Transcripts
1. Section Introduction Refinement and Rehearsal: Now we're really going to move up a gear in this section. I'm gonna take you through some refinement and through rehearsal to really make your delivery first class on. The first thing we look at is your stage presence. I'm going to show you how you can make more of an impact when you're on the stage with your audience really important. You can't just stand there. Then I want to talk to you about how you actually deliver what you're going to be telling your audience. Because delivery is just a Zim Porton as your content. The next part of this section is about your use of language. I want to show you how to upgrade the words you use serve their powerful on engaging, which will really make you sound much clearer and much more impactful than you otherwise would be. There's a neat little trick you can do with numbers as well to really get them across, because numbers on their own could be very bland and sometimes meaningless. I'll show you how to do that here. Dealing with questions in a presentation can be a really sticky matter if you're not ready for them so I'm going to spend a few minutes helping you to work out both in advance and at the presentation. The best way to deal with questions on Then finally, I'm going to show you how toe throw away your script. You do need want to start with, but by the time you finish this lecture, you won't need one at all. So that's what this sections all about. Refinement on rehearsal. I hope you're going to absolutely love it.
2. Mastering Your Stage Presence: being an effective presented from the stage is really important, so it's worth spending a few minutes talking about how you can do this more effectively. The first and probably the most important thing you could do is maintain eye contact with your audience. Now, this doesn't mean that you stare at one individual, but that you move your eyes around the audience. But when you look at somebody on, I'm allowing for for that for the fact that the light will be well enough. Be good enough that you can actually see your audience. If you're behind a whole lot of bright lights, it's very much more difficult. So you have to pick fixed spots around the room and talk to them, and other people will feel that you're speaking to somebody. But look at somebody and speak directly to them and then move around again and then find somebody else and speak directly to them on By making this eye contact with the audience, they'll really feel that they're part of the whole process. It's really important that you use your slides as a cue, but not as a script. I like to have very few words on my slides, much as I have here on this. These few words give me my script. They tell me what I have to talk to you about, and it's exactly the same when you go up in front of an audience on these few words will come up on the screen, and I know that for a minute. That's the topic I have to cover on because I've rehearsed it on because I know my material . It's very much easier to do that. But whatever you do, don't read either a script or the content of your slides. There's nothing that looks less professional and is less engaging than somebody reading a script or reading the sites. If they reading a script, they obviously don't know that material. They obviously haven't prepared the presentation themselves. And you think, What am I doing here? If they read the slides to your thinking, what's all this stuff on the slides for? I can read slights is what is you can if they've got that much material on their sides, they need to redesign their slides, and so do you. If you go and fall into that trap, I like to move around the room with confidence. Don't stay in one place. Use the whole width of the stage. If you're in a flat room, then certainly move up the central aisle or move around the arse. Use the room as your theater, and if you'll do that, it will become a much Mawr immersive experience for the audience because that your they will feel that you're part of them. Whereas if you just stay the remote figure way up there on on the stage behind the lectern , then they're going to feel like they're being lectured at rather than engaged in a presentation or an interesting speech. As you can see, I'm trying to use if you use your body language in your hand gestures in a natural way, it makes your whole demeanor the whole style with which you present much more interesting and engaging. So do use your hands. Naturally, you don't have to wave them and gesticulated. Be silly about it. But if you do allow your hands to express your words for you as I'm doing now, then again, your stage demeanor, your your whole presence will become much more interesting and much more effective and much more communicative. I have to keep on going on about this. I know I've mentioned it before, but don't stay behind the lectern. It's one of the worst things you can do. You put the lectern between you and the audience. There's a barrier between you. You want to remove that barrier on, be accessible to them. It's very easy to do. Make sure you've got a radio, Mike, you're not cute in or you're gonna mike, you're dependent on. But if there's a mike sitting on the stand and you have to get that taken off so you can hold it than do that. But don't allow yourself by the electron ICS to fall into the trap or being stuck behind the Lector. And it is absolutely, in my view, the worst mistake you can make. So there's some advice on how you can master your stage presence on. Just by using these techniques, your presentation will go to a completely different level compared to the person who just stands behind the lectern and reads a very dull script
3. Delivery is as Important as Content: the key point off this presentation is that delivery the way you give your speech, your presentation is just as important as the content. The first point I would make is that you can use emphasis as a technique to really punch home a point you want to make so you can drive home the emphasis you want to make on a particular word, so it really resonates with the audience. You can use inflection by ending sentences on a higher note or going down at the end of the sentence on really making the point very seriously. And by raising and lowering the pitch of your voice, you make it much more interesting to listen to pauses. Dramatic pauses are wonderful. Nothing succeeds like a good pause. You really get the audience in the palm of your hand on their at that point, hanging on your every word. It's much, much more effective than speaking very quickly because if you suddenly pools, then that change of pace on that gap makes them sit up and pay attention and wait to hear what you're going to say Next. Absolutely brilliant technique. You must use it volume the way you use The volume in your voice can also be a very effective tool because you can talk very quietly and that will get them to draw forward and listen in. I don't have to shell out the whole time. But again, if you want to add energy to your voice, you can add volume to it on really build up to a crescendo and by altering the volume is you go through. You also make your whole conversation with your audience much more interesting for pace. That speed at which you speak is also a very useful technique because you can really get energized. They're excited about a particular point. But then you can talk more slowly to deliver the punch line, or indeed, to bring home a particular point that you want to make. Try to avoid filler words the arms and the ars, the words that you fill in inadvertently without thinking, while your mind is digesting what you want to say next. And if you can speak with confidence without allowing yourself to drop into that particular trap, you'll sound far more authoritative. Finally, energy. You want to g o onto the stage really pumped up and I think if you think about a scale of 1 to 10 you don't want to be completely hyper on wired to the ceiling, so you don't want to be a 10 but equally you don't want to be very un energetic and very languid and slow and, frankly, very boy. So I am for something around a seven. So I get that the right balance between not being completely off my head and at the same time having enough energy to keep the audience interested and energized. So delivery is as important as content, and you should work on the style of your delivery when you're rehearsing to speak to your audience before you go into the lion's den.
4. Use Engaging and Powerful Words: I'd like to talk to you a little bit about using engaging and powerful words. So your use of English in your presentation whenever you speak, you should try to be simple, clear and direct. So keep your sentences short and your points very punchy. If you find yourself dropping into long, convoluted sentences with lots of commerce and paraphrases and on all sorts of things, then you actually just like this. It starts to get a bit wobbling. You know you need to keep each point very clear. You need to say what you mean, and you need to say it very clearly. Do you see the difference? So to do that, just stick to plain English. And then when I say plain English, I mean very ordinary, simple English Don't use lots of complicated, long, hard, difficult words. Now there's a great little website. The pagination hasn't worked very well here, using english dot com, and if you have a script and you run your script through there, that website, it'll actually tell you how clear and playing your script is now. Some of the things they measure and you can bear these in the back of your mind are the number of words per sentence. So keep your sentences short. Hard words, which they define as words with more than three syllables in it. So keep your words simple, and then finally they come up with the fog index. This is quite an interesting calculation because it's saying this is the number off years of education the reader needs to understand what you're saying. So if you start getting people into beyond high school and into university, then you're not actually giving a presentation or a speech. You're giving some sort of intellectual discourse. So think about your use of words in this context. Whatever you do, avoid jargon. If you find yourself having to explain jargon, words or even worse than that acronyms, then you know you're beginning to confuse your audience. Don't assume that they'll understand what you're talking about. I can remember going to have dinner bloods when I was in the Army and everybody was talking in four and five letter acronyms on It was like double Dutch. So imagine if you're trying to do that with an audience who don't actually have the same background or who may not have the same background. So whatever you do, avoid that. Make your points concrete and specific just like that. Be very clear about the point you're making. Remember, you're making one point per slide, albeit you may have 23456 subsidiary little points to get that point across. So make it very clear. Try to use emotional adjectives to bring some energy and passion into it. You know, don't worry about being a little hyperbolic. They are bad use of a long word. Don't worry about being a little extravagant with your language. So you know, this was an amazing experience. I found this really difficult and to talk about what you're talking about with emotion and with feeling. And if you do that, then they will get across. Don't be afraid. When you've written your script for the first time to edit it, go through it again. Think about these principles and then when you edit it once, go back and edit it again. You can't have too many edits when you can. In a sense, because the 80 20 rule kicking butt, for the most part, at least give it a couple of read throughs and change it to keep it simple, clear, precise, specific along the words along. Leave the principles that I just explained to you. So that's it. That's use of English using engaging and powerful words to make your presentation mawr engaging and mawr fascinating for your audience.
5. Dress Up Your Numbers: This is a really useful little technique, which I strongly encourage you to adopt on. That is to dress up your numbers. Numbers could be very boring or meaningless. They don't connect automatically. So when you're speaking to an audience, you need to create some context so that people can understand what the numbers are. This context needs to be specific, relevant and contextual, or at least one of the three. So, for example, if you're talking about blood pressure, you could be very specific if your blood pressure is too 20/1 80 we regard 1 20/1 80 is the norm. If you're to 20 everyone 80 then you need to do something about it. You're gonna have a heart attack specific, but you can also use analogies. You can put them into a context where the numbers themselves take on a different meaning, and they have impact on the very good example that is. Steve Jobs is very famous. IPod launch. When he talked about the new iPod, if you didn't talk about the number of gigabytes or anything, he just said 1000 songs in your pocket. Another example was when somebody was talking about the $700 billion bank bailout in 2000 and eight on. Instead of trying to say it was, you know, this huge number, he simply said. It's 25 times the net worth off the Google guys and that really put it into context. So you see, it's very simple, but very important. If you're going to use a number, dress it up, give it some context and it'll be much more impactful.
6. Dealing withw Questions: It's really worth talking for two or three minutes about how you deal with questions. You can actually do a lot of work before you go to the presentation. You're going to give in terms of anticipating the questions you're going to get asked. The best way to go about doing this is to write down all the questions you can think off that might be asked of you. And then once you've done that group, um, into buckets into groups of common questions around common themes on pick the keywords out of them. From that you can then create the best answer for each keyword for each category for each bucket, so that you have in your mind what the sorts of questions are that you're gonna get asked or you might get asked. So you then go to the presentation. You give your presentation, you asked for questions. Andi, listen very carefully to the question you're being asked and spot the key word. Then deliver the best answer around the answers you've already prepared, and you probably need toe have half a dozen to 10 of these ready in the back of your mind. You can always have them on a cue card. Don't forget sitting on the Lecter, which you can walk around and glance at if you need to. Now, when you give your answer, be confident about it. But make a point off going across and speaking directly to the person who's asked pants. The question. Now do again. Speak to the room, but make sure that you spend some time looking that person in the eye and actually telling them the answer to the question they've asked. Now what happens if nobody asks you any questions? You've probably got 10 minutes set aside. Andi, you know now you're suddenly left hanging. So what do you do? Very simple. You ask yourself a question. Now, this doesn't have to be very difficult or very complicated. Pit one you want to do, but you can introduce it and say, OK, we'll look. One question I'm often asked is posed the question and answer it yourself. Another useful lead in from that is, you can say. When I was delivering this speech last week, somebody asked a really interesting question, and I think it be worth me discussing and then deliver the question so you can because you've got these questions ready and you've thought about them beforehand, you can actually get over any difficulty. Sometimes an audience is a bit a bit reluctant. One little trick, if you're amongst friends, is to plant the first question in the audience because the first questions always the most difficult to ask. So you can actually have ah, plant in the audience who is asking the first question. And then the questions will flow after that, because people were relaxed and then have time to think while the questions being on and you'll see the hands go up. So that's my advice on how to deal with questions. It doesn't have to be difficult. It's certainly not scary. Handle it with confidence and you'll be absolutely fine.
7. Throw Away Your Script: I want to take you through a process of learning the content of your presentation, which will enable you to throw away your script. The first thing to say is never, ever read your script word for word. When you're delivering a presentation that is not delivering a presentation that is giving a recitation you are reading to them, and that's really not what your audience is. Therefore, your slides should be your prompts on because you've got the key words on the slide. That should be very easy, but let me show you the process of getting there. So it's easy to understand. Start by writing full sentences off the script you want to deliver in the notes section off Keynote or PowerPoint. Now, I recommend you don't have more than six sentences per note, so you do need to keep it simple. If you have too many points per slide, then you're getting away from the idea that each slide is a topic or on individual issue in its own right. So keep your self disciplined when writing there's notes. Now I want you to focus on the key words one or two key words in each sentence off those notes on. Once you've got those in your mind, delete everything else. So you just end up with 3456 keywords for each slide, and you may also have a word on the slide itself. Don't forget, it is important, as I've already said, to have one key idea per slide. And if you do that, it will be so much easier for your audience to follow the thread of your conversation of the threat of the presentation. Now practice delivering that presentation without looking at your notes. If you need to, you can refer back and check those keywords, but you really shouldn't have to buy this stage, because if you have the information in your mind and you've got that word on the screen and you thought about the keywords, which that word will trigger in your mind, you're going to start to find the whole person's face. Mint base Straightforward. Now if you need to, you can have a little a five bound book, which you could leave on the lectern with tabs on it for each slide. If you wish so it's easy to move to and keep that there as a name armoire, just in case you lose the thread. But what I do recommend you do is actually you throw it away altogether. You will not need this now. When I give my presentations, I do occasionally have a few key points on a piece of paper on the lectern that I really want to make sure that I bring home. But apart from that, I don't have a script. And if you go through this process and you get familiar with the material in your presentation, you will be able to throw away your script.
8. Rehearse Your Presentation: Now it's your turn. I want you to get your presentation out on to rehearse it. One of the best ways to do this is to find somebody whose opinion you respect on asked them to listen to you in a presentation style room. Deliver the presentation to them as if they were the audience. By setting it up and having the slide deck on the screen and having the whole feel of actually giving your presentation, you're going to get a lot more out of the exercise. Then, if you just sit across the desk and talk to them because your body language won't engage, you won't be able to use the screen properly. And you you just won't be delivering your presentation. You'll simply be telling him what the contents off your speech is all about. So that's the way to do that. Failing that, if you can't find somebody at the very minimum, try to record the audio and try to imagine yourself giving the speech on, Then deliver it again. If you can do it in a room where you're using the slides and you can hook yourself up to an audio recorder, then you'll get a much more out off the exercise if you can make it even more complicated. If you can actually get a video recorder set up or even a simple iPhone and actually record yourself delivering the speech, Then again, you're going to be able to go back and have a look at it. Then either ask your colleague for his honest and frank feedback about the content, about the slides, about your scared of delivery, about anything that actually comes to his mind that he thinks you can do to improve your presentation. But you can. Also, if you've got these audio and video recordings, listen to them and start thinking about how you sound, how you've come across, how you've presented it and how you can improve it. So that's the activity for this section. I want you to go now and rehearse your presentation so that come the day you will be ready toe kick it to knock it toe, blow it out of the ballpark
9. Course Checklist:Road Map: congratulations on getting this far in the course before we end on wrap up. I just want to give you an extra little bonus on that is a checklist oblique road map off the entire course. Now, these are actually the notes that I have used in order to create the course so they will get a more detailed breakdown off each of the slides throughout the course on. Hopefully, this will give you a greater depth of understanding, enable you to see the overall structure and how everything fits together and actors on a memoir to you. If you wish to go back and revise points and look at courses and and indeed find a particular point if you want to go back and revisit a lecture. So I hope you'll find this really helpful just a very simple bonus. It's attached to this lecture as a PdF, and you can download it, and I hope you find that a very helpful little resource
John Colley, Digital Entrepreneurship jbdcolley.com
