming across as seeking converts to my church”. The remedy to this is to remember that you are not so much “selling” or “spinning” anything as presenting an opportunity. Remember what made you passionate in the first place and describe that story. This invites people into your world.

over and out,
Daniel

How “conveying passion” gives you the edge

– guess there were 3 key things made me want to teach the art and science of “Conveying your vision”

1. Seeing friends at other companies with cool products who didn’t get customers, investors or a great team because they couldn’t convey their vision effectively

2. Seeing person after person with their heart in the right place and their mouth in the wrong place, describing facts and logic they believed in deeply with the conviction that this would be enough to make people listen.

Well, 90% of the people I knew fell into this trap – particularly environmentalists mates of mine who got angry at the very people they wanted to change. I heard company founders and scientists lose people with detail, accountants lose people with figures, artists lose people in thought-clouds and almost everyone lose their audience by forgetting how little they start off knowing about what you know, and how little they start off caring about what you love.

3. I took a lot of blind-alleys that others don’t need to in the process of learning – so wanted to present to others the shortest path : like Churchill said it “Life is too short to learn from our own mistakes; better that we learn from the mistakes of others”.

I noticed that most people found their passion, and a lot of them gained mastery of it – but it was people’s ability to learn how to convey this passion to anyone else that really limited the richness of what people had the capacity to experience. Having done all the hard work, the last 10 yards let them down – it was like stumbling in a 1500 meter race yards from the end after getting into first place … and then crawling over the line in last place.