Chapter 10
Seven Deadly Sins That Will Turn Off Audiences
“An error doesn’t become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.”
—Orlando A. Battista
In this book, we have covered (1) why you need to be a great presenter in order to be viewed as the expert, (2) how to design clear and concise persuasive presentations, (3) how to add impact to your presentations, (4) where to speak, and (5) how to generate additional revenue when you speak. In this chapter, we’ll cover a few traps that presenters often fall into that can really turn off the audience. The reason why I have waited until the end of the book to cover these “sins” is that if you do the things that I’ve outlined in the earlier chapters, you will easily avoid each of these sins.
We’ll start with the least offensive to audiences and work our way up to the absolute biggest mistake that presenters can make.
SIN #1: GOING OVER TIME WITHOUT PERMISSION
Going over the allotted time can cause a number of challenges for both you and any other speakers, and for every minute that you go over, you can subtract an equal amount of morale and enthusiasm for your topic. The way that most presenters prepare for their speeches actually causes this challenge. Most presenters have either memorized a speech or will prepare a bullet point for every idea that they intend to cover. As they deliver their presentations, if they elaborate on any specific point, they will have to make up the time difference somewhere else in the presentation. Often, presenters in these situations compensate by either skipping points or breezing through the latter part of the presentation. If the presenter gets too far off track, it can be impossible to make up the time.
However, presenters who cover only a few key concepts and use solid evidence such as stories, examples, and analogies to explain each point as we’ve discussed in this book can hit an allotted time period almost exactly. If the presenter finds that the presentation is running short, he or she can elaborate a little and give more details in the stories or examples being used. If the presenter is running long, more abbreviated versions of the stories can be given, and some of the evidence can be cut altogether. For instance, if you have five key points in your entire presentation and you prepare three solid pieces of evidence for each of the five points, you have the ability to use only two of the three pieces of evidence that you prepared for your latter points if you start to run long.
Speakers who are able to hit an exact time period without delivering a “stump speech” (one that you have practiced over and over and over to hit an exact time) are extremely rare. That is why when you attend conventions and banquets with a number of different speakers during the day, those who speak late in the day are almost always off their outlined agenda (usually running long). When you practice and master the presentation structure that we outlined in this book, and you learn to hit your time frame exactly, you will instantly move into an elite class of highly sought after presenters. You also gain an incredible amount of respect from your audience.
SIN #2: USING USELESS WORDS
Err, uhm, and you know are what we call word-whiskers, and when a speaker is nervous, these filler words can become somewhat annoying if they overshadow the actual presentation. These word-whiskers can hurt your chances of being seen as the expert, but only if the occurrence of these filler words is excessive.
For instance, a few years back after Barack Obama was elected president, Hillary Clinton became his secretary of state, and Caroline Kennedy (John F. Kennedy’s daughter) threw her hat into the ring to fill Clinton’s now-vacant Senate seat. She was the crowd favorite until she did her first national TV interview. In the first 3 minutes of her interview, she said, “Ya know” more than 40 times, and it just got worse from there. Shortly after the interview after experiencing days of ridicule, she removed her name from consideration entirely. So, yes, these word-whiskers can affect an audience’s perception of you.
However, the more you focus on the filler words, the more you will actually use them. Whatever you focus on, you will get more of. So if you focus on not saying filler words, you will likely end up saying them more often. What’s more, if you eliminate these words entirely, you will sound kind of odd. Many toasting clubs and adult presentation courses will have someone who counts uhms in the group, which is a huge mistake. The uhms are a symptom, so if you just try to mask the symptom, it’s like seeing the check engine light on your car dashboard and deciding to eliminate the light by crawling under the dashboard and snipping the wire to turn it off. Sure, you don’t see the light anymore, but the engine still needs repair. Uhms work the same way. You can train yourself to avoid the uhms if you spend a lot of time and effort, but it is a lot easier to just eliminate the cause.
The biggest cause of word-whiskers is bullet points. Specifically, this occurs when a presenter has 10 bullet points on one slide and each bullet point is just a couple of words that the presenter is using as a prompt to remember details about what he or she wants to talk about. Each time the presenter reads the next bullet point, he or she has to pause and remember what the heck it was that he or she wanted to say about that point. Nervousness shoots up, and the word-whiskers appear. “Uh, this bullet point was . . . uh . . .”
So what is the solution? Fewer bullet points supported by a story or example will always do the trick. Stories, especially personal experiences, are easy to deliver, because the presenter just plays the video in his or her head and describes what happened. Since this delivery is so much easier, the nervousness drops dramatically, and so does the number of errs and uhms.
SIN #3: SPEAKING IN A MONOTONE VOICE
Presenters without emotion are often described as being monotone or boring. Again, this is a symptom of a poorly designed presentation. If the presenter has all of his or her ideas on a PowerPoint slide and the delivery is in a read . . . click . . . read . . . click style, then it is much more difficult to add energy or enthusiasm to the presentation.
Next time you are at a bar or a party, look around the room and watch what everyone is doing. You will likely see people grouped together around tables. The energy around the tables will often be fairly high because the people around these tables will be building rapport with one another by sharing stories. Sometimes the stories will be funny. Sometimes the stories will be shocking. Sometimes the stories will be sad. But the stories will almost always have some emotion attached to them. As you look around the bar or party, you will probably not describe any of the speakers as boring, and none of them will likely have a monotone delivery. Interestingly, no one ever brings a slide show or projector to the bar for help, and no one ever has to rely on notes.
When you are communicating with your audience, use the techniques that work with your friends and add in stories or some of the other impact ideas that I covered earlier in the book. This will make the monotone voice go away.
SIN #4: SPEAKING SHOPTALK
Shoptalk is semantics related to a specific industry. If you have ever watched a television hospital drama, you’ll hear a lot of shoptalk, like EKG, MRI, angioplasty, ABG, CBC, stent, and many more. Accountants use terms such as accrual method, double entry, net income, IBIT, and balance sheet. Engineers have really cool terms such as apron, backwater, bedding, CMP, cutoff wall, and directional drilling. Even restaurants have terminology; in fact, companies like The Waffle House poke fun at restaurant terminology by having customers order their hash browns using semantics like smothered and covered (my favorite), but other restaurants have terms like bev nap, Cambro, dupe, in the weeds, and even stretch it. The point is that every industry has its slang or acronyms, but these terms can be very confusing to new people, to audience members outside of the industry, and, often, to the very people who the presenter would expect to know the terms.
Even if the people in your audience know the terms, they will still often have to pause, think about the terms, and then jump back into the presentation. This means, for just a second, you will lose your audience if you use shoptalk during your presentation. A little will be overlooked, but if you rely heavily on confusing terms to explain your points, you will likely turn off the audience.
So why do people do it? Why do presenters load up their presentations with complicated terms? Most often, if presenters think that the audience will be judging their intelligence (whether the audience actually is or not), the presenters will try to make themselves sound smarter by using what they think are intelligent terms in the presentation. A lot of new speakers will fall into this trap. Also speakers who present to audiences who have education credentials will fall into this trap. Presenters in these cases will often think, “I can’t let the audience figure out just how much smarter they all are than I am,” and will compensate with intelligent-sounding shoptalk.
If you find yourself falling into this trap, try to think about the entire presentation process differently. If people are taking time out of their busy day to listen to you, it is because you have information that they either want or need. For the topic that you are presenting on, you are the expert, not the audience. You have the cookie. So you don’t need to impress the audience with your “Harvard words.” You’ll have much better success if you use your content and delivery style, instead of industry semantics, to impress the audience.
By the way, not to keep harping on stories and examples, but even if you use shoptalk, if you use a real-life story to explain your point, your audience will still understand you perfectly. (Are you starting to realize just why stories and examples are so important to the success of a presentation?)
SIN #5: SPEAKING WHILE THE AUDIENCE IS READING YOUR SLIDE
Overly complicated or busy slides cause this challenge. If you have too much information on a slide, or if your slide shows a complicated chart or graph, your audience will stop focusing on what you are saying the moment you show the slide. The easy solution is to insert only visual aids into your presentation that add clarity and help you better explain the point you are making. If you have charts or graphs, rather than putting them on slides, it’s often better to create a handout for your audience or an oversized board as a visual aid.
When one of our Fearless Presentations instructors teaches a two-day class, that instructor will use no more than 20 slides for the entire two-day presentation. Participants in the class learn how to give entire presentations using only one concise slide as a visual aid. When I teach a two-day Entrepreneur Boot Camp, I will often use only about 25 slides total, and a number of those slides are used for funny videos that we show during breaks. Remember that the PowerPoint slide show is not your presentation. It should be a visual aid for your presentation.
SIN #6: READING THE ENTIRE SLIDE OR VISUAL AID TO THE AUDIENCE
The more PowerPoint focused your presentation is, the less your audience will see you as the expert. Remember that your experience related to the topic is your key to people seeing you as a go-to person in the industry. So if you just quote statistics from a PowerPoint slide, the audience will think, “Why didn’t the speaker just send us the slide show? I can read the slides myself.” Again, if you design your slide show well, this problem will go away automatically.
SIN #7: DUMPING DATA ON THE AUDIENCE
The absolute biggest complaint that audiences make about presenters is that the presenter gave too much information in too short a period of time. Remember that the audience is going to remember or retain only three to five key points; so if you give 10 points, 20 points, 30 points, or 150 points in one sitting, you will lose the audience almost immediately. The biggest thing to keep in mind about data dumping is that it doesn’t matter how funny you are, how entertaining you are, how interesting you are, or how interactive you are; if you give your audience too much data or too much information, you will lose them somewhere along the way.
Most people aren’t aware that the keynote speaker at the ceremony where President Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address was Edward Everett, a well-known and renowned speaker of his time. He spoke for 2 hours and delivered inspirational rhetoric that engaged the crowd. Shortly after Everett finished his keynote speech, Lincoln stood up and delivered the Gettysburg Address, which took just under 2 minutes and is probably the most quoted speech in American history. Everett took to the stage one more time as Lincoln sat back down, and legend has it that he turned to Lincoln and said, “Mr. President, you said more in 2 minutes than I did in 2 hours.”
If you are a great presenter and you give your audience more than a few key points, then your audience may remember some of your content. But you as the presenter don’t have any control over which of your key points the audience remembers. By being concise and using the concepts I outlined in this book, you will be a much more successful presenter.
MASTER YOUR PRESENTATIONS AND AVOID THESE DEADLY SINS
If you want to master your presentations, just follow these presentation secrets, and you can’t lose.
- Start by identifying what your audience wants and needs.
- Create a title (topic) that states a result that your audience wants.
- Limit your presentation to three to five key points.
- Add stories, analogies, and other impact ideas to prove each of your key points.
- Now design your slide show as a way to add clarity.
If you follow these simple presentation secrets, you will eliminate each of the seven deadly sins of presentations and will move into an elite segment of presenters who can inform, persuade, and entertain their audiences every single time.