Presentation Skills: Master Confident Presentations

1. Welcome: so welcome to my presentation skills. Course my name's Chris Croft on. I'm really delighted that you've decided to invest a little bit of money and time in presentations, presentations of really important, quite often with job interviews. Nowadays you have to give a talk. Andi presentations that things like conferences are often career defining moments. That might be somebody in the audience who offers you a job at some point. Or, you know, it might be really important to get a big sales order or something like that. So presentations of really an important skill on in this course I'm going to tell you everything you need to know to be able to give great presentations. I've structured it that we're going to look at things to prepare before your talk on, then how to actually give the talk. One of the practical things that you need to do is you go through your presentation from how to do a great start, then keeping the main body in a logical order with an agenda and all that sort of thing on . Then how to finish finish is important, so let's get started 2. Introduction: so welcome to my presentations. Course on the first part of the course is on planning. Planning is obviously incredibly important because if you planned your talk well, it's bound to go fine. So we're going to go through all the practical things you need to plan for a presentation. And a good thing about this is you can do it calmly either a few weeks or a few days before the presentation itself. So you consider the desk and you could dual these things, so let's get started on planning. 3. How to Plan - Key points and Timing: So the first thing to plan with your talk is what is the one central message of your talk? So let's say, for example, you're going to do a talk about your trip to Australia. My trip to Australia is not a central message. Your message has got to be. Australia is better than you thought, or Australia is not what you expect or don't go to Australia or something like that. But it has to be a really clear message. If it's just all about Australia, that's no good. Now, sometimes you're one clear message isn't clear until you've actually planned the talk. And then when you've planned everything you're going to say you can then look at it and think, Well, what is this really adding up to? You know, what I'm realizing is I plan My talk about Australia is that Australia was really different to what I expected on. Therefore, that's my message. That's really key to decide what your message is because everything's hung around that. So you then say right, I'm gonna talk to you about why Australia was different. What you expected on the first thing that was different is so absolutely vital what is your one central message? And that's a non trivial question. So what I do when I'm planning a talk is I draw out a mind map, and I actually love mind maps on an iPad because you could just use your fingers and move things around and insert sub categories. But a mind map on a piece of paper is also great if you don't like my naps. By the way, if you don't know what they are, just Google and their obvious, really, they've got there, got the subject in the middle of the lines, come out and then they divide so you can have sub sections. If you don't like my maps, you could just have a list. But I would really urge you to consider my maps because you can have sub branches. What you sometimes find is that you have, say, three or four branches, and then one of the branches goes into more and more detail. And you think, actually, that's really my talk, and I'm not gonna bother with the other little branches. But if you got three or four branches and there are roughly the same size, you can then decide what or do you want to have them in? So a bind map is a great way to think about the structure of your talk. So once you've got the the main body of your talk, ideally three or four sections, but it can be just two sections, but quite often you can have three or four. I wouldn't have 10 sections in a talk. I would try to divide them down into three and then have subsections within the three because our brains start to run out of road when we get to more than about four or five sections. So once you've got the main body structured, you can then think about what the introduction is going to be and what the summing up is at the end. So some people, when they're planning the structure of their presentation, they make the mistake of writing introduction first. But you must do the main body first and then decide what the intro is going to be and what the summer is going to be. And then the final thing to think about is your timing. How long is your talk and to take on this is really the most difficult thing about giving a presentations to keep it to the right length. If you got to give a 25 minute talk, how on earth you going to do that now? One way to do it if you're using Power Point, for example, is to just think about minutes per slide. Most people plan on about two minutes per slide. So a 25 minute talk you're probably going to lose, say, five minutes on the introduction and the summing up. So it's a 20 minute talk, two minutes per slide. So that's 10 slides. I actually find that I go slower than most people. I take about five minutes per slide rather than two. And that's because I quite like to improvise. Tell some stories on. Also, I like to chat to the audience a little bit, and I'm gonna come back to that later, cause that's a very important point, interacting with the audience. So I find on a typical slide, I've probably got five bullet points. Andi, I like to explain each of the five bullet points. Andi, ask people a question. Have they had this problem? What do they think? So it takes about a minute per bullet. So for me, it's five minutes per slide, and that means a 20 minute talk is only four slides, which is not many at all. I find with most people they have far too many slides in their in their presentation, as with a customer recently. And they have a little PowerPoint slideshow on. Welcome to our company, and it shows potential customers all about the history of their company, and it's got 40 slides. So even if you could just do one slide a minute, it's gonna take you 40 minutes. It had loads of boring pictures of, you know that this is the company in 1900 this was the extension rebuilt in 1960 on you just lose the will to live. So really 10 slides maximum and probably less than that. So 2 to 5 minutes per slide and the final thought about this is you can. You can either plan top down or bottom up, so you can either say it's a 20 minute talk. So if I'm averaging, let's say three minutes per slide that seven slides and then you can think, What am I gonna put on my seven slides the other way to do it. Just think, What do I want my slides to be, then? How many of I got and therefore, how long is my talk? And then when you discover the talks too long, you might to cut a slide or two. So mind map. Do the main body in, ideally about three sections. Then put the introduction and the summary on the beginning and end, and then think about your timing 2 to 5 minutes per slide. 4. 3 Effective and Simple Presentation Starts: So probably the most important part of your presentation is the start. The 1st 30 seconds. You need to prepare this really carefully. It's in these 1st 30 seconds that the audience decide. Do we want to listen to this person? But it's also in these 30 seconds that you, in your mind, decide. Is this talk going to be good or not? So if it gets off to a bad start, then you're really going to be struggling. So you absolutely must get up to a good start. So prepare it really carefully. And I would say there are three things you can have in your star. You must have one of these three. You can't have two of them or even all of them. So the three things that you need to think about one of them is start with a question. So if I was going to my talk about Australia, I could say, How many of you have bean toe Australia? Now why is that a brilliant thing to do? Well, he gets the audience involved from the start and even the people who don't physically answer in their mind, they're thinking, Well, I haven't Bean but I'd like to go or Yeah, I've seen. So it gets everybody involved, if you ask a question. But also, you need to know whether most of the audience of being or most of them haven't so asking them a question. How many people know about the changes to the tax system? You know, whatever your talks about, it's a really good start is a question the second way that you could start some sort of mysterious start. So you could say I'm going to talk to you about the biggest country in the world or the country that's got the most poisonous snakes of any country in the world. Or you could even put a picture up and say, Does anybody know where this is? And you could put up, let's say, some jungle because people would think Australia was going to be sort of red sand and desert. So some sort of mysterious start. So you could say, I'm gonna tell you three things you don't know about the new tax changes or I'm gonna tell you why the new tax changes are going to change everything. They're gonna have a huge effect on your business, something like that. Something where they think. Well, I need to know that. And I quite like the idea of three things or I'm gonna tell you 10 things that you didn't know about presentation skills. It's kind of mysterious. And you're thinking I need to know those 10. The final thing you could have in the start. Is that what's in it for me? Factor. And again, you could say I'm going to show you 10 things that you need to know about the tax system. But there needs to be something where they say I need to know this. So you need to say I'm gonna talk to you about what's happening with the tax system on. If you don't know about these things, it could be really expensive. It could lead to all sorts of problems. Or if you do know that these you'll be ableto make a lot more profit. So going back to my Australia example, what's in it for you? Why should you care about my trip to Australia on the arteries? I must say to you, I'm gonna tell you about Australia particularly. I'm gonna tell you about three things that you must do when you go the best three things I discovered when I was there on also, I'm going to tell you about two things to avoid to things that are definitely not good to do if you ever go to Australia. So now I've got you because you're interested, you can see what's in it for you. So those are the three things to think about in your start. Could you start with a question? Could it be a little bit mysterious? And could it cover the what's in it for me? Factor. I think you can see you can. You can do all three of those ideally and then run through your start just physically, actually stand there and present it ideally to a person. But if not, perhaps to a dog or a cat or to an empty room, but actually go through and say the words so you could just check that it feels OK and you don't stumble over anything. You don't have to run through your whole talk, but this this starting 30 seconds, you absolutely should run through it. Make sure you've nailed it on. Then you'll feel much better before you start your talk 5. Practicalities to Cover: So we've talked about your initial impact statement, If you like starting with a question or something mysterious. So now we get on to the main introduction of your talk. What are the things that should be in your introduction? Well, firstly, you have to say who you are on. I think the main thing with this is to give yourself credibility. But also be modest is quite difficult. Trick. You don't want to say I am an expert. I know everything, cause then they're just gonna think what? We don't like him or her. And they're gonna start to look for any faults they confined in your talk. So you don't want that you want to just quietly. So I've been doing this for years. I've made every mistake you could make. So I'm gonna help you to avoid those same mistakes. Something like that. And something I do is I don't always start with who I am. I usually start with a bit about the Torkham. What's in it for them. And then I say, by the way, I'm Chris. I've been doing this for a while because I don't think that I'm the most important thing. So I don't want to start with that. The audience of the most important thing, the message and the talk is the most important thing. So start with that and then mention who you are with some sort of subtly modest credibility statement. So who you are? Your credibility. We do need to cover the what's in it for them. Question. Which I've already talked about a bit, but there needs to be, I think, repeated something about you really need to know about this. It's going to help you. It's gonna allow you to make more money. It's gonna avoid accidents at work, whatever it is. Why should they listen to this talk? And you absolutely must prepare that and have a good answer for that. And then the next thing is to mention something about the length of the talk. People are obsessed by how long will this talk last? And they're obsessed by you not taking longer. So if it's a 25 minute talk, you absolutely mustn't take 30 minutes. Now, if it's a 30 minute talk, it's absolutely fine to take 30 but bizarrely, if you tell him it's a 20 minute talk and you take 25. That's really bad. So I say to them, It's a 20 minute talk and it really will take 20 minutes. We're gonna come back to that later, because when we're half way, we're going to reassure them. By the way, we're halfway through the talk. Now. People really worry a lot about you going over time. I don't know why. It's just one of those things. Okay, so we've had who you are. Some credibility, perhaps covered later on in the intro. We've had the What's in it for me. We've had the length of the talk, the next things to put up some sort of an agenda, absolutely vital to have an agenda, and it needs to be visual. So if you just say I'm going to cover five things Dr Death, then they're gonna think, what were those five again? So you need to have some visual agenda. They can see. It could be a PowerPoint slide. It could be on a piece of flip chart. What I quite often do is if I'm doing a PowerPoint talk, I have an agenda written up on a flip chart page off to the side because I like to see that as well. It means I know where I am in the talk and what's coming up, but also they can see the agenda as I go through my PowerPoint slides. But you can also have it down the side of your power point, like a sort of menu on a website, or even going across the top of the bottom so that you gray out each bit of the agenda as you go. But I have some sort of agenda that they can see all the way through is great. There's one other way you could do the agenda. You could put in a tender up at the start and say, This is what I'm going to talk about these five areas And then after the first part, you could say right. So we finished the first part onto the second, put the agenda up again, and then after the second part. Here's the agenda, and if you got quite a lot of sections, you might not put the agenda. Every time you might get a couple of sections, go by and say, by the way, we're now on part seven and put the agenda up again so they always come see where they are in the tunnel. Something else that needs to be in your introduction is is it okay to ask questions as we go along? You've probably heard people doing presentations and they say, Please go to keep your questions to the end. Now I personally don't like that because people are bottling up a question. They're worrying about whether they're going to ask the question at the end cause they're a bit nervous about asking in front of the audience on. Also, they may be completely stuck because you may have used some abbreviation or some technical term, and they don't know what it means on that could ruin the whole rest of the talk. So I don't think you should say Keep your questions to the end. I think you should say, feel free to ask questions during I like it. If you're not sure about anything, please just ask it any time. I sometimes say, if you think I'm talking a load of rubbish as well, feel free to ask me a question or to tell me that you don't degree because I want my talk to be interactive and I'm confident enough I can answer the questions, is going to be fine. And I'll come back to this in detail later on. You know what happens if you are asked a question you can't answer, so you must save them in the intro. Feel free to ask questions as we go along and then finally finish your introduction with a question. So when you finish your whole introduction, you don't say right. So we're ready to talk about my my visit Australia. How many of you have Bean to Sydney? And that signifies that the first section's gonna be that Sydney. In fact, you could say the first section's gonna be about Sydney. How many of you have bean there? So finish with a question, and that kind of tells them the intros over on. We're now ready to go into Section one of the talk 6. 3 Memorable and Confident Endings: So we talked about preparing the start, and that's really, really important. I think the second most important part of your talk is the finish. That's what they're left with after they leave the room. So the finish has to be good. So what should be in the ideal finish? Well, first of all, I don't think you should finish with. Just so any questions you know you shouldn't just sort of fizzle out on do some people they talk to sort of fizzle and they go well, so that's it, Really. And I hope it wasn't too boring on bond. So, by the way, never apologize. Never apologize at the start of your talk. Never apologize at the end of the talk. Never say I hope it wasn't too boring because people will think actually, yes, it was a bit boring, wasn't it? So on. So just to let it sort of fizzle out C. So there we are. That's I think that's it. Really. Any questions? That's obviously no good. There has to be a So there you have it Factor. I think of it is so there you have it. So, for example, when the best talks I've seen in one of my training courses they could do a talk on anything they like for 10 minutes. Right on. One guy did a talk on how to iron a shirt. Andi, He actually brought in an ironing board on a shirt. I think it would have been even colder if you taken off his shirt and done it. But he did. He brought another shirt and he showed us how to iron a shirt and he was telling us all about. You have to do the color, and then you do this bit and then you go back and he was asking us, Why do you think you do it in this order? It was a brilliant talk, but the best bit was the end, because when he finished doing all the shirt, he held the shirt up and he said So there you have it. The perfect shirt on. We all had to go. Yeah, you had to stand up and clap. It was so good. So your talk needs to have a so there you have it factor at the end. So if I was talking to you about my trip to Australia, I would probably just say so. There you have it. How to have the best possible holiday in Australia and you really should go or something like that. Just some sort of, you know, nice little depth finish aan den. You can say, by the way, are there any questions? But the any questions can't be your finish now, a couple of ways to have a good finish, you could have a summary a recap, so you could say so. There we have it. That's my talk on Australia. My top three things were You must cuddle a koala in Brisbane. You know, you must see the fruit bats of Belling and island on. Do you must see you know the the dolphin in tin can bay or the turtles wherever. So you just go back through your top points. So that's a good way to finish. Another way to finish is a call to action, so you could say so what I want you to do after this talk is to go back, get the Internet on on book a trip to Australia? That's a bit serious, but you could say so do bear in mind Australia as a possible holiday destination on. Certainly, if your talk is about sales, you should say next time you need this service or this component, please do consider us. Because as I've showed you, we have got four features that nobody else has got on by saying next time you need it. Please do consider us. You're putting that thought in their mind and they'll think, Yeah, I will. And then when that next comes up, they'll think, Oh, yeah, I was supposed to phone that guy. So a call to action just leaves a little subliminal thing a little trigger in their mind so you could finish with a summary or we could finish with a call to action or even both. There's a final way you could finish, which is to have a quiz. And you might think of quizzes a bit patronizing and a bit weird, but actually, people love quizzes, so you could say right, So to finish just for 30 seconds, I just want to find out how much you can remember from my talk. I just did. So what was the name of this or you know how many were of these? Were there on Just see and just get people to shout out the answers. Onda. Certainly, if you really want to remember several things, if you have a quiz, it gives you one more chance to tell them your message. So consider finishing with a quiz. Okay, so that's that's finishing. My main points were It's gotta have a So there you have it factor. It's good to say any questions, but that doesn't count. As a finish, you could have some sort of some Meriel recap. You could have a call to action, and you could have a quiz. 7. Know Your Audience: so the final thing that you need to prepare is the audience. What type of audience are they? What type of people, What level of knowledge and they're gonna have. They're probably gonna be a mixture, so that's a problem. But it's worth just thinking. You know, they were going to be qualified doctors. Are they going to be scientists? You know a lot about your talk already, or are they just going to be the public? So what type of audience and then what size of audience now the size of audience in some ways doesn't matter because you're still going to do the same talk. And I tried to talk to huge audiences as if they're my friends, and I'm just chatting to a small number. So in a way, it doesn't matter. But I think the one thing that does matter, what size of audience is, what sort of visual aid are you gonna have? So, with a small group, I like flip charts. Personally, I like to be just right on the flip charters and go along, and I can involve them. I can ask them for suggestions, and I can write them AARP and so that's what I would naturally choose. But when Power Point was first invented, that's how old I am. I've ever thinking Power points fantastic, and I made all these slides, but I just I found that it wasn't as good going through PowerPoint. There's something about a flip chart, wages charge and you write things. So for an audience of up to probably 30 people, I would go flip chart because thirties only a six by five block of chairs and they can all see the flip chart. Bigger than that, you have to go power point. And of course, if you're going to show photographs and things, you have to have power point anyway. So you need to think about your visual aid, and I'm gonna come back to visual age later. But Power Point is is definitely gonna be the option. If it's a bigger audience, you could use just a hand out so you could give out just a page of notes, and what I do when I got a really big audience is I put a page on each of their chairs with the notes on so that when they come in, they've got that and Then when they go, they take it away with them so they can write things on it during the talk. Whatever. And they take it away. And of course, it's got my phone number on my website on it. So So that's a nice thing for them to take away and hopefully remember May and maybe hire me later if that's the objective of the talk, so you could just have a handout. And if you're really pushed, you can have a handout and no other visual aid. You could just give them that, and you could just talk him through what's on the piece of paper. But generally it's much better if you can have a screen now, something I learned from the great Brian Tracy, who's totally a God. I mean, if you haven't heard of Brian Tracy, you must check him out. I went to see him to a talk, and he it was about leadership in the morning. It was about selling in the afternoon, and he gave out a little a four booklet, and it had lots of gaps. So it just said the salesman's biggest fear is Onda. Um, you know, when you were a leader. There are three things you must remember, which are. And then it was just a gap. So when I was listening to his talk, I was thinking, What's the biggest fear going to be? What is it? What is it? And then when he said the biggest fear was rejection, I think I was quickly writing it down. So So I learned from him and I copied it. And it works really well that you could give out a handout with gaps in, and the audience can fill in the gaps as they go along. So it prevents the reading ahead and seeing in advance what you're going to say. But it keeps them occupied on when they finish. They got this thing all filled in, that's there's that has some value to them, which they're then going to keep forever. And of course, it's got your phone number and website on the bottom so you could use just a handout and have gaps in it, or you could use PowerPoint. Plus, a handout on audience size is going to affect your choice of that. But the main thing is, never have nothing, never have no visual aid at all. It's very difficult for audiences to cope when you're just talking at them now. I'm just talking at you now, and it's not ideal. But each of these videos is only about four or five minutes long. Plus, we're putting bullet points up next to me because you have to at the very least have bullet points coming up. So that's what you need to think about when you're planning your audience. 8. Wrap Up: Okay, so that was Section one. On what? To prepare before you do your presentation. So you might want to take a break now and go away and actually do that preparing. And then I will see you for part two. What to do when you actually present your presentation? 9. Introduction: welcome to Section two on overcoming Nerves. This is a really important part of the talk, as I mentioned earlier on. Most people are nervous about giving presentations. They needn't be, but they are. But luckily I've got some great ideas, practical things you can do to reduce your nerves and to build up your confidence. So let's have a look at those now. 10. Say It Until It's True: So I've got seven tips for you on how to overcome nerves on the 1st 1 is self talk what you say to yourself in your head. Most people, as soon as they're told they've got to give a talk in a month's time, they think, Oh, it's going to be awful. I hate giving talks. If you say I hate giving talks, then you will hate it And the more you tell yourself that hate it, the more you hate it. And if you say it's going to be awful, it will be awful. And if you keep thinking it's gonna be awful imagining it being awful, that will happen. I had somebody on a course once, and she said to me however much I prepare when I actually stand up to give my talk, I can feel all my preparation floating out of my head on off, up into the sky and it's gone. And I remember thinking that such bad self talk, because if you could imagine it floating away, then it probably will. If I probably put that thought into your mind now, so you must tell yourself it's going to be great, Say the talk will be great. I love giving talks. It's going to be fine. I'm the expert I know all about. This subject is going to be fine now. You're probably thinking well, but it isn't going to be great. That's just not true. And elsewhere is I know it's not true. I want you to lie to yourself. I want you to say to yourself, It's going to be great even though it's not now, you mustn't say it's going to be great because then your subconscious doesn't believe you. You've got to say it is going to be great. You got to say it is. If you believe it on, what will happen is that slowly that will become true. It doesn't take long. You've probably got to say it 20 times, spread it over a few days, just every now and then say to yourself, I'm really looking forward to my talk. It's going to be great on After a while. Your subconscious gets bored with resisting that message. It's goes here. Yeah, it's gonna be great, and that's when you know you've won. So keep saying it till it becomes true. And of course it's going to be great. You are the expert, so that's my first of my seven tips. Self talk 11. Make Yourself Bulletproof: the second of my seven confidence tips is toe. Have backup plans for everything. Then you know you're bombproof, so bring spare connecting Leeds. They don't cost very much. Just have to Leeds for everything, cause leads are often the problem. When you find your projector is making everything look pink colored or yellow colored, it will be the lead. One of the little pins in the lead has got worn out, so it's often the leads, but also if you can bring a spare laptop. And certainly when I go into a presentation and they say everything is provided. I bring my own laptop because I quite often find they've uploaded my presentation onto their laptop on the fonts of different. Or it's a different version of PowerPoint or whatever, and I just bring out my laptop and everything's fine. Similarly, I have a spare projector in the boot of my car. Now that perhaps is a bit obsessive. I do training courses all the time, so it's easy for me. But if you're going to go and do a talk somewhere and it's really important and they say they've got a projector, why not borrow the one from the office or whatever and just chuck it in the back of your car because sometimes they'll be a problem with the projector at the far end. I can think of two or three times over 10 years where I've turned up and they've gone. Oh my God, Chris, it's awful. The project is not working, and I've said, no problem. I got mine on Sometimes they're projector isn't broken. It's just crap. It's just all fuzzy, and it's a really old one. That's bean in the hotel for years, and you just think so. You bring out your own, and it's all sharp and bright. So bring your own laptop, bring your own projector and bring all the wires as well. Also, bring an extension need, because quite often you know that you can't reach to the plug and it's just a small thing. But why not have an extension lead in your car on then? The final two things bring spare notes, so I bring handouts for the talk I'm gonna do. And then if there is a total failure of visual aids, then I can still just give them the notes, and we can use those as a visual aid, and I can talk him through the piece of paper that they're each holding. So I bring notes. The other thing. I always bring spare marker pens because if you're gonna write on flip charts or a white board, the white bullpens are always dried up. And quite often the flip chart just has a sort of yellow one or something. So bring loads of pens a swell just in case. So then you arrived with all this kit of stuff, and then, you know, your absolutely bomb proof. 12. Step Off the Stage: my third tip to overcome nose and be more confident is to chat to the audience as they arrive That this is a really good tip, but I know where I got it from. I think I've just discovered it. But get there really early, get all your gear set up so you don't have to be faffing with that while people are arriving on. Then you could just hang around at the front and chapter people. Now, why would you do that? And you might say, Well, you know, I'm gonna be intimidated. Suppose they're all doctors or something like that You might be thinking wrong. These people are so scared. But what happens is that you discover that they're just normal people. And you just say, Welcome to the talk. Have you come far or whatever? Why did you decide to come to this talk and you can you can find out that firstly, they're normal people. Secondly, you can adjust your talk subtly toe what they want, because you'll know what kind of people they are. You will be on their wavelength as you do that. So it helps you to tell your talk and make sure it's spot on. And thirdly, it means you've got some friendly faces in the audience already. If you talked to three of them, then you'll see them smiling as you as you're doing your talk and you'll feel good about it . So hang around and chat to people as they arrive. That's a really important tip. It doesn't mean you need to get there early. They get everything else done before anybody comes. But I would recommend that anyway. The last thing you want is to be panicking, trying to get your gear working correctly as the audience are already arriving. So that is tip number three. 13. The Early Bird: tip number four for getting rid of nerves is to get there really early now referred to this a little bit in the previous video. But get there really, really early? The last thing you want is to be stuck in traffic, having stress or whatever. And quite often, when you get to the room, you find that it's not what you expected. The chairs are all the wrong places. There isn't a flip chart or whatever. The screen isn't quite straight, and it takes a bit of fiddling to get screen the way you want it. So get there really early and check the Romany equipment. If I'm doing a talk, I quite often got the night before and stay in the hotel on. Guy like to go and look at the room the evening before because then I sort of feel subconsciously that it's my territory, and then when I go back there in the morning, I already know what I'm expecting, and it feels kind of easy and natural. It's my room then, so get there really early. Check all the equipment well in advance. If they've preloaded your PowerPoint presentation, then have a look at it. before anybody gets there because you obviously can't have slides coming up when the audience is already there. So go through them and I would go through every single slide just quickly, because sometimes you find that you know the funds have got corrupted or they've got different fonts. Or that the person who is organizing it has very helpfully fiddled with your presentation, which is really one of my pet hates. I've done it the way I want it. Oh, I just thought, I d prove it for you, Chris. So get there really early. Make sure everything's the way it should be. You might wonder why someone would change my presentation, but sometimes they change it to their corporate colors or their corporate font. So it all has to be pink and yellow. What has to be an area or some sort of horrible funked like that? So you get there, you go home. You didn't mind. I've made it into our corporate colors, and I kind of have to live with that. But at least I can go back through and just make sure everything fits on and least is easy enough to see. But it is a real pet hate of mind that to change my presentation and then you've got time to just relax and have a chat to people as they arrive. So that's tip for get there really early. 14. It's Better Once You're Up: tip number five out of seven for increasing your confidence is to stand up now. You probably don't want to stand up. A lot of people worry about standing up, but it is definitely better bit like swimming in cold water. It's great once you're in and it is better once you're up. So I would absolutely say Stand up. If you're using Power Point, you can operate it from sitting down. But don't the reason why you should stand up. There's a number of reasons, actually, but partly that you're easily visible from the audience. They can see you second. Your brain works better when you're standing up. I think when you're standing up, your heart has to work harder to pump all the blood around, and therefore it pumps around quicker and so more oxygen gets to your brain or something. But I bet you know that's right, because when you're on the phone, if you're doing a difficult phone call, don't you find it's better if you do it while while you're pacing around, your brain works better. Your brain works better, people can see you. It gives you more authority. If you're standing up your voice, carries better as well, but also it shows respect to the audience. If you stand up for them. I mean, if you just sort of lounging in a chair chatting, I mean, it's almost like you don't really care about the audience. So for all these reasons, you absolutely must stand up. And I quite like to use visual aids as an excuse. So if it's a just a small group of, say, three people, I'm going to present to it might feel a bit weird to stand up. And I say, Well, let me show you this and I then point to something on the screen. So then then I've got an excuse to stand up, to point to it. And then I just stay standing up as I do my talk. So stand up. You will actually feel Maurin control on more confident 15. Ask the Audience: suggestion Number six to improve your confidence and overcome nerves is, I think, probably my favorite one, which is to ask the audience questions during your talk. Now this takes a little bit of practice, but believe me, it's brilliant. Once you get used to it, ask them questions during your talk. If you just do a talk and they're all just sitting there silently, it's horrible, you know, other listening or they board. Do they agree with it? Do they understand it? I don't know. So I like to ask questions, you know, could be into Australia. What did you think? You know, as anybody stroked a koala, What do you think a koala feels like? Do you think it's soft or not? Because, by the way, they're not that soft. They like a bit of old carpet. You could ask them what you think softer a koala or a kangaroo is actually kangaroos a much softer, but who thought so? Any questions you like now? I just make up questions as I go along, like I just did then, but you might want to prepare your questions initially, but if this is a new game for you, so for each PowerPoint slide, and you're probably gonna have between five and 10. Prepare a least one question for the audience on they could be quite generic, like, Has anybody else had this? Or can anybody give me an example or or even what do you think my next point is going to be ? You know, Has anybody got any other suggestions? Those type of questions really important to ask questions during? And it feels great, because when you get answers coming back, you know that the audience are with you and they're on your side. Now, the worst cases, you ask a question and you get nothing, and I'm gonna come back to that later because I'm going to talk about what to do with difficult audiences. But, you know, just to jump forward slightly to that, you could pick on a person say, Louise, what do you think? Or you in the end there? Have you ever had this so you could actually pick on people? Or you could just say Hands up, everybody who's had this cause even if they're very shy and very introvert, they could still put their hand up. So how many of you like giving presentations. You know you could, you could get into or how many of you have given a presentation in the last month? Just see how many people put their hand up. So asking questions during is absolutely key. It will make you feel much more relaxed on. It'll make the talk feel much more interactive with the audience, so they will enjoy it more, and they will. I understand your key message much more clearly if they've Bean involved in the talk, rather just sitting there and having it thrown at. So that's number six. Ask questions during. 16. Practise Makes Perfect: And finally, my seventh suggestion for improving your confidence and overcoming nerves is to have a run through to check the timing, especially the first minute of your talk. You absolutely must run through that. You could run through the whole talk just to check the timings. Okay, I've been doing this so long. Now I know that I take about five minutes per slide on. I know that if I'm going faster or slower, I can correct as I go along. But you might want to just check that your 25 minute talk isn't going to turn out to be an hour or three minutes. So have a run through, and then you know that it's all fine now. As you do the run through, you might feel a bit nervous, and you may feel it's increasing your nerves. But if you've had a run through, you'll feel much more confident when you actually get there to do the talk. I wouldn't do loads of run throughs, though it starts to get a bit stale. Then I think I would do to run throughs at the most. That's my seventh tip for improving your confidence. Have a run through, especially of the first minute of your talk 17. Wrap Up: So those were my seven tips for improving your confidence and overcoming nerves on. I really hope those have helped, even if you just do some of them. Even if you just get there early. Chapter the audiences they arrive and then ask them questions during the talk that will make a big difference, but also having spare everything so that you know your bombproof anyway, whichever one of those tips you choose, and I hope you dual seven, that should make you feel much more confident about your talk. 18. Introduction: Okay, So we've looked at what? To prepare on how to overcome nerves. Now we're going to get to Section three, which is what to do as you deliver your presentation. 19. Looking the Part: So the first thing to think about when you do a presentation is your appearance. What should you look like on the main thing is obviously to be smart. But how smart. And I think similar to the audience. Really Perhaps similar to the audience, but a bit smarter than them. So you don't wanna be ridiculously smart if you talk to a lot of cool I t people who are all there in T shirt if you turn up in a suit and tie, you were just gonna look a bit weird and they're not going to relate to you. They're not gonna like you. They're not gonna trust your opinions on things if you're wearing really different clothes so similar to them but a little bit smarter on I think there's a big dilemma for men at the moment about whether to wear a tie or not. I went to a posh dinner, an awards dinner the other week on behalf of the men were wearing ties. Half the men weren't on DSO. It's quite tricky. I wasn't I prefer not to air it. I don't like the feeling of a tie on. I've got a belief that really important. People don't wear ties and people who wear ties and trying to look important. But I did have a tie in my pocket because I thought, What if I turn up and they're all wearing ties? I could nip out again quickly for the tie on, but actually, it was really interesting. It was 50 50 split, I would say probably slightly more people not wearing ties. So I think important, relaxed, creative people tend to not wear a tie, so I would wear a nice shirt, no tie and a jacket for women. Who knows? I mean, I'm out of my depth there, but you'll know, I think the main thing, though, is is nothing distracting for both men and women. Nothing distracting nothing low Kartal see through. In fact, if you look back through my Udine videos, you'll find on one of them. For the first couple of videos. I had one button too many undone. I think it was. This one was undone. See if you can find it and it was really a little bit sort of. Hello, so you don't want anything like that? Nothing that they're gonna think he's great. He's got a lot of our buttons undone, so nothing that's gonna distract the audience and people are very easily distracted if there's anything not quite right of your tires and straight or anything like Now, if you've got your hair rushed right over, the audience is going to be looking at that. So you've got to be professional on boring. I know that seems strange to be to be boring, but really nothing weird or distract. Don't wear some unusual time because you think people will remember you because yes, there remember your tie. But they won't remember what you said. I don't worry about trying to look great either. There was some research done in Italy. I mean, I know you could say it to these different, but they found that the more attractive the news reader waas, the less the audience. Remember, there was an absolute correlation more attractive. They remember this. So if you're thinking that you're not great looking, don't worry, it's fine. You're talks actually going to be better because they're going to remember Mawr off it. But the main thing is nothing weird or distracting. Just boring and smart 20. How to Plan the Room?: So you thought about yourself and your appearance. The next thing to think about is the room they out? Where you going to stand on? What should three audience layout look like? So there are probably four main audience layouts you can get. My favorite for groups up to about 20 is you shape of tables. I like a U shape because they could look at each other a little bit as well as just me. And also I can walk down into the middle of the U if I want to give out notes halfway through whatever and also gives me a certain amount of control over them. If I walk around because if you've got a big, long table, a boardroom table, the people at the far end consider chat and whisper, and it's hard to keep control of them. If you've got more than about 10 people around the table but a U shape of tables you've got control over, So that's my preferred audience layout. But I also like what we call cafe style on this is a collection of tables, maybe five tables, but it could be up to 20. I suppose it's usually about five tables, and then you have people sitting around the tables. Now you don't have them sitting all the way around the table because some of them would have their back to you. So you probably have about four or five people sitting around the far side of each table. And that's great for group work they can working groups on. Then you can come back to the presentation. Any problem with cafe style is that often ends up being quite wide as a table there, a table there on the table there, so I don't really know where to face. So I have to sort of walk around quite a lot. And if I've only got one screen, the people at the far end struggled to see the screen. But sometimes you have several screens, of course, and then cafe is great. You got you shaking up cafe, and sometimes you get classroom style, which is just rows of chairs. Andi that could be just a block of seats. Or it could actually be a kind of a new auditorium classroom, maybe even banked. I don't like class from so much because it's harder to be interactive with people with bigger audiences. It it has to be classroom, but a smaller audience. I wouldn't want passion style, really. But sometimes it's like that, and you can still be interactive. And you can chat to people, particularly people on the front row. You can chat to them. By the way, if you're putting out chairs, I usually put out slightly fewer chairs, so they have to fill up right to the front. And then as more people arrive, I pull out a few more chairs, as if to say, Oh my God, so many people have arrived to my talk more people than I was expecting because if you've got loads of chairs and you end up with a few empty ones, the empty ones will be at the front. And it sort of looks bad, as if you know you haven't sold all the tickets. Type of feeling. That's a little tip. Put some chairs away, bring them back out again. You can just have a U shape of chairs. I prefer tables because I think people feel a bit vulnerable if they don't have a table on . Also, if they're going to write notes and things, but you can't just have a U shape of table of chairs. That's the other option. I just think he bit more about room layout. Sometimes you have a problem with a very wide room or a very long room on. Both of those are a problem really want kind of square shaped? Because the room's really long, you're gonna have people way at the back who perhaps can't hear. You can't see the screen, and you may lose control of them. They might start chatting amongst themselves and things. And if you got very wide room, as I mentioned earlier with the cafe style, then it could be a problem because they can't all see the screen or the flip chart. So if you can have a fairly square room, that's better. But sometimes it's unavoidable. And then there's the question of where you're going to stand because obviously you don't want to block the screen and you don't block the screen for anyone. So, ideally, if my audience of where you are and that's the screen, then I would be off to the side looking at the screen like that, so I would be sort of diagonally so I can see them and the screen such ideally, how I would be so You need to think about where you're going to stand and maybe you have to move some tables out the way and that sort of thing. Just a final thought is Don't block the door, either. So quite often I arrived to do a a training day and there's a big long table and there's a door at one end, and I've got the choice of which end of the table should I put it on. I always put the flip chart at the end, away from the door so that people come in the door and then there's the table. There's me behind the table because then they don't feel trapped. I don't want to feel that if they have to nip out the loo, whatever they have to get past me and my flip chart, it feels like I've captured them. And also you don't want to have interruptions. If someone does have to go to the loo, they need to go to just go out the back. So ideally, you wouldn't be by the door or blocking the door, so there isn't thoughts about audience land 21. Give Them a Sign: So now we come to the agenda and the idea of sign posting, and this is really, really crucial. Actually, I've mentioned already that you would have an agenda. You must have an agenda, and it must be visual. So a verbal agendas, no good people can't remember the agenda. You got to actually show it to them, and you got to bring it up again after each section of your talk. But the key thing I want to say is, sign posted. So you say to them, right? That was section one. We talked about that. Now we're going on to section two and you have the agenda up while you say that. So every time you finish the section, you put the agenda back up and you say so. There we are. We've now finished section two. We've got two more sections to do, and I liken this to being on a train and going past the stations. So you've got your journey and, you know, we've now gone through Basingstoke, and next it's working. And then so you know where your heading. And you know that London is nearly there so really important to sign post and In fact, it's almost like going into a tunnel. Really? A presentation is like you go to this tunnel. Andi, you don't know how long you're going to be in the tunnel and the person doing the presentation has promised. It's going to be 20 minutes. But is it? But isn't it great if they say you've now passed this milestone? You've now passed this milestone because then you know that you're on schedule. So how long will I be in the tunnel for? Is what the audience a desperate to know And they're really worried they're gonna be in the tunnel longer than promised. So have an agenda sign posted as you go along. And just a final thought sign post that the ending is coming as well. So if you're talking about, say, seven things on the agenda when you've done five, you could say I've only got two more now and then we finished. And then you get to the seven point you say, Now, my final point, I'm gonna talk about this and then we finished, so they're not really be suddenly taken by surprise. It's a bit like Bob Dylan does a harmonica. Certainly before the final verse. So you always know when you get to the some would say badly played harmonica solo that you know that you've only got one verse to go. And then you can either feel happy that Bob has nearly finished or sad that Bob has nearly finished. So if you say one more section and then we finished, everybody knows. And then when you finally say so that's it. That's the end of my talk. Just to sum up, I've covered three things. It's not a sudden dropping off a cliff because I've seen presentations where the person is talking and talking and they said they go and that's the end. Do you think? What I didn't know? The end was coming. So sign post. The end is coming with two sections to go on one section to go 22. Body Language: So this next sections about body language. Some people are obsessed with this. Some presentations. Trainers. They say that you mustn't say, Oh, you mustn't put your hands in your pockets and you must 11 talk out presentation course I went on ages ago. The lady was saying, you should have a power stands. You should be sort of like this when you do your talk. So if somebody tried to push you over, they wouldn't be able to push you over. You should be like that on. I'm thinking, Really? Because I just think you should be yourself for it Should be relaxed and should be yourself . But I've already mentioned you absolutely should stand up on. Obviously, you don't want to be doing anything too weird with your hands. I think it is all right. Possibly to have one hand in your pocket while you're talking. I think, you know, be quite relaxed to be sort of talking like that. Perhaps I think both hands in your pockets would be dodgy. Don't gesticulated too much, but just however you would normally do it but definitely stand up. And I've already mentioned you can use the visual aid is an excuse. You can say I'm just gonna point to this and you can stand up. But I think your stance should be fairly natural. I think you should walk around a little bit. Don't pay something down endlessly, but I think you absolutely should walk around a little bit. Talk to the table over there. Talk to the table over there. If you've got several tables, cafe style. Try to be a little bit smiley. Now you may not want to smile because you may be really terrified of doing your talk, but if you can have the occasional amusing thing, if you can smile a little bit, that would be good. And one more thing about body language is equal Eye contact for everybody. Now is your big audience. You can't do it, but but you should spread your eye contact out. So talk a little bit for people over there and then talk to them and talk to the back a little bit and just go for the corners. Really, because if you just latch on to one person and always talked to, then it's a little bit weird and creepy for them, and it's horrible for everybody else because there will go. Excuse me. What about me? Don't you care about me? So if you can keep moving your eye contact around, then everybody will feel that their included but not under pressure. So those are the main things I think. Stand up, stand reasonably confident. By the way, I wouldn't hide behind a podium. You may think you need a podium for your notes, but I'm gonna deal with that later on because you don't need notes. I will come to that later. So don't stand behind a podium. If there is a podium, come out from round, either lean on the podium or stand next to it and talk to the audience. They'll much prefer that. So standing up, standing confidently, smiling and equal eye contact for everyone. 23. Audience Interaction: The next thing to think about when you're doing your talk is how are you going to be interactive with the audience? I mentioned this in the section on confidence because it's so important. If if you could be having a bit of a laugh with the audience and asking them things and they're telling you examples they've had, it feels almost more like a conversation than a presentation. And I think that's what great talks alike. And when I talk of conferences, usually there's, you know, six or 10 speakers during the day on I'm the only one who asked the audience what they think and has a bit of a a banter going with the audience, a bit of chat on people always love that. So this is something you can easily do that will make you better than the other speakers. So So, first of all, prepare it. Think what questions am I going to ask the audience? And you need to allow time for that. A lot of time goes by when you when you're asking them for examples, so it may double the time that you need, and therefore you've only got half the material that you think, and that is a bit scary. And sometimes I look and I think I might have any got three PowerPoint slides for 20 minutes. This is really But of course, it's going to be fine, because I'm gonna ask them for examples. Now, I'm gonna come back to timing later, because what you can do is have a few extra things in which you could miss out if you need to. So then you don't feel too worried. And if the audience just don't answer anything, you're still OK because you got your extra stuff. But I'll come back to that later in a more scientific way. But certainly you need to allow time if you're going to be interactive with the audience. I already mentioned the benefits before, but just to summarize them again. You know, the audience of with you, you know they're on your side. They know that they're you know they're understanding your message if you're getting answers back from them. But also you can correct, you can go faster or slower. You go into more detail or you can simplify things if the audience is struggling to answer your questions, but also it gives you time to think, because when you ask them a question they're answering, although you do have to listen to their answer gives you a little bit of time just to catch up in your mind and to reload. And to think, you know, how's the talk going? Have I covered everything just gives you time to think. Another benefit when you ask the audience of question is they have to answer it in their head. Even if they don't say anything, they have to answer it. So when you say who's been to Australia? They're all answering that, even though they may not say it out loud Now, if the audience are not very chatty, it's quite a formal occasion. You could just ask them a yes or no question, and ideally, you'd asked for people. You ask him to give you examples, so I suppose you're doing a talk on negotiating. You might say who's done a negotiation recently, but you could just say who likes negotiating but your hand up or whatever, but I like to usually ask them for an example or ask them what the answer is. What do you think you should do if somebody else refuses to negotiate. So here are some examples of the types of questions that you could ask somebody while you're giving a talk, you could say who thinks that they're too much of a perfectionist on. If they don't reply, you could get them to put their hand up. Hands up. Who thinks they're too much of a perfectionist, By the way, nothing you could do is you can get them into pairs. So you could say, OK, I just want you to talk for a couple of minutes to the person next to you about your biggest time management problem or your worst habit, or what your boss is like. Talk to your next door neighbor about your boss, and then you can have a rest for a couple of minutes. While there's loads of Khabab, everybody talks slight your could you go to get control again, but that will be fine. So after a couple of inches, you say, Okay, everybody, right, let's see what you've got. So hands up who had a bad boss and give me some examples of things that bad bosses do on. What you'll find is that because they have been talking to each other in pairs. That's loosened them up. And they've now got a message that they are proud off and they would like to give to the group. So they're much more likely to be forthcoming if they've just been talking in pairs. So questions you could have who's had a bad boss in the past. What sort of things do bad bosses do and what kind of things can go wrong during a talk? That's a great question to ask. What can a person do to make some cell to make themselves feel more confident? You can ask that question, and if it's a small audience and you're using a flip chart, you could just write the things up. So what can someone do to make themselves feel more confident to anybody? And you could just write me ideas. And people love seeing their idea written up on the flip chart, so that's a good way you can harvest in the ideas. If you're using Power Point, you can't really do that. But what you can do is you can ask them for ideas, and then you can put your list up and you say Yeah, well done. You got that when you got that one, that's an extra one that nobody got. So you could do it like that. So they're just loads of questions. You can ask. You can say what would be the answer to someone asking you to split the difference in a negotiation and just see what they say? Or you could put up a photo and you could say, How many safety hazards can you see in this photo on? People can shout out. You know, the ladder looks war. Believe that bloke standing on a roller skate or whatever. So spotting the problems in a photo is a great way to be interactive with the audience on Do you can follow that with saying, What's the biggest cause of accidents in factories? Do you think so? Plan your questions. Be interactive. It's probably the most important thing to doing a great talk 24. How to do a Talk Without Notes: So this next section is on how to remember your talk. Wouldn't it be great to do a talk without any notes? And you can I'm gonna show you how so in increasing order of goodness, really the starting with the worst one. Never read from a script. It's just horrible reading out a talk from a script. It means there's no eye contact with the audience. It's just going to sound stilted in itself. Eso never write a script out and read it. I mean apartment else. It's a whole load of work to have to write the script out as well. So that's the good news is you don't have to write a great big script. Andi. Similarly, never learn a script off my heart. I mean, I suppose that's slightly better than reading it out, but learning it off my heart is a huge job toe. Have to do Onda. What happens if your mind goes blank at the beginning of your talk or halfway through it? You're really stuffed, and if you've got the script, will be rummaging for where you are. Where's you know, where's your place in the script so never read from a script. Never learn a script off my heart just don't do scripts. So that's good news. So on two things that I like, I think in a four page of notes is good. You know, Imagine if you had just a piece of paper on on here. I've got about 10 things written in Capitals. I could just hold that and do my talk. And how would you feel if you were the audience? And I was just every now and then thinking, Well, the next thing I want to tell you about is distorted it. And then the next thing I will tell you about is this. Would you be thinking he's cheating? He's got notes. I think you wouldn't. I think you'd be fine with it. In fact, you probably would be pleased that I'd done a bit of preparation. So I think in a four page is absolutely fine. And of course, what you can do. You leave your a four page on the table. Then every now and then when you have a quick look, Ridic they're probably not even gonna notice that you're looking at it. So if I'm writing on a flip chart, I quite often put the A four page on the floor next to the flip chart or on a chair just behind the flip chart so I can see it. But the audience can't tell that I'm looking at it. A four is good. I don't like little cards of note. You know, the classic wedding speech when they have cards in their hand. I just think cards are a bit naff. They're a bit wedding speech e. On. They have problems as well, because they're small. The writing has to be small, which is hard to see, and then you have to keep turning them over. And, of course, the audience can see them. I always want to shout out I can see your cards because just cause they're small enough to be in your hand, you can still see them. But the main problem I find with cards is that you don't know what's coming next. So when you flip over the car, you think all Yes, I was gonna talk about that next, whereas if you've got your a four page, you can see what's coming next. So there's more of a flow and you can lead into it. You could say Now go to my next section, which is X So I just think cards, they don't flow. There's a risk. You're going to drop them and get them in the wrong order. They just I I wouldn't have cards. Personally, I don't recommend them. So a four page of notes you could put them on the table or behind the flip chart. Another little trick, if you're using a flip chart, is that you can write in pencil just very lightly on the flip chart, and the audience won't be able to see the pencil, but you can. So you you, then right in your big marker pen on the flip chart. But you've got the pencil telling you what to put. So that's a clever thing you could do. But I think the best way of all is probably just to be cued by your visual aid. And if you're using Power point, this is what you have to do cued by your visual aid. So the visuals that come up on PowerPoint should tell you what to do. Anyway, if you just got bullets coming up, that should be enough to remind you what to say Now when you do your run through. If you find that you can't remember a key number, a date or population or something that were a price, then put that on the slide. Andi, if there are three points you want to make about one of the bullets and you can't remember , the three are then put those three points as sort of sub bullets underneath that bullet point. So when you find it gets too complicated, you can't remember it. That's a sign you just need to put a little bit more on your visual aid, but the visual aid should just be bullets. You definitely don't want to have paragraphs of text that you're reading out because the audience of thinking well, I could read that. Why is he reading it to me? So no paragraphs of text, just bullets. I read somewhere that you should never have more than seven bullets on on one PowerPoint slide. And I think that's a good rule, actually, ideally fewer than that 45 It's probably ideal number, but as I mentioned, you could have a few sub bullets if their particular points you want to remember. But if you find you've got seven bullets, and within each of them there's four sub bullets. Then clearly you need to have seven slides, and each of those is gonna have four bullets on it, so you just got to divide it down. But then you've got to start thinking, How long is my talk to be? So you got to keep an eye on that. So to somebody, something, never write a script. Never have to read it out. Never learn from learned the script off by heart. Never have scripts have on. I don't think cards. Very good either Have a four notes on the table or on the floor, pencil on his flip shop or be cued by your visual aid. 25. Good and Bad Micro Sleeps: in this next section. I want to talk to you about micro sleeps now, Vera. Weird idea. But the idea is that people have. They don't actually fall asleep, but I have these little things called micro sleeps where they just day dream and their mind goes off for a while. You can have good or bad micro sleeps. The good ones are where your audience of thinking about your message there thinking, Yes, I suppose I do have micro sleeps. Yes, he's right on. And then the bad ones where they're thinking core. He's taking a while, you know, wonder wonder how long it is to lunch. Wonder what I'm gonna have for lunch or there thinking God, that shirt of his is rather nice. I wonder where he bought that between 80 since I treated myself to a new city, and they're often some complete, you know, daydream. That's got nothing to do with your talk. Now people will have micro sleeps. There's nothing you can do about it. And apparently for the 1st 5 minutes, people can manage to concentrate. But after that, micro sleeps get more and more prevalent, and by the time you've been talking for half an hour. They're away with the fairies about 50% of the time. So how do you handle the fact that people are having micro sleeps on? The first thing is to say everything important twice, because if you say it a second time, the chances are they won't be asleep both times and they'll get your message. So find a way to say things twice. One way is to say it in, in in the introduction and then in the main body. And then when you sum up, so at least when you sum up, they're going to hear it a second time. But quite often you can manage toe given example. So you you say, for example, when you go to Australia, you must have a look at the Kuala Bears in Brisbane. I know they're not bears, by the way they just call us on, do, say, And here's a picture of one of the koalas in Brisbane on. Then you say so that was my first point. Obviously, you've got to see the quarters in Brisbane, so finally excuse to really hammer that point in because they will be micro sleeping on Then the other way you can do it is to have visuals, because while I'm showing you a picture of a koala, even if your mind is away thinking about lunch, your eyes are still open. Hopefully, so you're still seeing the koala and you're still thinking there's a Kerala there. So if you could have visuals as well as the talk, then you can overcome the tendency to have micro sleeps and then do the summing up. Of course, So there's something up is not just so they can hear it twice, but it gives them a chance to get back on the train. So imagine, you know, we're going through these stations, but imaginative every now and then, people fall off the train. If you stop and say, Okay, so that was number eight. Micro sleeps. Now I'm going to go on to point number nine. They could they think, Oh, OK. And then they get back onto your talk so some of every now and then so they can get back on the train. So that is micro sleeps 26. Talks Longer than 15 Minutes - Six Activity Ideas: now what if you're doing a longer talk talk that's longer than, let's say, 15 minutes. It's good idea to put an activity or two in. And certainly if you're doing a talk for several hours, you've got toe have activities in that talk, and I've got six ideas for activities that you can put into a talk. My 1st 1 is discussion in pairs. I mentioned this before. You just say the audience, talk to your next door neighbor about you know what the strategy is for your company or what you think of your boss. Or how much do they know about the data protection legislation or whatever it is and just getting to chat in pairs? And this loosens them up, and it makes it much easier than to get them to talk to everybody later on. So that's the first thing talking in pairs. The 2nd 1 is to get the shout things out and write them on the flip chart on as I mentioned earlier. If they're talking impairs, they're much more likely to engage with this second idea. So you get into shout out ideas and you write them up so you'd say things like, What do you think the main things are that you would want to do if you were on holiday in Australia and they go koalas and you can write that one up and you know, surfing or something like that and you write, you write them up, so that's a really good way to involve the audience on your getting them to do some of the work, give you a bit of time to think on you, get a nice big list generated by them and remember, if they generated, it must be true. If you say it, it may not be true, but if they generated, it must be on anything they don't come up with. You can add. You could say there's a couple of other things I would do when I was there. I would really recommend, you know, seeing the turtles or whatever it is and you can add. Those are my third of my six ideas is a post it wall. So you just give out Post it, notes the audience and you say, But I believe it's something that they may not want to admit. So suppose you were collecting ideas for how the managers in the company could be better managers, and people might not want to admit they've said things you just say right on the Post it any ideas of how the managers could be better and people will write things like, you know, thanking us more or involving decisions and things like that, and they can all right there post its and then they just stick all the post its on the wall so you don't know who's written what. But it's also good because you can then sort them into categories as well. So you can actually organize the information and get some conclusions. You could see 20 people here all said that they didn't think they were thanked enough on. Only two people said that they thought the pay wasn't enough. I mean, that would be really interesting. So a post it wall is a really good idea, Teoh to pad out your talk of it by making it more interactive. The fourth idea is to get them to present something so you could divide them into groups and say like you for I want you to come up with ways you think that the company could improve its sales. And you four, I want you to look at customer care when you four. I want you to give a little talk in a minute. Just a five minute talk on, um, new product ideas or whatever it is on. Just give them stuff to do so they then need 20 minutes to prepare it, and then each person's talks going to be five minutes. Ondas four of the hose. So that's another 20 so 40 minutes is going to be used for this. But we're not just padding. This is going to actually be a lot better than you just droning through all the answers because they get really involved. They feel that they had a chance to have a say on there, probably come up with stuff that you wouldn't have thought on as well. So getting them to do a little mini presentations could work really well. And if it's a group of four, if a couple of them are really nervous about presenting its fine because you only what? One of the four, perhaps two of them to do? The presentation on just a five minute presentation using a sheet of flip chart paper as a visual aid. That's what I would do. I give them each a piece of flip chart paper and a couple of pens, different colors and say Right some things on there and present it back to the group in 20 minutes time. So that was the 4th 1 the fifth of my of my six ideas. And can you see how I'm signed? Posting. So you know where you are in this little tunnel? My fifth idea is to have a worked example. So this is where you giveth, Um, a question toe workout on. Then you show them the example up on the screen. So something like finance would be classic for this. You know, you could say Have a look at these three companies and work out which one's got the best profit margin or whatever on then. You could show them the example and you write it up so they get a chance to have a go, and then you show them the right example. The right answer. And then my final example. The 61 is to have a quiz, and I mentioned earlier people love quizzes. They get really competitive about it. on I. I usually just do a shout out the answer type quit. So I just have PowerPoint slides with questions on at the question. The answer. The question, the answer. Onda have the words appearing as they do it. So you ask the question. They all shout out the answers. Then I click and it comes up. By the way, have a clicker. You gotta have a clicker. So this things just come up because then you could walk around the room and you can just click up the next line on your power point. So that's the quiz. You can give it out in writing and get them to either on their own or in groups. Work out what the answers are, and then you can ask each question and get the groups to shout out the answers to you. That's another way you can do it. So, working in pairs, shouting out ideas for the flip chart, the post it wall, getting them to present, giving them a worked example, which you show them the answer on, then a quiz. Those were all ideas for making your talk interactive. If it's a bit of a longer talk, 27. Three Insider Tips: in this section. I just want to make three points about the general style of your presentation. On the first of my three points is to use examples to make abstract ideas come to life. So if you've got an abstract idea like you know, when you're negotiating, your opening offer should be reasonably extreme. That's too abstract. But if you say I suppose there's a house for 200,000 don't offer them 195 offer them 130 because that's got it really shocked them on. Then they're going to come down 10 grand straightaway. That's much better, isn't it? Have that actually example. It's much more powerful than just saying extreme opening offer. Or if you're saying something like, you know, when you calculate net profit and gross profit, you know the difference is that with net profit, you tell, you don't include fixed costs or whatever it is. That's really confusing. So what you should do is to show them a riel example. Here's a company here. The fixed costs here are the variable costs, and therefore you could see that's the net profit that's the gross profit and actually show them a really example. So always use examples to make abstract ideas come to life. That's the first thing I wanted to say about general style, and you can either have unexamined all and then the principle that comes from that. Or you can start with the principal and you could say And here's an example of it You could do it either way around the second of by three points about general style is humor. Should you have jokes or humor in your presentation on? I think you've gotta have some humor when I've joked around a little bit in this talk already. But humor is difficult because it's very easy to upset people with jokes. There's always going to be somebody who who doesn't find a story amusing. Um, so, for example, I sometimes talk about what I'm talking about. Project management. I talk about estimating, and I took about How long will it take for me to drive home Onda. We talk about the average and then I say, What's the quickest I could do if I'm absolutely charging down the country lanes with badgers bouncing off my bonnet, how quickly could I get home? And I think that's kind of amusing. But of course there is a risk. There's going to be somebody who loves badgers and is really upset by the idea of me running over badges, which, of course I don't do and I don't want to do. I love badges. I think because I say badges bouncing off my bonnet, I can sort of get away with it. But I think you got to be really careful about humor because it's always gonna be somebody who doesn't like a joke. And I definitely wouldn't put in a pre prepared joke, you know? Yes. Now that reminds me of of a little story about three people who went into the pub. I mean, it's just going to be all fun. It's gonna fall flat. It's going to be terrible. So never have a pre prepared joke. But if you can get humor from anywhere during your talk, you should absolutely take it. You know, if somebody comes up with a funny answer. I was doing a project mentioned course the other day on when we're doing the Gan chopped we have the 1st 1 has Thea Hours how many hours each person spending and the 2nd 1 We put the pounds the spend, but what I do to make it interactive, I have I name the 1st 1 hours on. I said If the first one's called hours, what's the second sheet going to be called? And somebody said There's on everybody just a was just hit areas And obviously she hadn't really been concentrating if it had been a long day to be fair to her. So we all had a bit of a laugh and I said, No, no, we got ours and the other one is gonna be pounds and sometimes funny things happen and you can all have a laugh and that's great. On def, somebody else makes a joke. I mean, that's That's brilliant, you know? So humans, fine. But don't pre prepare humor because it's gonna fall flat. And then the third thing which I've illustrated in this actually is to have a few stories tell a story, give a real example of something that actually happened. People love examples, and I'm gonna be telling quite a few more stories later on, Dickie, when we get to what could go wrong in a talk on, you know, I've got a few stories of terrible things that have happened to me while I'd be doing talks . And you just know that they're going to be good, aren't they? So if you could put a couple of real life examples real stories and that's great, I have a little game I play by the way, where sometimes when I tell a story afterwards, I say, By the way, do you think that story's true? Or do you think I made it up and they go, 00 and you know, half of them go. I think you made it up and have them say it's true and then I go, No, it is true on. I think that's quite a good way to make them see that the story really is true. Why would I make it? I'm not clever enough to invent stories. They are all true. But that's a fun way to really accentuate the fact that stories are true. So summing up general style, then use examples or even a story to make abstract ideas come to life. Be careful about humor, have a little bit in there, but be careful about pre preparing humor on include a couple of stories. If you can get stories really make your talk come to life 28. 12 Essential Powerpoint Tips: Now we need to look at the dreaded power point. People talk about death by PowerPoint, and some people have tried other things like President. If you've seen present, which is pretty funky, I like President. But really, it's power point is the only game in town, and it's not going to go away anytime soon. I don't think even if you like using president quite often when you turn up to do a talk at a conference power point is what they are using. So how could we make power point? Good. Well, I've got 12 tips for Power Point. I'm going to zoom through them pretty quickly. Tip number one is if it's on someone else's laptop. Check it. Just don't trust anybody else. If they say no, no, I've prepared. It's all gonna be fine. Check every single slide. Make sure the colors are OK. The font, sir. Okay. Make sure they haven't changed. Always check it. So that's the first tip. Second, tippy spellcheck. Why would you not run the spell? Check. Some people don't know there's a spell check for power point. They think it's only inward, but absolutely run the spell Check. There's no excuse for typos on your PowerPoint slides and a swell as the spell check. I would get somebody fussy like me to have a look at your PowerPoint slides just to check. You haven't put anything stupid. Maybe Maybe there's a typo that isn't going to be detected by the spell checker, so you really want to make sure everything's right. Number three. Not too much on each slide I mentioned earlier on seven is usually said to be the maximum for the number of bullet points on each bullet. Point should be short. You don't want to have a big, long line, probably more than no more than about four words for each bullet point. Shorten it and shorten it, I found. It's one of the main things that I do when I'm teaching presentation skills. When somebody puts up their Power Point presentation, the first thing we do is hack it down just short in the lines. Get rid of half of those bullet points, so number four is not too many slides. You know, if you're going to take five minutes per slide to 20 minute talk, that's only four slides. And if you're two minutes per slide 20 minutes, but that's only 10. It's such a common fault that people have too many slides. And then, of course, the presentation overruns and the audience or unhappy. Or you have to rush horrendously fast through the last few slides, so don't have too many slides. Next is the look of your slides. I would recommend just black on white or maybe dark blue on white. Don't have pink on green or yellow on green or something like that. Andi. I also would not recommend White on black, because when you print it out, you're gonna have to use a huge amount of ink, and it's gonna be really hard to read. So so just make sure you got the right colors on your PowerPoint slides. Point number six is Have a clicker. Have one of those little buttons so you could just go through your sliding. You can even have it in your pocket. That's pretty cool, and you can just click through Just You know, you don't have to keep going over to the computer and pressing the button, although if you are using somebody else's computer and you don't have a clicker little tip , I'd recommend is you can use the space bar because if you're trying to use the forward and backward arrows, there's a risk. Your press, the wrong arrows, you press end, it jumps to the end, and that's really horrible. So use the space part and move on, but better have a clicker. And if you are gonna buy a clicker, spend a little bit more and have one that has double A or triple A batteries. You don't want to have one that has those little round silver hearing aid batteries because they run out quite quickly and they're expensive, and the last thing you want is a clicker that runs out halfway through your talk. So go for one that has double A batteries or triple A batteries. Point number seven Build the slides. Don't have your PowerPoint pages just coming up completely full, but make each word come in and don't have them zooming in with sound effects for you know, you just want to build the slides on. Have the have the words just coming up Just appearing. I use the one called Appear. So do that, Um, but I would say build the sides most of the time, but every now and then, if you've only got, say, three, you might want to just bungle three on there and talk about them, especially if the bullet points are not that revealing. It's OK to have all three on the slide on the screen at once, because if you always build the slides, it starts to feel a bit labored, a bit tedious for the audience so built the most of the time. But every now and then, just bung them all up. So that's easy if you don't know how to build sides and get someone to show you, Number eight of my Power Point tips is put a full stop after the final line. This is a little thing I've invented, but I think it's pretty cool. So if you've got your slides being built on the lines of coming up, you don't know if there's one more line that's going to appear on. It's really horrible if you say on my final point and there isn't another one and it just goes to the next slide. But it's also horrible if you say there we are finished and you go to the next slide and one more line comes up. So the way to know that it's the final line is to put a full stop just after the final bullet line, because then you know it's the final one point number. Nine of my PowerPoint tips is photos. Get those photos included on your whole thing comes to life if you've got a picture. And in fact, I've seen people do Power Point talks where there were no bullets, it was only pictures, and they just talk around each picture. That's pretty cool as well. But make sure you've got pictures, not distracting ones, and, you know, but make sure you've got some pictures in your talk. Otherwise, it's horribly dry. Point number 10 of my 12 so only three left is diagrams, diagrams of great as well, much better than a list if you could make it into a diagram. So I saw a guy to a talk about diving about scuba diving on what he did. He actually didn't have power point. He was just drawing. He drew a little stick man with a head and the body on. Then, he said, the first bit of apparatus is the air canisters and he drew these two cylinders. And then he said, There's your mask and he drew the mask. And then there's the flip person he do, and he explained each bit of equipment, and he was drawing it on, and it was so much better than just having a list. So So if you could have some sort of a diagram, it's much better than, at least so every now and then. If you've got too many lists, just think to yourself. How can I make that list into a diagram? Idea number 11 out of 12 is one that I mentioned earlier, which is to use the space bar. If you're using somebody else's laptop. I think that is a good tip. It probably deserves to be on the list in its own right. And finally, number 12. A really clever little tip that most people don't know is that you can jump to any page within your presentation by just putting in the number. So if you want to go to page 11 just type in 11. Enter Andi, it will. It will go straight to that page. So if you do actually accidentally press end instead of using the space bar, and you want to go back to wherever you were. Suppose you on page seven. You could just press seven Enter on Power Point. When it's in presenter mode, it will take you back to Page seven. And that's great when you're answering questions, because if somebody says, you know the end, they say, Can you explain that thing again? You could just go three enter in your back there. So if you print out all the pages and have them on the table, if anybody wants to go back to a particular page, you can see the number and you could just put the number presenter and you're there. That's my final PowerPoint tip so that we are 12 tips to improve your use off power point. 29. Dealing With ANY Problem: So what could possibly go wrong in your talk? Well, what I want to say first off is you will be fine. There are so many things that could go wrong, but actually most of them most them. You'll look back and laugh later. I've had some horrendous things happen to me on going to go through those with you and environment, and you'll see it's the most horrendous this. But here I still am. I've survived. I'm fine. I can look back and laugh so they find. So I'm gonna talk to you about some of the funny things and then in the video after I'll talk about some of the more common problems that happen on What could you do about those? So first of all, let's have a look at some of the funny things that have happened to me. First of all, I've had a nosebleed during a talk. It was just blood coming up my nose, and I tried no sniffing and it just wouldn't stop. And it was all running down. And in the end we had to stop the talk and they had me lying on the floor and they're all pushing tissues up my nose and but after about five minutes, it stopped. And then I carried on with the talk and it was fine. But that was that was pretty bad. I mean, I could look back and laugh now, and I'm sure they will remember that talk is the one where the guy had the nose bleed on. It was in Guernsey and I'd gone across on the aeroplane, and I think the pressure must have made me have that. But you know, it's fine. The next one is I've bean sick. I've actually thrown up during a talk, and I did actually have time to run out of the room and I would see something I'd eaten at lunchtime, have disagreed with me or something. And I said, Look, I'll be back in a minute. Sorry, everyone on. I just had time to run halfway down the corridor. I didn't even get as far as the toilets. I came back in and I realized I had. I went to the loo, cleaned myself up. I came back in. I realized that there was also the water down the front of my tie, I think, where I'd sort of tried to wipe off pits of sick. And it was a talk to a load of doctors as well. And they were all looking again. You okay? And I was probably a bit of a sort of greenish white color. And you okay, Chris? Okay, I'm fine. And I actually had to run out a second time, be sick again, and we ended up calling that talk off, but again, So what? You know, I'm fine. I'm here. I'm still alive. So you know why? No, the next one is that somebody fainted on. Somebody just collapsed off their chair onto the ground. Um, that was a bit of it Turned out, actually had been drinking a lot the night before, and they had alcohol poisoning. So that was a bit off putting. I've had people run out of talks in tears because I've mentioned something, you know, badgers or whatever it is, and they've been really upset. And if they've burst into tears and run out of the room, we have also had somebody had a a hearing dog, which was just the cue test ever dog, which lay on the ground. And I thought, if you have done a few training sessions where people have had dogs and they are quite quite distracting. I also did one where somebody had a signing person with them next. So because somebody in the audience was death, they had someone doing sign language next to me. So while I'm talking next in there, somebody going like this the whole time and I was putting extra words in, like, tapeworm and things, you know, just to see what the sign Waas. So that did put me off a bit, but it was fine and, you know, it worked. I did a talk at a pig farm and the whole the whole room where we were was infested with flies and they sprayed poison So most of the flies were dying and they were so just falling down and sort of buzzing while they lay on their backs. And that was really horrible. When I got back to my car after the talk and it was full of flies, I'd left my sun roof open, and for some reason all the flies have gone into my car and I open. The windows didn't help. They didn't come out, so I thought, I'll just drive and hopefully they'll gradually, I drove all the way from East Anglia to Manchester with my windows open on the final fly. Went out of a window just as I arrived in Manchester. Horrible. Three more things that happened. I lost my voice completely. One time on That was bad. I did the talk, I brought a microphone and I was gonna just talk very quietly into the microphone. But in the end, I just whispered the talk and it was actually worked really well because everybody really had to lean in and concentrate. So losing my voice was OK, That wasn't a problem. I could have used the microphone. There was a rather horrible one where somebody was working on the roofs, scaffolding was being put up and the guy actually fell past the window. Andi hit the ground and an ambulance came and he was taken away and things. And, you know, we just carried on with the training session. But that was pretty awful on the final one. I gotta tell because it's funny. My trousers disintegrated. I was doing a project management course for Harrow Council, Onda and suit trousers A pretty thin anyway, and I think they were really worn. Andi, I must have probably just gone past the corner of the flip chart or something. And I must have just scuffed my trousers in any way while I was writing the foot track. But here, all this sort of tittering. And I said that, you know, You okay? There's no question. And it's a Christmas. It's your trousers. And I reached around. I felt it and Oh my God, the whole flap. It just sort of come down on on how When I was wearing pants, it was at the end of the world. So I just did the rest of the morning facing towards the audience. And at lunchtime I went to Mark's expenses and bought some or trousers and but actually I do have a spare pair of trousers in the back of my car. Now, just in case. But the point is, all those things happen to me and I'm fine. I'm still here. I lived to tell the tale. I can laugh about them now. It doesn't matter. So those were some of the crazy things that have happened to me. And here I am. I'm still fine and but you're unlikely to get any of those. I hope so, for your sake. But what are the problems that you're likely to get? And what can you do about those? Let's have a look at them now. I think the Communist ones are probably people who chat people who people in pairs, who just sort of mutter and whisper on This can be a good things. It can be that they're saying, Oh my God, he's right. I need to do that. Well, they might be saying, What did he say again? I just missed that. So it could be that they're interested in your talk, But it could be that they, you know, just distracted or you know, something. They've suddenly thought of something to do with work. And you want to tell the other person Andi, I personally I think that to start with, you should ignore them. Just let him do it. But then you could sort of look at them, catch their eye. You could. Then if that doesn't work, you could tell you, OK, that you want to ask something? I was a member of school when I was talking about They'd go. Croft is there something you would like to share with the class. And I began. No, sir. But so you could say, Is there is there a question you want to ask You okay there? Because they might just want to ask something, but if they carry on doing, you could see. Look, I do need you to concentrate it, you know? Do you mind? Andi, I think you know you can really step it up and say, Look, if you're gonna talk, do you want to go outside and have your conversation, then come back in because you've got the power, you're running the course. So I think people who chat are a common problem, but easily handled another common problems. People who ask tricky questions, either questions that you don't know the answer to or questions that I just just deliberately malicious, really just deliberately impossible. And I think with these difficult questions, it's fine to say I don't know the answer. You got me there. You know, I don't know the answer to that. I could find out. I'll let you know later if you like. Or you could say the audience. That's a good question. Is anybody know the answer to that one, Andi. Somebody probably will. But if nobody does, you could say, Well, I don't know the answer, either. On I think it's fine. And if you are asked a really horrible question by somebody in the audience, three audience will be on your side. There will be saying, Oh, glad I'm you know, that's a really stupid question or I'm glad he is glad I don't after a while. So that question. So I think it's absolutely fine. Did you just say that's a good question, actually, and I'm afraid I don't know. The art haven't got the answer with me for that one. But I can find out that, you know, another common problem in audience is people falling asleep. But I hate to admit this, but I probably about one talk in five that I do. Somebody falls asleep, but I sort of think if you've got an audience of 50 people and 49 of them are riveted, you're doing fine. It's not you, but I think some people just have, you know, a baby that keeps them awake, or or they just, you know, are in some the axe and is equal to sleep apnea. There's a thing which, you know, some people just can't stay awake. So don't take it personally if somebody's falling asleep and it could be just that they're just a a boring, ignorant person who is not interested in your talk and has turned up by a mistake or something. But if everybody else is interested, it means you're doing fine. So don't worry about the person is falling asleep. I have tried going silent and seeing if they suddenly wake up or even pointing at them on everybody else is a laughing at some point to get the person. But generally I think it's better just to ignore the person who's falling asleep, people who come in later annoying. And I used to say something to them. I used to say what were we were all here on time or something like that. But somebody was late and I gave her a hard time, and it turned out that her Children had bean in some sort of horrible accident, and I felt really bad about it. So what I've learned now is not the have a girl. People who come in late, they've probably got a good reason. They may just be disorganized and rude, but the chances are they've got a good reason. So I think the main thing is just ignore them when they come in late. One of my pet hate problems, what I call chip foreigners on These are people who constantly chip in the constant go Oh, yes, yes, we have that in our company to, and I find that it's quite easy to deal with because I do this or that and they're actually keen and they're actually supporting you. But they are hard work on. It's difficult really, to deal with the chip arena, because all you could do say Okay, well, thanks for that. Does anybody else have anything to say? But it's hard. I know. I don't know what to do with Chipper and as they are a bit of a dread, really. Clearly, you can be a little bit assertive in your talk, and you could say to them, Well, you know, thanks for that. But does anybody else have any thoughts or thanks for that? But we need to move on, or I think that's a little bit to off track. I don't think I can answer that now because it's not really part of the talk, but we could talk about it later. So the old talk about it later gambit always works. Um, but the other thing you could do if there's a real problem like, ah, horrible problem with the I T. Or with noise, you know, maybe builders air drilling through the wall. That sort of thing is to say, Shall we have a little tea break while we sort this out? Audiences are always happy to have tea breaks. So if you say let's just have a five minute comfort break, people connect to the loo, maybe get a cup of tea and I'll sort out the drilling and then we'll restart or our sort out the I t. Will find out what's going on with this computer will start again in five minutes. Audiences air, always delighted by that. And then you can phone up the I T. People get help or whatever it is you need. So if in doubt, have a tea break on, nothing can stop you 30. Should You Give Out Notes?: so you're probably gonna give out some notes to the audience. I strongly recommend that you do, because it's a symbolic gift when you give them notes. But also they're going to remember your talk more. If they've got notes, they may never look at the notes again, but they might do. And also you can put your phone number and your email address and things on the notes, so you should give them something. The big question now is, Do you give the notes out before your talk during your talk or after your talk? And there are pros and cons of all three of these, so it's tricky. I think my least favorite is to give the notes out before the talk. Some things you have to do this because if it's a conference that might be a pack that's been sent out or whatever. But the problem is, if you give the lot's out before they can read ahead and they know what's coming up and it just takes away all the excitement and all the suspense from your talk. But the advantage is that they can write on them, so if you don't give them notes beforehand, they're gonna go. Is this in the notes? So if I'm doing a talk and I haven't given the talk that the notes out before then, I reassure them constantly. Don't worry, this is in the notes, but you can give the notes out before and they can write on them on. Do what you can do is you could leave gaps in the notes that they can fill the men so they can't read ahead. I mentioned earlier on how Brian Tracy did that, and he's a God. So if Brian Tracy does it, it's got to be fine, and you can leave them on people's chairs before they arrive. So if you've got a lot of people turning up to a talk, it could be on the chairs with blanks. And that's my preferred thing. If I am forced to give out notes before I give them out with blanks on, then I might give out a finished version with all the blanks filled in after the talk as well. I don't tell him I'm going to do that, though, so they have to pay attention during the talk to fill in all the blanks. Now what about giving out the notes during the talk. This is what I like to do. If I'm running a training course for, say, 10 people, if I've got a U shape of table so I can get to each person, I like to give out the notes and sometimes I just get to pass them round or sometimes I go around each person, I give them out. It's like a symbolic gift. Every time I give out another page, they go, Thank you. So it's great. But the big reason I like to give notes out jury isn't really to stop them reading ahead. It's the fact that could miss stuff out if I need to. So if the talk is going a bit slower than I expected and I'm struggling to finish everything, I can miss things out. Or if I don't know whether I'm going to need to do a detailed thing or a highly technical thing, I can have it as a spare. I can put it in if necessary or not, so I don't have to pre prepare a pack. I could just have a pile of stuff and give out the bits I want to give out. So I like the flexibility of giving out notes during, and you need to decide how you want to do this. But that's an option you've got. It does take a little bit longer to give notes out, and if you've got a big audience, then you do need to factor in the time. And in fact, if you got 30 people, it's going to take too long to stop and go out and just give notes out to everybody. It's gonna be just too hard to do the other advantage, though, of having notes to give out as you go along. It does act as a cue, because I've got my notes that I look at on, so I'm kind of using them as I do my talks. I give out each page and then I talk about it. Or perhaps I talk about it and then give it out so it does act as a cue. Tell me what to say next. Now what about if I'm going to give the notes out after That's the third choice you've got the slag would Giving the notes out after is they don't know if it's gonna be in the notes , so you do need to reassure them. The other snag is they never read them. If you give out a pack afterwards, a couple of really conscientious people might read them. But most people won't read them. So if you want to look at the notes, you need to give them out before or during. But the advantage you're giving them out after is they don't know what's coming up. And, of course, if it's a pack that you're going to give out after you are already committed to covering everything that's in the notes. But you can always you can always get around that by saying, I've given out a pack for you, which has got a whole lot of additional reading as well as just my talk. And then that's an excuse to not cover everything cause you haven't got time. So that's the question. Do you want to give notes out before, during or after? My preference is gearing, if I can. If it's not a big audience failing that, I think my next preference would be before with blanks. My third choice would be after on my worst Cook case is to give them out before with no blank so they can read everything that really is bad. So there we are things to think about with notes. 31. Ending Perfectly on Time: So finally, when you're giving a talk, it's absolutely vital. Toe end on time, never overrun. People hate it. If you overrun, even by five minutes, they'll be climbing the walls. I don't know why, but it's a big thing. So how can you end on time? Well, the first thing is to have a buffer that you could miss out at the end. A friend of mine always has body language. Whatever training course he does, he always has a section on body language that he misses out if necessary, and he nearly always misses is out. But if for some reason it's a very quiet audience, and he's just going quicker than normal, he's got his section on body language he could put in if he has to. But you could also have a bit of an area that you can speed up rather than miss out. So maybe you're planning to have a fairly interactive section with the audience. You know, perhaps they're going Teoh, discuss things in groups, and you could just miss that out so you could still cover it. You could still talk about the main points, but you could just speed through it Or maybe there's a quiz, and you could just tell him the answers rather than asking. And the answer is that sort of thing. So having a buffer on the buffer has to be fairly near the end, of course, because he won't know your in time trouble until you get near the end. So somewhere in the last quarter, you need to have something that you can either speed up or miss out. The second idea is to put timings on your slides so that you can check that you're on schedule. Doesn't have to be very scientific. Just if you got 10 slides and it's a 20 minute talk, just put two minutes on each. Just put 12 14 16 18 minutes or whatever past 12. Put the actual time so that you got your watch, either. Probably best to put your watch on the table, actually, so you can see it. But there may be a clock at the back of the room that we better so you could just compare your timing's with the watch, and I sometimes put the timing's just in very faint light gray in the corner where only I can notice them But sometimes I put them in in big red writing. And I say to the audience, I'm going to stick to the time and you can check on me because the timings will actually be on the slides. Why not reassure the audience that you are on it? So putting the timings on the slides is an option, and then my third point I really want to make is ending on time. It's signed post that the end is coming. You don't want to fall off a cliff. Suddenly the end of your talk. So, ideally, about three points before the end, you want to say I've got three more points and then we finished and then two more and then one more. So you say this is my final point and then I finished my talk. We've got time for a few questions, but that's all. So my final point is that the desert and then you say so there you have it. That's presentation skills. So make sure you ended on time and sign post that the ending is coming up 32. Conclusion: and that's it for my presentations. Course I really hope you've picked up some useful practical tips on, but it makes your presentations less stressful and more effective. Better at getting your message across to your audience. Does remember. That's what we're trying to do. Just get that message across now. Ideally, you would do a talk soon. Try it. Put into practice. You'll find it all worked really well. And if you don't have a talk scheduled, you probably do, because that's why you're you're doing this course. But if you don't have one scheduled, why not volunteer to do a talk? Why not go to your boss and say, Is there a talk I can do for you on Put into practice as soon as you can? Because the great thing is, you now own this course so you can come back to it as often as you like. So every time you got a presentation in the coming years, you can come back and you could just watch it again. So it's great to have. You could even look at it after you've done a presentation, and just to see the things that you forgot that you need to remember for next time, so keep coming back to this course as often as you need to. And I really hope that it makes you more successful in life generally, because presentations is an important skill. Now, if you've got any questions, there's a discussion forum where you can post things and I go on there and I put answers and things. You can't message me directly, but it's much better to use the forum because then everybody can see the discussions that are going on it shared with with the community. So please do use the discussion forum. It's a bit of fun, so that's good. And something else would help me hugely if you wouldn't mind leaving me a review, I would love it if you could leave a review and some some stars or whatever. It really helps me a lot, because when people are deciding which course to use, which one to buy, they look at the number of reviews, So if you could leave just a really short review, that would be brilliant. Please, please do that on finally, because I'm eternally grateful to people who buy my courses. I've got a little voucher system going. So there should be a code coming up on the screen here, which you can use to get my other courses cheaper. So if you're interested in negotiating, for example, which will save you thousands, or if you interested in selling or leadership or one of my most popular courses is called How to Live an Amazing Life, why would you not want to know that? Have a look at that and that you can use the voucher to get that massively reduced price. So I hope to see you again on one of those other courses. So good luck, Andi. Bye for now. 33. A Bonus Freebie: I've got one other thing for you, which is free, which I think you might like, which is my tip of the month. I send out an email tip free to everyone who's been on my courses if they want to have it. So please do sign up for that email address will be coming up here, but it's basically free management tips CO UK with hyphens. So you have put your email address in there and you will get a free email from me every month forever and it will never repeat. You can always unsubscribe if they don't make you happy. But I know you're like it. 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