My top 5 tips for developing a high-stakes presentation

One of my big clients recently featured me in an interview on their employee intranet. The questions they asked were fun to answer — so I thought I'd share with you these 5 tips I shared with them. 

1. If you aren’t a little afraid, you aren't saying anything interesting.

Every speaker I’ve worked with whose talk has spread like wildfire has had one thing in common: they were afraid to say what they were about to say. Part of my job is to coach people through that fear and ensure that the message is sound and will be received well. We live in a world where people are bombarded with information and messaging on a daily basis. If you want them to listen to you, you have to be interesting. And you get to be interesting by being real, human, and vulnerable. The secret sauce of great talks is taking a big idea and wrapping your personal stories around it. 

2. Be careful about soliciting feedback.

One mistake I see speakers make time and time again is that they try to incorporate everybody’s feedback into their talk. If you do that, you end up building a talk that pleases everyone but impresses no one. Instead, get really clear on who your audience is. Maybe pick one person whose mind you want to change by giving this talk. And keep them in focus while you build the talk. 

When you do ask for feedback, be intentional about who you ask and smart about how you interpret their feedback. If you’re having trouble deciding whose feedback you should trust, poll your friends about their Myers Briggs personality type and look for an ENFJ. They are notorious for understanding people, what fascinates and interests them, and how to get them to do something. Some famous ENFJs: Martin Luther King, Jr.; Sheryl Sandberg; Maya Angelou; Neil deGrasse Tyson; and Oprah. I also happen to be an ENFJ, so if you want some honest feedback, ask me. :)

3. Appeal to their senses.

Because PowerPoint has dominated business culture since the late-80s, we place way too much importance on slides and visuals and forget that people have 4 other senses that we need to awaken. The more senses you engage, the more people will remember what you say. Smell, taste, touch, sound… explore creative ways to weave these things into your talk. If you can’t literally engage their senses, then use words to describe your own sensory experiences. Is there an important story you are sharing in your talk? If not, there should be. And it should include real details about how things looked, felt, tasted, smelled, or sounded.

4. Start strong.

The first minute of your presentation is crucial. In this minute people are deciding whether they like you, whether they care about what you are saying, and whether they want to click away from your video and go look at something else that’s more interesting. Make sure the first few sentences of your talk are not boring. And get straight to your why.  If you tell me WHY you do something (instead of starting with what or how), you make me care about what you care about. And that’s powerful because then I’ll keep listening.

5. You don’t have to be perfect.

One of the things I love about TED is that it’s given a platform to people who are not professional speakers. You don’t have to be Tony Robbins to be heard. It used to be that the people who had great ideas stood behind the curtain while somebody else got up on stage to talk about it. But we now live in a world where people want to hear about the idea from the idea-makers themselves. Your audience doesn’t expect you to be perfect and polished. In fact, we’ve come to mistrust messages that are too polished. Be real. Be gritty. Make mistakes. And trust that people are rooting for you. If Jennifer Lawrence can fall on the stairs at the Oscars and get a standing ovation, there’s no mistake you can’t recover from unless it involves not being true to yourself.

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I also love the tips that Gina Barrett shared with the TED community. I highly recommend reading Gina's tips if you're serious about presenting — she's been a speaker coach for TED for many years.

Slides are not about you

I was going back and forth with a client today about what words should go on a slide. She was arguing for one sentence and I was arguing for another. And she said to me, "Oh, you're thinking about the audience. I was thinking about me."

We both chuckled. But her realization was also a realization for me. 

I'm always putting myself in the seat of an audience member and I assume others are doing that, too. But I think it's tempting when you are the presenter to think first about what you need on the slide to remember what you're going to say. I call this using slides as crutches. You can do that, but it's at the cost of giving your audience the experience they deserve.

Thanking the team

I often work with speakers giving a presentation about a project that involves a bigger team. In nearly every case the speaker proposes including a slide with the team members listed on it, a list of committees or departments associated with the project, etc. I always counsel against this and am usually met with resistance. I think that resistance is noble: we want to give credit to others and not make it look like we did all the work ourselves. I get that.

But it is far more powerful to tell a story about your project team. Tell the audience what makes this team special, what's the thread that binds everyone together (high-performing teams usually have strong shared values). That story honors the team in a much more memorable way than a list on a slide.

For a compelling illustration of this, watch an awards show like the Oscars and notice that 90% of the acceptance speeches are boring, rattled-off lists of names we don't even know. What a missed opportunity. The best acceptance speeches use storytelling to talk about what we value.

Stop starting off your presentation with a question for the audience

I have a big pet peeve — when a speaker begins their presentation by asking the audience a question. Something like, "Show of hands, how many of you....blah blah blah?"

Has any great speech EVER started off this way?

No. No it hasn't.

It's a tired gimmick that's intended to make the speaker look like they care about the audience, are good at being "interactive", or have a clever point to prove.

It doesn't work, and if you choose to start this way you're wasting those precious first few seconds. The few seconds where the audience is deciding whether or not they care about what you have to say.

Start by saying something that matters. Something you believe with conviction that will make people sit forward in their seats. Authentic stories laced with values will always trump contrived introductions.

Better Presentation Tools: Haiku Deck

I recently worked with a speaker who built his own slides using Haiku Deck. I admit I hadn't heard of this tool before he mentioned it. I also admit that I get tired of people using tools like Prezi to make their presentations look cool without putting the effort where it really belongs: on their content.

But Haiku Deck surprised me. If PowerPoint is an outdated tank with way too many stupid buttons, Haiku Deck is a sleek Mini Cooper that is fun to drive. It encourages you to use big photos and few words, which I love.

Sometimes we see all of the bullet-filled template slides in PowerPoint and think we need to fill them up so we look smart enough. Haiku Deck pares it down to what matters and lets the focus stay on you.