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En provenance du cours de National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery

29 notes

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery

29 notes

Cours 3 sur 4 dans Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

Mumbling, stumbling, worrying, trembling, sweating and fearing are the outcomes of the low delivery skills. In this course, we are not going to teach you how to replicate the best bits and traits of the acknowledged speakers. Dumb replication of someone’s successful behavior may help you only to an extent. That extent is the situation. When you are facing a different context, a different situation such “skills” might not work at all. Instead, we try to get to the core issues that stand behind the troubles with delivery and start honing your skills from there. Topics we are going to cover: 1) Preparation — how to deal with fear and anxiety 2) Voice, pace and gesture — how to speak, stand and move. 3) Getting live feedback — how to interact with the audience. 4) Taking Q&A and Improvisation So don’t meddle, start the course and make your delivery better.

À partir de la leçon

Part 1: Preparation

This week is about preparation. Preparation is the key to dealing with anxiety and fear, various technical, semi-technical faults and live mistakes. We will cover the proper ways to rehearse, ways to deal with faults and mistakes.

Worst fears of public speaking8:21

How to fight anxiety?7:02

If I don’t have anything to say5:21

If something goes wrong12:02

If I forget something8:56

If I make a mistake6:39

Status anxiety6:22

Rencontrer les enseignants

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

What if something will go wrong?

Well, truth is it might.

Statistically speaking, it will.

If your career is long enough,

sooner or later your projector will explode.

Now, good news is,

this is perfectly normal.

All those technical troubles you might experience, this is okay.

I mean this is not your fault.

So, I think this is where this advice about staying calm actually does work.

If you just stay calm and even do nothing, you will get help.

The audience will help you,

the organizers will help you.

So just don't panic.

Seriously. I mean I know clickers jam,

batteries in your microphones die,

your projectors display your slides in some weird colors.

And, of course, who forgot about the all good blue screen of death.

Stuff happens but the mantra is,

let's talk about the blue screen of death thing first,

the mantra is stay cool.

This is normal. It's a computer.

Computers crash.

This is like their essence in a way.

So this is not your fault.

Just there's nothing to be ashamed, seriously.

And you don't need to apologize.

Seriously. Just, "Okay, it crashed.

Sorry, folks, I need to reboot that one."

And then just go and reboot that one.

If it doesn't come up,

well, that's a bit of a problem.

And in that case,

you need to have your slides somewhere in the cloud,

on a thumb drive maybe,

but preferably I mean in 2017 in a cloud.

Google Drive, Dropbox, Apple,

iCloud, what's it called now.

So do have your slides somewhere in the cloud.

That way you can open it magically on some other device and just carry on.

And, finally, if you're really paranoid,

come with a printout.

I've actually seen people coming to important conference events with

a stack of slides and in case my projector dies I know what to do.

I can continue using printouts even without my slides.

So, be prepared.

The Boy Scout motto, I guess.

Next thing, clickers. Now, clickers can be a bit troublesome,

but this is no excuse for not having your own clicker.

Do have your own clicker.

I know many venues right now have clickers,

but this way you will have a spare clicker.

So come with your own clicker.

A couple of years back, I bought this nylon mesh case,

which is semi transparent from Muji, I think,

and I put there some stuff I thought I might need somewhere on the road, maybe.

So, yes, a couple of dongles, a couple cables,

a couple of pens, some nail clippers,

earplugs, and, yes, a clicker.

And this is perhaps the thing I use the most because of my profession, obviously.

So carry a clicker with yourself. Clickers are great.

From Logitech or Keystone,

I don't know, any actually would do.

So if your clicker is not responding,

the first reaction would be to just wait a second, seriously.

Sometimes it's not the clicker,

sometimes the issue is with the computer,

sometimes the animation is too slow.

So just wait for a couple of seconds.

The next thing you need to do,

you need to admit the problem.

You need to say, "Oops,

folks, I'm having some troubles with my clicker."

And then you go and stand behind the computer and hit the space bar.

And if the slide doesn't change,

then this is a problem with the computer.

You probably need to reboot it.

If it does change then,

all right, you have a problem with your clicker.

So the next thing you do,

you reset the thing.

There's a reset button somewhere here and you just switch it off and then on again.

Seriously, it's a computer.

It has its own little operating system. Computers crash.

This reset thing really helped me a couple of times.

So try it.

It might as well work.

And, finally, talk to the organizers.

Sometimes they have a spare clicker.

But even if they don't,

you can just stay chained to that laptop of yours and just hit space bar.

Really, it doesn't matter.

Just stay calm.

I invite you to watch this video of Steve Jobs about

10 years ago having this exact problem with his clicker.

And the first thing he does,

he says to the audience,

"The clicker is not working."

Then he says, apparently,

to someone behind the stage,

"The clicker is not working."

Then he cracks a joke, the audience laughs.

They always laugh at those situations because tension is quite high.

And then he proceeds to tell a story which buys him some time.

So do have a story to tell.

A story about some technical difficulties which might or might not be,

like in Steve's case, might not be related to the problem at hand.

So take it from Steve.

Have a backup, have some material,

the only purpose of which is to buy you some time.

Microphones. Now, sometimes batteries die,

sometimes they just stop working with no apparent reason.

Now, once again, remember this is not your fault, especially with microphones.

It's not your microphone.

So talk to the organizers.

"If you have a microphone," just typically ask some organizers

around because this is a technical complex environment.

Ask for another microphone.

And if they don't bring you one,

remember that for a group of like 75 people,

you can go without a microphone.

Just ask the audience,

"Can you hear me back there?"

And they say, "Yeah, we can."

And then just go on,

for a group of 75 people in rooms with decent acoustics.

I think you can go even for the groups of 100 people.

Even if you don't have a strong voice, seriously,

people will make an effort to hear you because they actually sympathize you.

They can empathize, I think,

would be a better word.

They understand what it feels like when your microphone falls apart.

So don't worry, stay calm,

ask for another microphone,

or just go without a microphone if the audience is relatively small.

Finally, projectors.

Now, this is the worst part with all because projectors,

in fact, could be quite tricky.

So do arrive early.

You might need 10 to 15 minutes to connect your laptop to the projector.

It happens less often with Windows machines and more often with Macintoshes,

but really doesn't matter.

Do arrive early, test your slides,

put your slides up on the screen,

go sit in the last row,

pretend like you have a vision which is

slightly worse than the actual vision that you have.

And if you realize that the last row cannot see your slides,

well, maybe you need to do some emergency reshuffling,

maybe you don't need to show that particular slide.

You should be testing with your busiest slides obviously.

And if you're on a Mac,

you need to carry a dongle.

Buy a spare dongle. I have two.

One at my home,

the other one I always carry with myself.

You never know when you need it.

And, once again, have a plan.

What are you going to do if the projector falls apart,

if the projector explodes?

Maybe you can go with your laptop,

maybe you have printouts, whatever.

Do have a plan, come prepared.

Once again, if something happens, just stay calm.

Seriously. Your response defines the audience's response.

They have no clue how to react with those kinds of things.

If you stay calm, they stay calm.

If you crack a joke,

they laugh because, once again,

the tension is very high and there's a tendency to serve to

diffuse the tension and laughter works that way.

There are three ways you can react to, well, unpredicted things.

You can acknowledge them.

You can say, "Well, yes, that just happened."

You can negate them.

You can pretend like nothing had happened or you can ignore.

That's not a choice, obviously.

It's like just something falls out of your attention temporarily.

And the last two things is what gets you into trouble, in my experience, that is.

Very rarely I saw people acknowledging stuff and then not being able to deal with them,

but I've seen a couple of times people negating things like pretending nothing happened.

And this looks really bad.

I invite you to watch this video.

This is Steven Sinofsky,

Microsoft's VP. It was a couple of years back.

He was presenting the first version of their tablet called Surface,

and that thing froze in the middle of the presentation.

And what he should have done,

he should have looked at the tablet,

looked at the audience and said,

"Oh my god, it froze.

Not today. Okay, wait a second.

I have an extra one."

And then just go and take his back up,

which he did, eventually,

because he was forced to.

But he spent 10 very painful seconds.

I mean watch it. It's a pain to watch.

Very painful seconds trying to pretend like nothing is happening.

So, please do admit the obvious.

If whatever it is that you are presenting froze,

just say, "Oops, I'm sorry.

I need to do something about it."

And then go ahead and do something about it.

And, contrast, watch the reaction of Steve to the almost exactly the same events.

Steve just doesn't care.

Steve is a cool guy.

If he cannot turn the camera on,

he'll just throw the camera into the audience and ask for help,

and he actually gets help.

People are willing to help.

So don't worry, admit the obvious, ask for help.

Acknowledging means saying yes,

and this is what we need to do about it.

When I first started doing seminars,

the first thing I was asking

my audience to do for me was to switch off their cell phones.

This was like the second slide I had in my presentation,

the first one being the title for it.

And I do not do this anymore.

I actually wait till the phone rings,

which happens very rarely, by the way.

But if it does,

well, I have a routine, all right?

I have a dance that I do,

and I actually attract a lot of attention to this particular instance,

and I have my sermon about cell phones.

So be prepared, expect the unexpected,

acknowledge things, stay cool.

Stuff will happen, but the mantra is,

this is perfectly normal.

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