10 Tips On How To Rock Your Audience With Your Presentation Skills
Take some pointers from the entertainment business to keep your students' attention to the final bell – and beyond…
- by Nigel Barlow
In our digital age minds are easily distracted and divided, making it all the more vital for us to find new ways of capturing and holding the attention of our students and fellow teachers.
However, traditional speaking and presentation skills don’t seem to work very well. I know, because I wrote most of my book sitting in the audience, with presenters who didn’t fully engage me.
I speak for a living to educational and business groups around the world, but being a listener made me realise how much those of us who teach can benefit from being on the receiving end more often. I was also struck by the difference between the response to a formal talk, and the fully engaged participation of the crowd at a great musical performance. In the former, a passive dullness often hangs in the air; in the latter, there’s rapturous involvement.
So what if we could apply some of the methods that make live music so memorable and moving to the art of speaking? That’s exactly what I’ve done in Rock Your Presentation, to help you give talks and lessons that are more compelling, engaging and memorable.
By that, I don’t mean that your students will all be waving their mobiles in the air and singing along as you chant your introduction to inorganic chemistry or the rise of Nazism; rather, that great material can be murdered by mediocre and uninspired presenting. The equation for success is style plus substance – it’s ‘both/and’, not ‘either/or’.
So here’s a top 10 of ways to accomplish this, which are typical of the ones I speak and coach about.
1. Hook them The first thing the neocortex of your listeners’ brains is registering is, ‘Do I care?’ So make them care at the outset – with a compelling story or example, a provocative thought or question.
It’s like hearing the opening bars of a great song: immediately you filter out everything else and are drawn in. The DNA of your talk should be in there in your first utterances.
2. Involve them Time after time I see speakers ask the dumbest question there is to involve the listener: “Any questions?” This will almost certainly create a stunned silence, followed by a certain amount of pressure from the teacher.
Much better is, “What questions?” It’s open-ended, not closed, and implies that there are some. Even better is to get people to talk to their neighbour for a couple of minutes to discuss their questions – then you will have lots of them.
3. Be a protest singer! We all know that the subject we were most inspired by at school was down to the passion and enthusiasm of the teacher. Physics was a closed book to me until young Mr Hargreaves showed us his personal moon shot clippings and told us about his early awakening to the joys of the subject.
He was ‘pro-testing’– telling us all he was for, while also sharing his frustrations with where research had been blocked and underfunded. He was an enthusiast in the real sense of the word: en theos, from the Greek for ‘in spirit’, or ‘in God’.
4. Strong choruses Often, the only part of a song we recall is the chorus. Unless we are very familiar with the number we tend to hum the rest, but the chorus is unforgettable! I encourage speakers I’m coaching to be clear about what their essential message is, assuming the class is going to forget most of the other material. Reducing it to tweet size is a good exercise.
Of course, unlike a song you’re going to have to vary the words, but the skill behind a memorable talk is to keep reinforcing your central theme – this your chorus, the bit you don’t want them to forget.
5. Go ‘unplugged’ Musicians often touch an audience by going acoustic, not electric. Here, the music metaphor suggests not hiding behind your PowerPoint or whiteboard, and instead breaking what actors call the invisible ‘Fourth Wall’ between you and your audience.
You could even sit down and open up a dialogue with someone in the audience. A particularly inspiring neurologist at Oxford University does this with his medical school students to great effect – it becomes a conversation, rather than a monologue.
6. Paint word pictures What switches listeners off a talk is too many abstractions. We recall images better than words, so think faces, not names.
So when I’m asked to talk about Innovative Cultures in education and business, my starter mental picture is to say: “Build a garage!” Why? This sweaty, intimate environment is exactly where innovative companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, and Oracle were born.
Of course, what I’m really saying is mentally build a garage of risk-taking, prototyping and experimentation. The image sticks with people. In the same vein, take some of the abstractions in your own lecture and turn them into memorable and visceral images, stories or examples.
7. Go minor It’s conventionally thought that a minor key in music is sad. It can be, but it also causes you to reflect and makes you more pensive.
In a talk, this means having some passages where you are more reflective, perhaps even expressing doubts and concerns. It helps to slow down, and if you have strong emotions on the subject, don’t be afraid to express them. It will draw the listener in.
8. Call and response When you hear a speech by Dr Martin Luther King, you hear those present responding like a gospel choir to his visionary words. They are effectively saying ‘hallelujah!’ – his call, their response.
Okay, it’s surely a fantasy to have your science class respond with the same fervour to your description of photosynthesis, but the same principle applies – you need to hear their voices. “What does and doesn’t make sense here?” is a good question to stimulate a response. Don’t try to fill the silence by answering your own ‘call’; it only works if they respond.
9. Press the pause button Just as music is the combination of sound and intervals of silence, so it is with speaking. Most nervous speakers gabble; the idea is clear in their own head, so they assume that by rattling it off the class will miraculously get it. You are not ‘covering’ a topic, like covering a syllabus – you are putting over your thoughts at a pace and rhythm the listener has time to digest and connect with.
So use silence judiciously, which means more often than you think is necessary! Pause often, make eye contact with the group and vary your pace of delivery. ‘Mono-tonous’ does what it says.
10. Powerful climax People remember first and last things, so never finish on a Q&A. Whatever inspiration you have built up will fizzle away.
Instead, have a strong story, revelation, example or callback to your starting theme; a thought that will leave the audience buzzing, or at the very least, thinking.
So next time you have to give a talk, whether it be a five-minute briefing to staff or a school-wide address to students, just think what it would take to ‘rock it up’ a little. Make your delivery more lively, involving and passionate; your audience will love you for it.
Nigel Barlow is a speaker on innovation in business and education. His book, Rock Your Presentation is available now and contains practical and inspiring ideas for bringing lessons and lectures to life.
For more information, visit nigelbarlow.com or follow @Nigelmaybarlow
