"There’s one mistake I consistently see made by speakers both novice and experienced: they’re not excited about their talk."<p>I'm a nervous presenter. The way I used to combat this was with a poker face. No smiles, no laughing, no gestures, monotone voice... I'd do anything not to clue them in to my nervousness.<p>This is a flawed approach for me. People are very forgiving of humanizing nerves and foibles. People aren't so forgiving of boring, monotone talks.<p>What I try to do now, with some success, is to embrace (not suppress) the nervous energy. To 'feel' the same way I do before a challenging ski slope. I'm in my 30s and I don't get adrenaline spikes very often like I did in my 20s (like say, when flirting with someone new that I really like). So I'm teaching myself to seek out places to present, so I can get and enjoy that intense energy spike.<p>Adrenaline is the best, cheapest, healthiest, and most legal drug available to you; don't shy away from it. And give some of that energy back to your audience.
Great post, especially the concept 'Talks should always be reactionary rather than anticipatory'.<p>A public speaking ancedote for all those that are nervous at public speaking or currently aren't that good at it.<p>My father excels at public speaking. He has done many conferences, TV interviews, company all-hands meetings, regular presentations, etc. He is natural, comfortable, excited, etc. Most imporantly, he can really read a room and react to people and tune his presentation on the fly to what interests the crowd.<p>But it was not always so. When he was in his 20s, he was absolutely terrible at speaking in front of a room. At one point early in his career he was giving a presentation and his boss turned to the HR guy that had hired him and said 'is it too late to undo this one', purposely, loud enough for him to hear.<p>Over the course of 5 or 6 years he dramatically improved at public speaking.<p>Public speaking is a learned skill. You can practice it. Do not leave making the presentation to the last minute, finish it a week before hand and practice 40 times. Comfort comes from being prepared. Walk the room beforehand. Check all of your gear and have backups of everything just in case. Be prepared to use no slides so it won't be a completely new experience. Have fewer slides, it makes you feel more naked but the audience won't notice if you get things out of order a bit.<p>Toastmasters helps. If you are younger, join a debate or model congress club. It's like shooting a foul shot, you just need more reps.
It's tougher to be a solid public speaker than it looks. I've given talks to big rooms, gyms and moderately sized conference rooms. I rarely get nervous but occasionally it hits us all. I do have some notes on watching great speakers in person and learning from my own mistakes.<p>1. Do NOT ask for a 'show of hands' from the audience. Even some practiced speakers do this. They think that it engages the audience, but it is a crutch, an attempt to turn the focus away from the speaker onto the audience. It's always clumsy and delays the audience from hearing the content. Some speakers claim that they want to know more about the audience before they proceed. We all know that's not true. Are you really going to completely modify your speech, dropping that five minutes of solid material just because not enough hands were raised when you asked about it? Of course not.<p>2. Note cards are not 'bad'. I had to learn this one the hard way. If you are professional orator, you will eventually get to the point where you can pontificate the same speech verbatim without a single note. But for the rest of us, a note card of bullet-point topics can keep us on track. Just don't have a ream of pages and stare down at them, reading monotonously without looking up.<p>3. Everyone hits that middle 'death valley' at some point. It's the point of a talk where you are very aware of your own voice, and you aren't getting any perceived feedback from the audience. This is the hard slog where you have to know that while time has slowed to a crawl for you, it hasn't changed for the audience. Remember how you feel when the situation is reversed - how often have you ever seen a speaker so bad that you actually noticed it and remembered it? Not often, if ever. Boring speakers are forgotten - bad speakers are ignored - great speakers MIGHT be remembered. So just keep going, and the worst that could happen is that you are boring, which no one will remember anyway.
My breakthrough in being comfortable with public speaking came from a quote:<p><i>"...though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does make the reassuring claim that where it is inaccurate, it is at least _definitively_ inaccurate."</i> - Douglas Adams<p>If I am to make a mistake while presenting, then by gum I'm going to make that mistake with the most confidence and gusto I can muster. I will own up to being wrong, I will turn that into a "teaching moment" for the audience, I will plow forward confident in the spirit of Kipling's "If" knowing that while I may have screwed up I did so in a good-faith effort at taking the lead and making things happen for an audience that chose to follow. If I am wrong, then I shall be <i>definitively</i> wrong!<p>That's pretty good for an awkward introvert.
I like this a lot. I'll add a few of my own points too (though I think Zach's are great):<p>1. Practice, practice, practice. Now, I'm a hypocrite for saying this because I do tons of speaking engagements with little or no practice (which is a combination of hubris and the fact that I'm often pegged to do stuff at the last minute). Still, if you aren't comfortable speaking off the cuff or in front of a crowd, practice makes perfect.<p>Something I've often done is to do screen recordings like Zach says -- but instead of doing them of the talk live, I do them before the presentation. The advantage here is that I can practice what I want to say, listen back to my cadence and then adjust and readjust if necessary. By the third or fourth time, I'm usually golden and I have a great master copy that I can try to mimic live on stage.<p>2. The better you get. -- This is true of almost anything, but it's especially true of speaking in public. You'll become more comfortable and natural on stage (or on camera) and have a much better sense of how to steer a talk, how to keep your energy up and how to come across as assured.<p>3. Record yourself in advance. For beginning public speakers, it's important that you record what you sound like so that you can adjust your speed (slow down or speed up) and cadence. It can be odd to hear yourself speak at first, but once you get used to it, you can adjust what you look and sound like. This is especially important if you are doing any media appearances.<p>4. Watch Yourself After -- If your speech or conference is being recorded (or if you are recording yourself) -- watch it back after. Again, it can be disconcerting but it's a great time to learn how you can improve next time. It's also a great way to see how you progress over time. If I look at my first CNN appearance in April of 2011 and my most recent appearance, it's like night and day. That helps me when I get up to present at an event, keynote a conference or do another media appearance.
Legendary senior partner at a law-firm sandwich seminar: "The most important thing about public speaking is to say it with <i>confidence</i>!"<p>Young associate (me), raising hand: "But what if you really <i>aren't</i> confident?"<p>Senior partner, fiercely: <i>"FAKE it!"</i>
"Talks should always be reactionary rather than anticipatory: they’re going to come off as more natural, more interesting, and above all, more valuable."<p>I agree with the sentiment here. My presentations are all about science and bioinformatics, and I find they go best when I have a story to tell. The audience loves to hear stories, especially when they can experience the aha! moment themselves before I get to the end of the story. It's a much better story if the project is almost complete rather than mostly unfinished.<p>As a minor aside, being a grumpy old guy, I would suggest that rather than "reactionary" (which means something altogether different than what I understood Zach to be saying), the proper term might be "retrospective" and paired with "prospective". I misused "reactionary" myself in younger days and still cringe when I think about it. Strange word indeed.
For those that do much public speaking there's an interesting article on rhetoric here <a href="http://www.european-rhetoric.com/rhetoric-101/modes-persuasion-aristotle/" rel="nofollow">http://www.european-rhetoric.com/rhetoric-101/modes-persuasi...</a><p>In a nutshell For communicating a message Pathos(emotive "Be Excited") is more important then logos(the words). Ethos(Ethics, character) is more important then Pathos.<p>Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. Persuasion is achieved by the speaker’s personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.
-Aristotle 1356a 2,3
"Talks should always be reactionary rather than anticipatory: they’re going to come off as more natural, more interesting, and above all, more valuable."<p>I think that's not true at all. There is room for both. I would say do not mix them. Talks can either share what's been done or share what can be from a visionary perspective.
Great post.
I used to often speak publicly. Last week I gave my first talk in years, to a large crowd. I was nervous because of how long has passed since I've last done it, but then I remembered my old habit. Before my talks I used to spend time with the conference goers in the hall, just chatting with them about whatever comes up. This seems to play a trick on the mind, making me feel like I'm speaking to friends rather than a faceless crowd. It worked last week as well. I highly recommend trying it out.
I would give serious consideration to taking an Improv Comedy class. If you can't, I'd like to share the concept of "Yes, and--"<p>Invariably something will go wrong during one of your presentations.<p>A slide will look funny.
There will be a weird noise from outside.
An audience member will say something strange.<p>The idea behind "Yes,and-ing" in improv is basically you treat every single thing as if it were planned and part of what you were doing, rather than negating it or ignoring it, which is dishonest and creates a disconnect.<p>I've given three presentations in my life (all this year) and each time something went wrong I ran with it and the audience responded very positively. My slide about "Internal Leaks" was missing the first two letters. Second time public speaking. Crap.<p>Instead of negating ("Oh this was supposed to say Internal"), I Yes-And'ed.<p>"Up next, a very important problem, Ternal Leaks." And I then verbally chopped off the first two letters of the next slides (verbally), my name, my company name, and closed with "Anks, I hope you enjoyed it."<p>(Yes, it's a little corny, but it breaks the wall between audience and speaker. I find, in life, if you make someone really laugh, even if it's just once, everything else works out.)
Be excited about what you're presenting is key. You have to engage people through your excitement and by cuing off what they react to.<p>Many times I find myself including the audience feedback into the presentation in terms of spending time on certain points that get the most reaction.<p>The author is dead on about the questions, though they don't have to be after the presentation is over.
I had a laptop hard lock in the middle of a talk once. That was fun. For the record, I handled it by immediately swapping out my laptop for the session runner's (can't risk it happening 2x during the talk), my slides were online and I just re-downloaded them and tried to go forward losing as little time as possible.
An obvious thing that took me a little too many talks to figure out, is to say "Thanks" when you're done. The audience wants to applaude, but the speaker has to initiate it. It always gets weird if the speaker goes to Q&A without it. Do we clap now? Later?
This blog has a ton underlying something I think of each time I go into a large presentation - be a rock star!<p>I realize that's oversimplifying it a bit, but if you think about presenting there are many items that do coincide: know your material in and out, think about your audience, bring the enthusiasm...etc. I realize not every presentation is going to be rock star material, but if nothing else it makes me strive to elevate what I am discussing and has given me something more to strive for whenever delivering material to a larger audience.
"Most conferences are a crap shoot when it comes to video. Half the time they won’t record your talk, and the other half of the time it may take months before your talk is published.<p>Something I’ve been doing recently is making a screen recording of my talks using QuickTime on my Mac."<p>This is really true, and really good advice. Organizers have a lot on their hands leading up to a conference, and, after, getting recordings posted languishes until they manage to recover enough of their personal lives to start ramping up for the next.<p>I've had several instances where I've given a talk, been very happy with the response, and then realized that I had no way to share it with a wider audience except trundling off to the next conference. Next time, I'm making my peace with a screen recording app.
I've always been bad at speaking (all my experiences were in school, so far... Not really "public"). But my one really good presentation happened in college. I'd stayed up pretty late the night before finishing the thing along with a handout we were required to give to the class (also my notes), which I was going to print off in the library before class.<p>Went to bed and next thing I knew my alarm was buzzing and class had just started. I had time to throw on pants, jog to class and immediately start talking about the French horn; no notes or props. I didn't have time to be nervous or worry, and was just genuinely engaged in the topic and it went great.
I find that engaging the audience into a back-and-forth has been very successful for me, and I get more positive feedback on the talks afterwards, too.
Exceptional advance. Thanks.<p>I would add that one should not try to get excited about a topic that does not excite you. Authenticity is important. Rather, give talks about topics that you are excited about.
The title is a little misleading: they do tell you all these things and more if you don't rely on blog posts that will unavoidably focus on a couple of things and go for a good book.
Yesterday's episode of "Back to Work" went over public speaking and confidence as well -- it's definitely worth a listen:<p><a href="http://5by5.tv/b2w/72" rel="nofollow">http://5by5.tv/b2w/72</a>
mm Nothing at all about the art of rhetoric and how to do public speaking well though you could try watching<p><a href="http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-art-of-rhetoric" rel="nofollow">http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-art-of-rhet...</a>