6 pieces of tomfoolery that some public speaking coaches tell you- and why they're wrong

Philip Larkin, late, lonely, lovely English poet, wrote a short and bitter little thing that leads us into why so much rubbish is spouted to us by people who really should know better.  'This be the Verse'...

They F*** you up your Mum and Dad'
They do not mean to but they do,
They fill you up with all their troubles,
Then throw a few in extra just for you.

But they were f***ed up in their turn,
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern,
And half at one another's throats,

Man hands on misery to man,
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as quickly as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Hmmm.  Larkin didn't have any kids and he died friendless and alone, so let's not use him as too much of a role model.  But it makes me think that we've all been taught things by people who, were doing what they thought was best for us, with the tools at their disposal, at the time.  Hindsight is the human being's greatest gift, isn't it?

Obviously a lot of what we've been told is valid but some, we come to realise, is just plain useless. I look round the great presentation skills blogs by my colleagues across the world (I'll tell you who they are as we go on) and all of us seem to have a collected a few of the presenting  'myths' to dispel, so here are 6 things that I was taught on my journey; by trainers who meant well; but that I've found to be fool's gold as I've grown.

1. Don't speak too quickly- What a lot of tosh.  Some people speak more quickly than others, and they should because it reflects them, their culture and their personality.  It's never how quickly you speak that affects whether you're understood.  It's how well. Ever seen the 'Quick Shakespeare Company' who can do 'Hamlet' in 4 minutes?  They speak at a rate of hundreds of words a minute and are easily understood.  Why?  Because their articulation is perfect and they honour the punctuation in the piece.
2. Don't say 'Umm' or 'Errrr'-  Why not and who cares? If it's a natural, human sound you make occasionally when you're thinking, then I think people don't notice.  But if it's the sound you make at the end of every sentence while you think of what to say next, it probably means you're not prepared and you should be whipped for it.
3. Don't use notes-Why not?  What they often mean is 'pretend you don't need notes' and you end up using your slides, or a surreptitously hidden piece of paper, that looks poor and makes you nervous.  Notes, cue cards, scripts are all fine and rather like wigs (toupees, hairpieces, whatever they're called where you live), they should be used unapologetically and well.
4. Don't get nervous?- Why not?  Surely it's nervous excitement that delivers real performance.  You should get nervous, throw-up if it helps, but learn to use the adrenaline and manage the effects so that you're really 'switched on' when you perform.  Most audiences like to see a little sign of nervous energy at the start.  It tends to mean that the speaker is taking us, and her subject seriously.
5. Don't wave your hands about-  Again, what are the other options?  Handcuffs? Pockets? Behind your back?  No.  Use your hands, gleefully, joyfully (and all those other words from 'The Logical Song' by Supertramp) naturally.  It's what human beings do when they talk, and it helps you to express, emote and, errr, think.
6. Don't get in the way of the projecter- OK so why not? Surely you have to if you want to engage with your visuals, and direct your audience's attention to where it's best for them. What's the alternative? Stand next to it, stiff as a board, looking like a lemon? Just do it deliberately and love it.

Where do most of these myths come from?  American political pollsters who look at politicians and how they 'work' on TV.  Their results, over time are then passed on to political advisers, who work with their politicians on very specific issues to do with the way they come over on camera. And guess what? All of the things I've listed above do look terrible on TV because there's that really powerful, small frame, close-up, magnifying effect that TV has. 

From Nixon vs Kennedy in the 60's (we're back to old style hats and coats) to McCain v Obama right now, the US election is a battle that's won on the news networks, so it's really important that candidates know the rules. 

That's where all this stuff comes from.  It's all valid for TV and totally, completely, ludicrously irrelevant for us in the real world of work.

Have you heard? PowerPoint is dead- Prezi is here

What is Prezi?

In a nutshell, Prezi is a Flash-based presentation system that allows users to create incredibly dynamic presentations. Presentations where you can zoom in and out across a large area (no slides), create motion paths, embed images and video and do things that previously needed a pretty competent Flash developer and a whole chunk of time. It kicks traditional slide ware way into touch. And it is very, very easy to learn and use.

Is it better than PowerPoint?

No of course it’s not. I don’t even see it as a competitor. If Microsoft’s tool is the motor car, Prezi is the hand-built kit car for weekend use only. It looks lovely, it fills your heart with joy, it performs wonderfully well on those high mountain roads in summer, when love is in the air and you’re 25... But it's fragile, windy and noisy and you wouldn’t take the kids away in it, for a week skiing in December. Not yet anyway.

Obviously, Prezi is not as broad, flexible, integrated or widely used as Bill's much derided package, so it’s nowhere near PowerPoint as the default option for corporates, but as an expert user of PowerPoint, I could do some things much more easily and powerfully with this little gem, and there are times that I’d choose to use it, without question,  simply because Prezi’s starting position is so different.

Crap presenters will still present badly with Prezi, maybe even worse because there’s less structure to follow than in a PPT template. But designers, poets, CEO’s who want to woo investors, show-offs, me, and people with a little bit of hunger for the new and dangerous will just want to have a go.

Should we learn how to use it?

Of course you should.

Why ?

It differentiates you from 99.99% of the others in your field. Put it more directly. I had a pitch last week for a big chunk of credit-crunch busting work over 2 years. I created a great story, charmed the client, created the visuals and chose to use this (with a PPT backup if all went wrong). It just wowed them. It made us look and feel different to the other people who'd walked into that room before us.  Yes, we did a good job too- 95% our work, 5% these slavic nutcases at Prezi. But it helped . 

You've got to try it out if you call yourself a presenter.  Haven't you?

Lesson 6- Use everything in the verbal bag of tricks- but sparingly

Use Alliteration:

Alliteration is the deliberate arrangement of words with the same letters and sounds at their start for explosive effect. Alliteration is a trick of the spoken word. A technique that is very popular with tabloid newspaper editors, TV presenters and poets… Examples

• Magazine articles: “Science has Spoiled my Supper", “Too Much Talent in Tennessee", and "Kurdish Control of Kirkuk Creates a Powder Keg in Iraq"
• Comic/cartoon characters: Beetle Bailey, Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Phineas and Ferb, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
• Children's Books: Animalia by Graeme Base is a famous example of alliteration within a storybook.
• Shops: "Coffee Corner", "Sushi Station", "Best Buy".
• Expressions: "busy as a bee", "dead as a doornail", "good as gold", "right as rain", etc..

Try Onomatopoeia:

 The formation of names or words from sounds that resemble those associated with the action or thing to be named, or that seem to suggest its qualities; babble, cuckoo, croak, ping-pong, quack, sizzle and snore are all probable examples.

 It can also mean the use of words whose sound adds meaning to the meaning of those words. “Whoosh” is a word that actually sounds like the sound that you are using it to describe.

 Slimy, slithering, slippery and squelchy are words used to describe how something feels. The words themselves have a similar feeling. Slithering sounds wet and greasy and disgusting so hopefully the impact of the sentence and the overall meaning is enhanced.

Use the Rhythm of the words:

“Rhythmic speech or writing is like waves of the sea, moving onward with alternating rise and fall, connected yet separate, like but different, suggesting of some law, too complex for analysis or statement, controlling the relations between wave and wave, waves and sea, phrase and phrase, phrases and speech. In other words live speech, said or written, is rhythmic, and rhythmless speech is at best dead.” (Fowler’s Modern English Usage)

Some people use meter, the counting of beats and pauses and syllables and lines as the measure of rhythm. Don’t bother. Just get into the habit of saying what you write or intend to say out loud. If it sounds good then it’s probably rhythmical. If it sounds stilted, confused, over-complex then it probably isn’t.

Lesson 5- Use the simple metaphor to help- Learn Jeremy Clarkson's only trick

Metaphor is a fundamental tool of the English language. Without it, meaning would suffer because we would be left with flat description not vivid pictures in words. A metaphor makes a link between previously unlinked things. This linking can add meaning, and depth to our understanding of the world.

When Mrs Thatcher, the UK's formidable first lady Prime Minister, was first called the "Iron Lady" many people laughed because the word "iron" is used metaphorically. To some iron represents fearlessness, to others heartlessness, for some it represented her principles and for others her lack of them. This metaphor stuck because it allowed people to say so much about their subject in a simple phrase. Well-worn examples of metaphor:

• A trail of broken dreams
• Someone or something falling at the first hurdle
• Shareholders crying foul
• Lloyds TSB gobbling up Royal Bank of Scotland
• Heavy-handed asset strippers

Use simile too, she's metaphor's more direct sister and we know and love her as a natural part of our language, for simile is another version of metaphor. The difference though is that in a simile the comparison between two things is direct, and is often signified by the use of phrases like “like a” and “as if…” Common examples of similes include…

• To follow like a lamb to the slaughter
• To laugh like a drain
• To look like grim death
• To swear like a trooper

 With a bit of thought you can invent your own for great and memorable phrases, remember Jeremy Clarkson  has built his career out of this single skill. http://www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk/jc-top-gear-quotes/

Lesson 4 - Use visual imagery

Hypnotists and comedians know that people hypnotise and amuse themselves. A hypnotist's job is to get the subject to use her own imagination to 'see' that other possibilities exist.  To see her walking into a room with confidence, getting the job, making the presentation.

A comedian's job is to get us to see the joke just before he deliver's the punchline. Billy Connolly telling us that he told his ageing father that you could get prescription windscreens made for short-sighted drivers, and his father, having believed him, pestering him for weeks for the phone number of the garage who could fit him one.  Billy then turns to us and says 'can you imagine driving in front of a car with a prescription windscreen?  You'd look in your rear-view mirror and see a head (signalling with his hands) THIS BIG'.

When you give a presentation, try to create strong mental pictures for your audience. We are open to language that gets us to use our mind's eye to imagine whatever it is being described to us. Poets do it too.

“He was a proper poet he was,
He had a way with words,
Images flocked around him like birds,
Words, he could almost make them talk…”

Roger McGough

It's not just hypnotists, poets and comedians who can use it though, Gerry Spence, a very successful trial lawyer puts it as follows…

“I visualise my arguments, I don’t intellectualise them. I don’t choose the intellectual words like, ‘My client suffered grave emotional distress as a result of the serious fraud perpetrated against him by the defendant bank.’ Instead in my mind’s eye I see him coming home at night and I tell the story:

‘I see Joe Smith trudging home at night to face a heap of unpaid bills sitting on the kitchen table. Nothing but cold bills to greet him in that cold empty place. No heat, no light, no water, all cut off by the utility companies. I see my client, a tired man, a man worn down by the weight of his troubles, a man without a penny to him. The bank had it all…’

Lesson 3- Avoid cliché like the plague:

In the " Dictionary of Plain English", the editor A.G. Fowler says…

"Hackneyed phrases become hackneyed because they are useful in the first instance; but they derive a new efficiency from the very fact that they are hackneyed."

I think he means that clichés can be useful if you use the right ones. Use the familiar phrase if it expresses your meaning clearly, but not simply because it is familiar. Then it becomes lazy.

"Dog-tired" is ok, "sick as a parrot" is not.

"Original thinking" is OK, "Blue sky thinking" is vomit worthy

"From start to finish" is OK, "chapter and verse" is hopeless

"Starting tomorrow" is OK, "Going forward" is horrible

Lesson 2- Remove business jargon: Blah, blah, blah

Abstractions distance the audience from you as a speaker, they make it harder for you to connect your ideas with their lives. On bad days they make you sound like a charicature of corporate foolishness.  The most commonly used abstractions in presentations are jargon. If you want to leave a warm & human impression behind, and sound sincere, then delete stuff like this from your phrasebook.  No-one will notice if you do't use such tired old guff, key people will notice if you do and they won't be thinking 'What joy that he's talking like a  buffoon...'

To help you understand how audiences think ( Based on expensve and rigorous reserach by the British Psychological Society) , I've added the internal commentary that you'd get from the audience as you said each of these words or phrases-

• Empowerment- bullshit
• Synergy- Utter bullshit he means job cuts
• Commitment- don't talk to me about commitment
• Bespoke- pompous oaf
• Blue sky thinking- fool
• Synergistic- I think he's going to sack me, kill me and sell my kids for medical research
• Value-added- you're about as relevant as Cliff Richard (Outside the UK, look him up)
• Leading-edge- When did we get in a time machine and go back to the 1980's?
• Post-modern- Guardian (UK based liberal arts newspaper for students and hippies) reading poseur

Every company and industry also has its jargon.  Just notice what yours is and remove it from your lexicon.. Try testing your next big speech on your friends, family and pets.  If they think it sounds like bullshit.  Guess what?