Thank you Timo – you’re a star!

Go to Timo’s PowerPoint Twitter page to download the add-in. Open PowerPoint, and click on the Add-in ribbon. Then click on Autotweet – highlighted in this screenshot:

You’ll get this Dialog box:

Then type your tweet into the Notes pane of your PowerPoint slide. Type [twitter] before your tweet and [/twitter] after your tweet. Then when you click onto that slide, that tweet will get posted to Twitter.

This new tool is in alpha mode – meaning it’s not yet been thoroughly tested (Timo is looking for testers). In my first test it worked beautifully.

What about Keynote users?

You’ve already got an add-in. It’s called Keynote Tweet and works in much the same way.

Why would you want to do this?

There’s lots of tweeting going on at conferences. But often the presenter is the only one not taking part. This way you can be present in the backchannel of your presentation. And you can make it easy for your audience to retweet the main points of your presentation (make sure your tweet is easily retweetable by allowing space for “RT @yourusername” within the 140 characters).

One warning – create two versions of your PowerPoint show – one with the tweets and one without so that you can practice with your slides without sending multiple tweets several times over.

Related posts:

1. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter
2. How to tweet during a presentation
3. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool

The advent of the backchannel is a tremendous opportunity for presenters. The backchannel is an online conversation that takes place at the same time as people are talking live. Audience participation didn’t use to scale easily beyond a small group. Now, the backchannel allows every audience member, whatever the size of the group, to be an active participant. However, if you plan to use a backchannel proactively in your presentation, it may be better to use a backchannel tool other than Twitter. This is because:

1. Twitter users won’t have to be concerned about overwhelming their followers with a series of presentation-specific tweets.
2. Anybody can access and contribute to the backchannel without having to register.

That makes the backchannel more inclusive – no Twitter-divide – and allows the backchannel to become a lot more intimate amongst conference attendees.

Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 has written a great account of using both Twitter and a no-registration backchannel tool, TodaysMeet, at the WebWise 2009 conference:

“Whereas Twitter provided the conference highlights to a wider audience, TodaysMeet allowed attendees to delve deeper into individual moments and questions.”

The other presentation-friendly backchannel tool I’m aware of is Backnoise (do tell me if you know of others). (You may have heard of Backnoise. It was used as a backchannel at the New Media Atlanta conference. There wasn’t a good fit between the speakers at the conference and the audience and the backchannel descended into snarky chaos.)

Review of TodaysMeet and Backnoise

Both TodaysMeet and Backnoise are ultra-easy to use. You go to the website, choose a name for your “room” and start chatting. That’s it.

There are other chatroom applications (Chatzy, Tinychat) but they have features which make them less presentation-friendly (eg: having to invite people to join by email) so I don’t recommend them.

Here’s a comparison of TodaysMeet and Backnoise:

TodaysMeet	Backnoise
Very easy to use	Easy to use
Twitter integration (introduced on 30 October)	Twitter integration
140 character limit	400 character limit
	Has “Buzzkill” function*
Have to put in a name (but you could put in an alias)	Can remain anonymous
	Can mute specific people from your own screen (other people will still see them)
Has a fullscreen display function	No display function but working on it
No archiving of content – but working on it	No archiving of content

*Update: Backnoise and Buzzkill

Initially the Buzzkill function on Backnoise could be used by anyone at any time to delete all the conversation content up to that point (and it still says this on the website). I didn’t get the point of this, and certainly thought it would be a disadvantage in using Backnoise as a constructive participative backchannel. Keith McGregor, the developer of Backnoise, has changed the way it works:

“Buzzkill allows a segment of the conversation to fade away. Repeated buzzkills by others fades the text further and further, until it vanishes. Each viewer gets a limited number of times they can buzzkill a conversation. This limits abuse by an individual. Collectively, however, the community of the conversation can fully mute portions”

This is definitely an improvement, although I’m still not sure how I would want to use this functionality in a presentation context. How do you think it could be used?

Which is best?

Now that both TodaysMeet and Backnoise have Twitter integration, TodaysMeet is the slightly better tool because of its fullscreen display.

9th November update: Charlie Osmond of www.freshnetworks.com has just let me know about using Google wave as a backchannel. Check out his post Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences.

Note: This is an excerpt from my forthcoming free eBook “How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels)”. If you’d like to know as soon as it’s released sign up here:

I’ll let you know when it’s released, and then when I update it. I won’t send you any other information or use your email in any other way.

Related posts:

1. 10 tools for presenting with Twitter
2. Should you display the live twitter stream on a large screen?
3. How to tweet during a presentation

Photo by Olly Barrett

This week I went to my first Pecha Kucha night in Wellington, New Zealand.

Pecha Kucha was developed as a presentation format to allow design and creative types to share their passions and show off their work. The format is very tight. You have to present with 20 slides and each slide is shown for 20 seconds. It has the great advantage of keeping presentations short and concise – perhaps accounting for it’s popularity around the world. However, it’s challenging to prepare a good Pecha Kucha presentation and even more so to deliver it well.

From my observations, here are my tips :

1. Have a theme

Photo by Meena Kadri

I get that this is not a standard business presentation where you would have a key message supported by three points. But nevertheless I think there should be a theme which ties it all together. The presentations that I saw which had a theme were far more effective. One in particular stands out. It was by Meena Kadri and was an exploration of the creativity of what she called “lo-fi” folk in India. We saw a series of stunning photographs but all tied together by the theme of the creativity and artistic flair of poor people.

Those that didn’t have a theme seemed like an unorganized slideshow “Oh here’s this piece I made…[waffle about it for 20 secs] and here’s something else I made”. If you’re an artist presenting at Pecha Kucha think of yourself as the curator of your slides – explain to us the ideas that bind them together or show us how your ideas developed from one piece to the next.

2. Plan your outline before the slides

Pecha Kucha does tend to revolve around the imagery, but that doesn’t mean the images should come first in your planning. Here’s my suggestion as to how to go about planning a Pecha Kucha presentation.

1. Plan your rough outline first focused on your theme

2. Storyboard the slides to fit with the outline

3. Plan and carefully time what you’ll say for each slide.

Because of the tight timing constraints I think you have to plan what you want to say more carefully than other presentations – there is no room for waffle. But avoid a script if you can.

Felix Jung has put together a most amazing and detailed guide How to make a Pecha Kucha presentation. This is a must-read if you’re doing a Pecha Kucha presentation.

3. Spend more than 20 seconds on a point

Garr Reynolds has commented that the format makes it difficult to go deep. I agree. Many of the presenters the night I went felt they could only spend 20 seconds on each “point” or “image”. That meant there was never enough time to fully develop a point. By contrast, Meena Kadri  sometimes developed a point over two to threes slides. The set of slides would show different perspectives of the same thing. For example:

• First slide – picture of two Indian brothers – she told us about two brothers who had a thriving business as artists. People came from far and wide to buy their art.
• Second slide – image of their art – they paint scenes from Bollywood movies – name them a scene and they can paint it.
• Third slide – zoom out to show that painting is on a mud flap of a truck!

4. It’s better to finish earlier than later

Many presenters found themselves overrunning the 20 seconds that they had for each slide. That meant they were still talking about a slide after it had left the screen.  The classic was a picture of a rather ordinary step ladder that had been used for painting. We learn that it’s in a gallery and that it’s considered a great work of art … that’s when the slide transitioned. She then tells us “Those paint spatters are actually inlaid crystals.”  Wow – do we want to see it again!

As you can imagine, once you’ve gone overtime on one slide, the problem compounds itself and you tend to go over on the others. The presentation becomes a confusing out-of-sync race.

A couple of times some presenters did finish talking about a slide a few seconds short of the 20 seconds. They were impatient to move on. But we, the audience were fine – it gave us more time to look without having to process words at the same time.

So prepare your narrative so that you’re a little bit short of 20 seconds rather than a bit over.

5. Rehearse

The value of rehearsal applies to any presentation, but it doubly applies to a Pecha Kucha presentation. It’s a dance with a partner who you have no control over. You need to have your side of the choreography – the narrative – down pat.

If you’ve done a Pecha Kucha presentation do add your tips in the comments.

And if you’ve found this post because you’re preparing for one – go well!

Related posts:

1. What you need to know before your first presentation
2. Don’t follow these presentation tips
3. 3 things speakers should know about virtual presenting

Presenting while people are tweeting is challenging – but also adds a new dimension to the presentation experience for your audience. Gradually tools are being developed to make it easier for you as the presenter to manage the backchannel.

Posting Tweets during the presentation

Crafting a set of tweets for the main points of your presentation and then tweeting them as you make those points in your live presentation is a great way to be part of the Twitter conversation.

Both Keynote and PowerPoint have add-ins which allow you to automatically send a tweet when you click on a slide.

Keynote Tweet

Keynote Tweet allows you put your tweet wrapped in [twitter] tags in the presenter notes pane for that slide and when you click onto that slide, the tweet gets published.

AutoTweet

AutoTweet is a new add-in for PowerPoint developed by Timo Elliot of SAPWeb2.0. It works in the same way as Keynote Tweet. For more information see PowerPoint Twitter Magic.

Monitoring Twitter feedback

I don’t recommend trying to scan the twitterstream at the same time as you’re talking. But you can take Twitter breaks – where your audience can tweet and you can read the Twitterstream for realtime feedback. Or if your presentation includes interactive exercises for the audience take those moments to look at the Twitterstream.

SlideSix

Todd Sharp of Slidesix is developing a desktop version of SlideSix which will have an extra pane in the presenter view of the slideshow, showing you the twitter feedback.

You can, of course, monitor the reaction to your presentation through your normal twitter client or any number of twitter search applications. But I love the idea of not having to switch applications, so kudos to Todd Sharp for this idea.

Displaying the Twitterstream within your slides

During a presentation (as opposed to a panel discussion) it will normally be most effective to only show the twitterstream at certain times during your presentation (see my post Should you display the Twitterstream? for thoughts on this). For example, display the screen when you’ve asked a question and want people to respond via Twitter or when you invite audience members to ask their questions using Twitter. There are two applications which allow you to pull tweets into your PowerPoint show. That means that you don’t have to switch to a different application.

SAPWeb2.0 Feedback slide

Timo Elliot of SAPWeb2.0 has developed a very elegant solution. You put in a search term at the bottom of the slide and it pulls in the most recent tweets with that term.  Here are the results for #pptlive on 12 October.

Timo has instructions on his website for how to create this slide in your own slidedeck. Update: In brief you just  cut and paste from his slide to yours. Update (25 Oct 09): Timo has made some brilliant improvements to his already excellent application. He’s made the Twitter avatars and links within tweets clickable. And he’s also teamed up with TidyTweets to allow filtering and tweet by tweet moderation:

Update 29 October: Tidy Tweets is free for personal use, but costs $10 a month for business use.

SAPWeb2.0 has another method for pulling tweets into a PowerPoint slideshow. It’s a Twitter ticker bar that runs along the bottom of your slides:

Generally, I wouldn’t recommend using this as it’s highly likely to distract your audience. During most types of presentation, I think it’s best to only display tweets when that’s what you want your audience to focus on. But there are times when it could be a fun addition.

Poll Everywhere

Poll Everywhere also allows you to pull tweets into a slide. But the procedure is a bit more complicated. You ask a question and the audience responds by tweeting @poll and including a specific number with their answer. Their answers are anonymous unless you upgrade to a paid version (the lowest price point for personal use is US$15 a month).

As you can see the look of the slide is not terribly exciting. You can change the color of the background and text and that’s it. If you want to remove the logo you have to upgrade to a paid version. One of their paid plans (US$65 a month) also allows you to moderate tweets before they’re displayed.

In the context of a live presentation, I’m not sure what this adds to simply asking your audience to tweet with a particular search term and displaying the resulting tweets on the screen. And if you want the results to be shown within PowerPoint, the SAPWeb2.0 slide looks much more elegant. However, Poll Everywhere does have the advantage that people not on Twitter can text messages (as long as in you’re in a country with coverage – not New Zealand!)

Voting with Twitter

Both Poll Everywhere and SAPWeb2.0 also have the ability to conduct a vote with Twitter. In decision-making meetings I can see this could be particularly useful.

Other applications for displaying the Twitterstream

There may be times in your presentation when you want to display the Twitterstream separately to your slideshow. There are many different applications for doing this. Julius Solaris has a round-up on his post 5 ways to visualize twitter at Events. But we have very different criteria. For him, the more distracting the animation the better. His favorite Visible Tweets reminds me of the worst type of PowerPoint animation:

I prefer a very plain display.

Simple systems for displaying the backchannel

Tweetchat is my favorite. It’s a simple display without distracting animations. Tweetchat allows you to block particular users (click on the user control link). And it has a pause function which is very useful if you want to discuss a particular tweet and you don’t want it to disappear off the screen.

Twitterfall is also presentation-friendly. It also allows you to exclude specific terms – which can include a Twitter username if a person is tweeting inappropriately. It’s only failing is that the pause function is not available from the fullscreen mode (Twitterfall calles this the Presentation theme).

More complex systems for displaying the backchannel

Paratweet has a free version which does auto-filtering (ie: screening out tweets with profanities) or you can upgrade to a paid version ($80 a month) which allows you to moderate Tweets:

I found it quite complex to use.

Twubs is free whilst it’s in beta. It also seems to have an easy method of approving tweets for display:

As well as allowing you to choose which tweets are displayed, it will also display other media – such as photos, videos etc. Twubs has lots of other features which will be of interest to event organisers.

Wiffiti also does a lot more than just display tweets. It’s primary use is to create “digital signs”. The site says that it allows moderation, although it doesn’t show how it’s done. Here’s a screen that I created for the #pptlive hashtag.

A neat feature is that you can upload your own background to the display.

A note on moderation

Moderation allows you to approve tweets one-by-one before they are displayed on the screen. There are two ways of looking at moderation. Either you can use it to screen out offensive or off-topic tweets. Or you can use it to highlight the most useful tweets. For example, if you’re asking people to ask their questions via Twitter, and there are far more questions than you can handle – you could pick out the questions you want to answer and display those. An idea for a future application is a system which picks out the tweets with the most retweets. Then you could ask the audience to retweet the questions that they most want addressed – and just display those.

If you do decide to use a display tool which allows moderation, I recommend having a colleague do this, rather than trying to do it yourself during your presentation.

And the application I couldn’t leave out

This is not primarily a presenter tool, but it’s so impressive and so useful I couldn’t leave it out. A Seat Apart was developed by Allister Klingensmith literally over night at An Event Apart 2009 conference in Boston. It matches a person’s twitter username with where they’re sitting. The virtual world of Twitter and the real physical world get integrated. I think this is a fantastic way to ensure that the community feeling that builds up on Twitter is translated to real life.

Each box in the picture below represents a seat. If the person is on Twitter it shows their Twitter avatar. This is a static screenshot but if you go to the A Seat Apart website you can see that when you rollover an avatar you see the Twitter username.

This application is not in general release, but I’ve emailed Allister and he says if you want to use it for your presentation, contact him through his website: www.getsugarspun.com.

What next?

I’m looking forward to more applications being developed to make presenting with Twitter easier for presenters. If you know of a tool that I’ve missed out, please let me know and I’ll add it in.

9th November update: Charlie Osmond of www.freshnetworks.com has just let me know about using Google wave as a backchannel. Check out his post Google Wave vs Twitter at conferences.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming free eBook “How to present with Twitter (and other backchannels)”. If you’d like to know as soon as it’s released sign up here:

I’ll let you know when it’s released, and then when I update it. I won’t send you any other information or use your email in any other way.

Cliff Atkinson has written an excellent book “The Backchannel: How audiences are using Twitter and Social Media and changing presentations forever” which is to be released on 27 November 2009. You can pre-order it on Amazon here (if you order through this link, I’ll get a few cents).

Related posts:

1. Powerpoint Twitter Magic – now you can tweet from PowerPoint
2. 8 things I learnt about using twitter as a participation tool
3. The two best alternatives to Twitter as a presentation backchannel

The research is the work of Chris Atherton, a cognitive psychologist. Chris recently delivered a presentation at the Technical Communication UK Conference and has put up her slides on slideshare. There’s been a tremendous amount of interest in them, but as they were designed to complement Chris’s talk – they only tell half the story.

In this post I’ll explain the findings of Chris’s research. I’ve written the post based on Chris’s slides and asked Chris to comment on various aspects. Chris has also reviewed this post to make sure I’ve got all the science right.

The research

Chris tested the effects of using two different types of PowerPoint slides in a presentation. Students were randomly assigned to two groups. One group attended a presentation with traditional bullet-point slides (with the occasional diagram) and the second group attended a presentation with what Chris calls “sparse slides”, which contained the same diagrams, but minimized the amount of text, and broke up the information over several different slides. Both presentations were accompanied by the same spoken narrative.

Here are samples of the slides used:

A. Traditional bullet point with the occasional diagram

B. Sparse slides

Chris tested the students’ learning in two ways – multiple choice questions and short essay answers. There was no significant difference between the groups on the multiple choice questions. Chris comments:

This is most likely because it’s not very hard to pick out the correct answer from among distractors when you have only recently been exposed to the material and your memory of it is quite fresh.

Before marking the short essay answers, Chris worked with two independent people to identify the themes of information in the presentation. They identified around 30 themes by consensus. The short essay answers were then marked by counting how many of those themes the students wrote about.

As you can see the students who were in the presentation with the sparse slides did much better than those who saw traditional slides.

Theory behind the research

There are a number of theories which can be used to explain these results (if you’re not interested in the theories, scroll down to the next section “What does this mean for your presentations?”):

1. The limitations of working memory

Even the students who did well in recalling themes, remembered only 6-7 themes out of a possible 30. Chris suggests this is due to the limitations of our working memory. Recent work (Cowan 2001) has estimated working memory capacity to be around 4 chunks of information:

2. Two processing pathways

The brain has two major pathways for processing information.

The auditory cortex and the areas around it are involved in processing language – both spoken and written.

When a presenter uses bullet-point slides, they’re not using both pathways as effectively as they could. The audience member has to read the words on the slide and listen to the presenter at the same time, leading to overloading of the language areas whilst leaving the visual cortex with very little to do:

Chris notes:

The visual cortex is involved in reading the words on the screen -  it works on the lines and features to assemble the words that are being read, but it’s not really being used to the full, since there’s usually little color or texture information.

3. Cognitive load

The theory of cognitive load was developed by John Sweller. Cognitive load is the amount of work required to understand or learn something. There are two main types:

1. Intrinsic cognitive load – how inherently difficult something is.
2. Extraneous cognitive load – extra work imposed by the thinking/learning environment.

Chris suggests that the sparse slides may minimize extraneous cognitive load by creating fewer competing demands on attention — that is, because we don’t need to spend very long processing the visual elements, we have more attention for what the speaker is saying. She adds:

Having anything on a screen invites people to look at it, the same way their gaze would keep returning to a TV screen in a pub. Since you can’t control the audience’s visual attention, it’s all about controlling what visual information you make available at any given moment, and minimising what is there so it’s not distracting from the spoken narrative, while also ensuring that it is congruent with what you are actually saying.

4. Better encoding of information

Encoding is the process of putting something into your memory. McDaniel and colleagues have shown that a little more effort at the encoding stage can be beneficial to learning. Chris suggests:

Sparse visual cues could lead to better encoding of information — that is, having to work a little bit harder to integrate the speaker’s narrative with the pictures might actually improve our storage of the information (obviously this is only true up to a point; having to work too hard at integrating the two could actually be counterproductive, effectively producing a situation with high extraneous cognitive load).

What does this mean for your presentations?

1. Don’t say too much

Limit what you cover in a presentation. Your audience has limited capacity to take it in.

2. Split the load

Take advantage of the brain’s two pathways. Design your slides so that they can be processed quickly by the visual cortex, allowing the language areas to focus on what you’re saying. This means using more pictures and as few words as you think you can get away with.

3. Get rid of visual clutter on your slides

Do what you can to minimize the extraneous cognitive load on your audience. For example:

1. Only put on your slides things you want the audience to focus on.
2. Split information between slides rather than having it all on one slide, so that you can direct the audience’s attention where you want it.

4. Make your audience work

There’s some evidence that making your audience work a little to understand your point will make your point stick better. A big caveat to this is that obviously you mustn’t make it so hard that they don’t get your point at all. Some ways of doing this are to:

1. Show a picture that the audience has difficulty relating to what you’re saying. Either ask them to guess the relationship, or explain the relationship to them.
2. Show them the axes of a graph, and ask your audience to guess the way the data goes (give enough clues that they’re fairly likely to get it right – without making it too easy).

Thank you Chris

It’s great to have some solid experimental evidence on the use of slides in a live presentation, to back-up what so many presentation authors, trainers and coaches have been saying. I’m also deeply indebted to Chris for her help with this post. I’m looking forward to whatever research Chris does next.

Related posts:

1. New research questions the benefits of custom animation in PowerPoint
2. Powerpoint custom animation experiment – check out the animation for yourself
3. New scientific evidence for banning bullets from your PowerPoint slides

Many people think that this type of visualization can help you not only speak better but also help reduce your fear of public speaking.

It may make you feel good at the time, but the scientific evidence doesn’t support the belief that it will help you achieve your best performance or reduce your fear of public speaking.

But there are other types of visualization that can help you in both these areas.

Visualization for best performance

The most effective visualization to improve your performance is a Process Visualization. During a process visualization you visualize all the steps necessary to get you to the outcome you want. So for example you visualize yourself:

• preparing your presentation
• rehearsing
• presenting to a normal audience (some nod and smile, some look blank, some are playing with their iphones)
• coping effectively with any problems that arise.

Process visualizations have been proven to be more effective that outcome visualizations:

1. Students who visualised good study habits did better than students who visualised getting an A grade in the exam. (Taylor S E, Pham L B From Thought to Action: Effects of Process-Versus Outcome-Based Mental Simulations on Performance Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 25, No. 2, 250-260 (1999)

2. Students who visualised the steps necessary to improve their tennis skills did better than those who simply visualised being better at tennis. (Singer R, Symons Downs D , Bouchard L , de la Pena D “The Influence of a Process Versus an Outcome Orientation on Tennis Performance and Knowledge.” Journal of Sport Behavior, Vol. 24, 2001).

Visualization to reduce your fear

The conventional visualization may make you feel good at the time that you’re doing it. But there are three drawbacks with this type of visualization for reducing your fear of public speaking.

1. It’s not believable.

That means it will only have a short term impact, if any, on your feelings.

2. It doesn’t accord with reality

Neither does this type of visualization help you when you’re faced with a “normal” audience. A normal audience tends to have some people who are nodding and smiling, some people who are looking vaguely interested and some people who don’t make eye contact. When the reality doesn’t accord with what you visualized, any good feelings you may have had from the visualization will evaporate.

3. It doesn’t prepare you for when things go wrong

And in particular, this visualization doesn’t prepare you for when things go wrong. It’s like a sports team visualizing an easy game, where the opposition just melts away and they score effortlessly. Sports teams don’t do that. They study the opposition in detail and work out the strategies they need to deal with the opposition.

Rational visualization

However, there is a type of visualization that can help reduce your fear of public speaking. This comes from proven psychological strategies to reduce anxiety. It’s called a rational visualization or coping rehearsal (Froggatt W “Fearless: your guide to overcoming anxiety” 2003).

In this visualization, you visualize yourself doing your presentation – including all the things that may go wrong. For example, the datashow not working, getting a mind blank, people looking bored. You work out what strategy you’ll use in that situation – and then you visualize yourself putting those strategies into action and effectively coping with the situation. This works to reduce your fear in two ways:

1. You’ll develop some practical strategies to use when things go wrong. For example, you’ll make sure that you’ve got hard copy materials that you can use in case the datashow doesn’t work. Knowing that you’ve got a “Plan B” in place will mean that you’re less concerned about the possibility of the datashow not working.

2. In your mind you’ll have rehearsed coping effectively with things going wrong. For example, if you’ve rehearsed how you’ll recover from a mind blank, you’ll no longer have a voice in your head saying  ‘If my mind goes blank that would be awful’. Instead you’ll be able to say to yourself “I hope I don’t get a mind blank, but if I do I can recover from it.”

So don’t just visualize success – visualize the steps needed to achieve that success.

Related posts:

1. Review of the top 10 methods to overcome fear of public speaking #1
2. 15 baby steps to overcoming the fear of public speaking
3. The Seven Thinking Sins of Public Speaking

These three different causes of speaking anxiety relate to three different areas of the brain – the Old Brain (it’s called this in neuro’pop’ books but is more correctly called the Hindbrain), Midbrain and the New Brain (again more correctly called the Forebrain). [Note: I have edited this paragraph to make it more scientifically accurate - thank you to Zen Faulkes who commented on my previous description].

My descriptions are a simplification of the science – in particular, the parts of the brain all interact with each other, so it’s not strictly correct to say that just one part of the brain causes nervousness. But I think it’s a useful model which may help you understand your fear of public speaking and work out the best way to reduce it.

1. Old Brain nervousness

Your old brain is the part of your brain that is constantly scanning the environment looking for threats. Survival is what matters to the old brain.

Many people suffer from ‘Old Brain’ nervousness. In prehistoric times, being part of a group was essential to our survival. So one of the threats to our survival was being kicked out of the group.  What might get you kicked out? Standing out in some way, saying something offensive or stupid, or not performing up to expectations.

Fast forward to now. You’re standing in front of a group ready to open your mouth and your old brain goes (metaphorically):

Oh-oh. This is a threatening situation. If you say something stupid, YOU MIGHT DIE!

It’s no longer true that you might die, but your Old Brain doesn’t know that. Your Old Brain activates your survival system: fight, flight or freeze. When it comes to public speaking the most common reactions are flight or freeze:

Flight - You avoid public speaking if at all possible. If you do have to speak, speak as fast as possible so that you get through it as quickly as possible.

Freeze – You feel stiff and artificial as you speak, your mind goes blank.

Here’s what can you do about this type of nervousness:

1. Accept nervousness

This type of nervousness may happen every time you speak. Accept that nervousness may be your ever-present companion. If you fight your nervousness (eg: say to yourself  ‘I shouldn’t be nervous’  – see New Brain nervousness below) you’ll make it worse. In this post How to use your fear of public speaking to make you a better speaker I’ve written about three specific ways to accept your nervousness.

2. Get used to it

You may suffer from nervousness less as you gain more experience presenting. That’s because your old brain  has gradually realized that this public speaking thing is possibly not that life-threatening. So desensitize yourself – take every opportunity to speak in front of a group.

2. Mid Brain Nervousness

Our emotions are regulated by the Mid Brain. In conjunction with other parts of your brain, your Mid Brain will make you nervous when you’re reminded of a previous nerve-wracking experience. So if you had an experience at school where you were humiliated in front of your classmates, or suffered an embarrassing mindblank in an important presentation, those strong emotional memories may come back to haunt you.

If you can readily identify a previous experience which is causing you to be nervous now, the most important thing to do is rationally evaluate how bad it was. If you continue to tell yourself that it was a terrible, awful experience it will continue to create nervousness for you into the future. So rationally evaluate how awful it was. What were the consequences of it?

Here’s an exercise I use on our courses to help people put these experiences in perspective. You can do this now:

1. Think of that nerve-wracking presentation experience.
2. How awful was it on a scale of 0 to 100%?
3. Imagine, your little finger has just been cut off in an accident!
4. How awful is that on a scale of 0 to 100%?
5. And now how awful is that nerve-wracking experience compared to losing your little finger.

Most people revise the awfulness of their nerve-wracking experience from somewhere near 100% to somewhere near 0%. They would prefer to relive that nerve-wracking presentation experience rather than lose their little finger. The loss of the finger helps them to put it in perspective. (If you’re happy to lose your little finger, imagine losing your hand, or the finger or hand of a loved one – at some point you’ll gain some perspective).

The rational reality is that most of the things that happen to us in presentations, are not that bad. They’re nothing compared to the other things that can happen to us in life – like relationship break-ups, loss of a loved one, and serious health issues. The most serious consequences of a presentation going badly are losing a large sale, an election or other contest, or your job (though I’ve never heard of someone losing their job because of one bad presentation). These consequences are disappointing – but not catastrophic.

3. New Brain nervousness

The New Brain is the conscious thinking part of your brain. Most of us have patterns of thinking that contribute to our nervousness.You can reduce your nervousness by exploring your patterns of thinking. This is part of the basis of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

One of the most common patterns of thinking that contribute to the fear of public speaking are demands.

Here’s an example of how they operate. A few weeks ago I was running a training course. I knew that the CEO would be one of the participants. I felt myself get a little nervous as we were setting up. When he walked into the room I got hot and my heart started racing.  Why would I react in this way? I have a demand around CEOs. It goes something like this:

CEOs are really important and I must have their approval.

My demanding thought made me nervous. What was the result? I messed up the instructions for a simple exercise that we do at the beginning of every course and that I’ve done perfectly hundreds of times before!

Here are some common demands people have about presenting and public speaking:

I must be interesting and engaging

I mustn’t leave anything out

I mustn’t waffle

I mustn’t show I’m nervous

I’ve got to be able to answer every question

These demands make you nervous because you can’t guarantee that the demand will be met. To reduce their power, rationally analyze the truth and usefulness of these demands. For example, with my CEO demand I can see that it’s not essential that a CEO approve of me. I don’t demand that everybody approves of me – and it’s irrational to demand that a CEO must approve of me. I can also see that it’s not useful to have this demand as it made me mess up!

In the post The Seven Thinking Sins of Public Speaking I’ve analyzed other common demands and explored how to defuse them.

I get that fear of public speaking can be debilitating, and can have you avoid opportunities in your life. I hope this post has been useful to you in thinking through how you can best reduce your nervousness.

Please let me know what you found most useful by writing a comment below.

You may never have written a comment on a blog before, after all its similar to public speaking – you’re saying something that many people will read. It may make you nervous… accept that and write the comment anyway. Look forward to hearing from you .

Related posts:

1. Why do you have a fear of public speaking?
2. Overcome your fear of public speaking the proven way
3. 15 baby steps to overcoming the fear of public speaking

Hans Rosling gets in the beam

Why you should get in the beam

1. You show your energy and passion

One of the classic TED videos is Hans Rosling’s 2006 presentation. If you’ve never seen it before, do take the time to watch this amazing presentation:

Can you imagine if Hans Rosling had stood passively by the side of the screen as he explained his statistics? Lifeless! By getting in the beam and physically showing us the statistics, Hans Rosling demonstrated his energy and his passion for his topic and the audience loved it!

Interacting physically with your slides like Hans Rosling gives you a way of demonstrating your passion – and your audiences will love  it too.

2. You can dance with your slides

The slides should not be the wallpaper of your presentation. See your slides as your co-presenter, as your dancing partner – and dance with them. That means you’ll be interacting with them, explaining them, pointing out the key parts to your audience. And yes, you’ll get in the beam. But that’s a much better alternative to standing beside your screen like a lifeless doll.

3. It’s better than using a laser pointer

Some people recommend using a laser pointer. But just because remote mouse manufacturers put laser pointers into their remotes doesn’t mean you should use it. You have to make silly little circles around what you’re pointing to so that people can see it. This is wimpy compared to getting in there and showing people physically. Even when you have a big screen you can do this, as Hans Rosling shows. Mike Pulsifer has written an indepth post on the ineffectiveness of using a  laser pointer.

Tips on getting in the beam

1. Don’t inadvertently get into the beam

There’s one situation when you shouldn’t get in the beam. That’s when you don’t know you’re doing it. It can be very distracting to the audience. Being human beings we start focusing on the silly shadows instead of your wise words.

So be aware of the position of the beam. The closer you are to the projector the more central you can be without getting in the beam:

2. Be aware of blocking the screen from members of the audience

You also have to be aware that depending on where you stand, you may block part of the screen from people in your audience. This has a lot of people become projectionists instead of presenters. They spend all their time to frozen by the side of the screen. But, if your slides are primarily visual (as opposed to text) you don’t have to do this.

When you first show a slide, make sure you stand in a spot where all of the audience can see it. But once the audience has seen your visual, it doesn’t matter if you block part of the slide. The energy and passion you’ll show from interacting with your slides is far more important than not being able to see all of the slide all of the time.

3. Don’t explain your slide to the slide

As you get into explaining the slide, it can be incredibly easy to forget about your audience and direct all your focus to the slide. Look at the slide so that you can point to the right place then as you start your explanation turn back to the audience and talk to them.

So get into that beam, show your passion, explain your slides – your audience will love it.

Related posts:

1. 9 ways to use space in your presentation
2. How to go from good presenter to great presenter
3. 8 states of mind that will make you a more compelling presenter

I then ask the audience how they found the presentation – they often don’t notice the issues which loomed so large for the presenter.

It’s not pleasant to be stumbling your way through a presentation. You’d like to feel that your brain and mouth are perfectly in sync and that words are just flowing effortlessly out of your mouth. That may feel good to you when you’re presenting, but it’s not necessarily good for the audience.  Don’t aim to replace your stumbles with a continuous flow.

Think of a continuous flow of water out of a hose. Just as it’s difficult to drink all the water flowing out of a hose – even for a dog, it’s difficult to process a continuous flow of words.

Photo by CaptPiper

Just as we need gaps to swallow water, we need gaps to process words.

Consider written information. There are phrases, commas, sentences, full-stops, bulleted lists, and paragraphs. They break up the information into discrete chunks. Now imagine a page full of a continuous flow of words. You’d throw up your hands in horror.

For the audience it’s better if the words come in discrete chunks.

Those stumbles, mind blanks and restarts provide the audience with time to process your words. Now I get that it would be better to proactively provide the audience with time to process – rather than it be an incidental consequence of your mistakes.

Chunking

You can do this by using a technique called chunking (I’ve written about chunking before as a solution for people who are told they speak too fast) . Chunking means talking in a rhythm which has you deliver chunks of words with short silences in between the chunks of words. The key is developing the rhythm of chunking. Here’s a video of Tony Blair chunking:

[Update: This video is no longer working - I'll find another one to demonstrate chunking as soon as I can.]

Chunking gives your audience time to process and also has major benefits for you:

1. It will help you avoid stumbling over your words.
2. It will keep your brain and mouth in sync and so prevent mind blanks.
3. It will give you time to think so that you don’t start a dead-end sentence.

The distinction between chunking and pausing

Chunking has the end-result of incorporating pauses into your speech. But it’s a very different technique. Deciding to pause is easy, doing it is hard. You have to remember each time that you want to pause. Some people mark up a script to help them remember to pause. That’s really going to help you come across as natural and authentic!

Chunking has you focus on a rhythm that you can easily maintain. Once you’re in that rhythm, the pauses come naturally.

So freeze that continuous flow of water, cut it into chunks, and deliver it one chunk at a time to your audience.

Related posts:

1. How to save time preparing a presentation
2. 9 ways to edit your presentation
3. Three levels of presentation openings – which should you use?

Twenty-five years ago Max Atkinson was an Oxford academic – his area of research was conversation analysis. Then he coached Anne Brennan, a woman with no speaking experience whatsoever, to win a standing ovation at the Liberal Democratic Party annual conference by using rhetorical techniques. Overnight, Max became an in-demand presentation coach and eventually left academic life to teach rhetorical presenting techniques to business people. In his book, Lend Me Your Ears he shares those techniques.

These techniques were first developed by the great Greek and Roman orators. Politicians have used them extensively throughout history. What Max does brilliantly in his book is to show how the techniques can be adapted for business presentations.

Max’s research shows that the use of contrast is one of the most powerful ways of prompting applause in political speeches. Many long-lived and memorable quotations use contrast. Here’s a couple you’ve probably come across:

It is more blessed to give than to receive. (The Bible, Acts 20:35)

I come to bury Caesar,
not to praise him. (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)

Let’s dive into the anatomy of different types of contrasts so that you can create your own.

1. Contradictions: ‘not this but that’

One of the most famous examples of this type of contrast is from Martin Luther King:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

The technique works just as well on more prosaic topics. A participant on one of our courses developed this sentence to describe a new organization-wide filing system:

The new filing system is based not on where you sit, but on what you do.

2. Comparisons: ‘more this than that’

Take this very ordinary sounding sentence:

The various points I have outlined in this presentation point to the need for us to do even better in the future.

Max shows how using a comparative contrast it can be transformed:

So the important thing
is not how good we are today
but how much better we need to be tomorrow.

3. Opposites: ‘black or white’

Max writes:

The fact that there are so many words with opposite meanings provides us with immense scope for producing stark and dramatic contrasts.

Here’s a political example of using an opposite:

What the electorate gives,
the electorate can take away. (Tony Blair)

Other rhetorical techniques

Contrast is just one of the rhetorical techniques that Max covers in Lend Me Your Ears. He also covers puzzle-solution formats, metaphor, rhetorical questions, and three-part lists. He shows how you can combine these techniques to produce powerful soundbites. For instance take this plodding sentence:

Recent years have seen a widespread proliferation in the incidence of medical negligence cases, in which Health Authorities have incurred increased costs as a result of the greater legal sophistication with which cases are being argued.

Max applies the magic of metaphor, a puzzle-solution structure and a three-part list to transform it:

Health Authorities are faced with a new kind of epidemic.
A once-rare disease has turned into a plague of litigation.
Medical negligence cases are now more frequent, more expensive, and more expertly argued than ever before.

When to use these techniques

These techniques can be very powerful in the right context. But they come with a risk.

The risk is that your presentation will become a performance rather than a conversation. The techniques rely on careful phraseology. That means that you either have to memorize the lines, or have a script in front of you as you speak. Unless you’re skilled at remaining conversational – you might start to speechify (that means coming across as if you were making a very formal speech).

So to begin with I recommend that you use these techniques sparingly – for just a sentence or two in your presentation. In my Presentation Planning Guide I suggest that a presentation be focused around a key message. That’s the ideal sentence to apply these techniques to. The use of contrast, in particular, will make your key message stand out and resonate with your audience.

Once you feel you can maintain a conversational and authentic style whilst using these techniques, they are a powerful tool to add to your toolbox. And there’s no better teacher than Max Atkinson and his book Lend Me Your Ears.

Related posts:

1. How to create a “new” presentation from pre-existing slides
2. Six lessons in public speaking from Obama
3. How to tell a story like Malcolm Gladwell