Presentation Skills – Keeping the Blackberries at Bay

Question: How do you know if an engineer is an extrovert?

Answer: He looks at your shoes when he talks to you! I am allowed to say that, coming from a family of engineers, but it’s exactly to the point of this month’s column on the art of successful presentation design and delivery. At the heart of all successful presentations is a presenter who maintains proper eye-contact with members of the audience at all times.

Microsoft estimates that with over 300 million copies of PowerPoint installed world-wide, something like 3 million presentations are given every day. What they don’t say is that roughly 2.9 million of those are completely ineffective in achieving true knowledge transfer, what presentations are supposed to be about in the first place.

Knowledge transfer occurs, for the most part, when you are able to keep every member of the audience on the same page throughout the entire presentation. Unlike a written report, where the intended audience has the luxury of acquiring the embedded knowledge at his or her own pace, a presentation is actually an event where knowledge transfer is a rather ethereal event; information appears on the screen and is discussed for a fleeting moment in time, and then disappears.

To understand the relationship between an on-screen presentation and a written report (or worse – the presentation printed as a hand-out), think billboard versus magazine ad.

Look me in the eye

To keep the audience together, you first must start with a presentation that allows you to stay engaged with the audience, as opposed to either the screen or your notes. When you lose engagement in business presentations today, you invite audience members to wander, and that’s when the Blackberries blossom.

A key element to successful engagement involves learning proper eye contact, which requires you to hold contact with individuals for anywhere between 3-7 seconds, or until you have completed one thought. At which point, you pause and move to another person and do the same. Most presenters look at one person no more than ½ to 1 second at a time, if that, and then only when they’re not looking up at the ceiling or down at the floor. Or, with extroverted engineers, your shoes.

Modern presentation theory teaches a conversational approach to presenting, because that’s the way to maximize both comfort and trust between you and the audience. By practicing some fairly simple eye contact techniques, you can deliver to a group of 500 without ever feeling more anxiety than you would when discussing your job to friends around a lunch table. Most people find that hard to believe until they’ve received some training, but when you get it down, it’s rather powerful stuff!

People like to talk about themselves, about what they do, and about what they know. Your presentations should be like that. Use the screen to keep yourself in a pre-set direction, use it to list all the points you want to be sure to make, but deliver the presentation itself from the heart. People care somewhat about content, but what moves them to interest is hearing how you feel about it. To get across emotion, you want to be conversational.

Reading is NOT fundamental

Your job as presentation designer, therefore, is to create visuals that further this process rather than hamper it. Your slides need to contain only as much information as is necessary to start the conversation, and allow you to continue it while engaging individuals in the audience with your eyes. You are not there to read slides – the audience could do that quite easily for themselves, thank you. If you’re reading from the screen, you’re not engaging the audience. If your eyes are anywhere but in contact with a listener, the audience is actually dis-engaged.

The other problem with trying to deliver a presentation that contains lengthy streams of prose is that the people who came to hear you speak can read words about 40% faster than you can speak them – 250 words per minute for them vs. 150 wpm for you. It is the equivalent of having a minivan that waits until the last minute to pull out into the road in front of you, and then proceeds to drive 40% slower than the speed limit you were pleasantly exceeding.

When there is too much information on the screen, especially in the form of sentences, not only does the reading process rob the audience of their precious time, it also leads to breaking the essential bond between you and the audience that occurs only with constant eye contact. When you project up TMI, you are forced, by design, to turn your back to the audience as you read from the screen.

As practitioners of the conversational approach know, nothing works more to bind you with the audience than the proper use of eye contact, summed up with this rule:

If eyes aren’t locked then your jaw must be.

With a visual so complex that it forces you to read from the screen, this all-important component to proper presenting is lost, attention erodes, and the only contact your audience seeks is with people at the other end of their wireless devices.

The solution, then, is to restrict the volume of information at each exposure to that which can be absorbed by both you and the audience in just a few seconds – 10 at most. The proper procedure for achieving transfer of information from the screen to the audience involves a fairly simple 3-step process, but that deserves an article all to itself.

About the Author

J. Douglas Jefferys is a principal at PublicSpeakingSkills.com, a national consulting firm specializing in training businesses of all sizes to communicate for maximum efficiency. The firm spreads its unique knowledge through on-site classes, public seminars, and high-impact videos. For free tutorials in print and video, go now to: http://www.publicspeakingskills.com.

Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT)

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Got A Social Anxiety Problem?

Social anxiety is particularly common in our society. It is estimated that up anywhere around 20% of the adult population is affected by some form of anxiety, including social anxiety, at some stage in their lives. The good news is that social anxiety is a disorder that can often be successfully treated.

There are a range of treatments available for sufferers of anxiety in its various forms. These include counseling, medications of various types and a whole panoply of relaxation techniques and other remedies. These can sometimes successfully include herbal remedies.

These can be complimented with dietary changes, the inclusion of exercise into the lifestyle and sometimes additional vitamin supplements to offer the possibility to sufferers of any one of the dozens of types of anxiety of a full recovery.

Many of the herbal anxiety remedies help to reduce stress and induce relaxation. These can include the use of Kava Kava and Chamomile, skullcap, Siberian Ginseng and Valerian root.

Chamomile is often used as a relaxant. It can be brewed and taken as a tea, or else it can be added to bathwater and a long and sooting bath taken. Jasmine can also be used as a relaxant in bathwater with great success.

There are many different types of herbs which can be useful in relaxing anxiety sufferers. This relaxation can help them in their quest to overcome their affliction, and combined with other remedies as described above, can be extremely successful.

However it is always important to consult a qualified herbalist before using any form of herb as a treatment, just as it is important to consult a doctor for specific medical problems. And always use any recommended product exactly as instructed.

Anxiety can have some severe effects on the immune system as a result of the stress felt from the anxiety attacks. Often this can be alleviated somewhat the addition of various vitamin supplements to the diet. It is extremely important that the anxiety sufferer maintain a strong immune system.

It is also important to ensure that the person maintains a good nourishing diet. This will also impact the immune system and help it to remain in good order. And paying attention to reducing certain foodstuffs in the diet can also be beneficial. For example it is well worthwhile to reduce the intake of caffeine and refined sugar. This will help reduce the incidence of specific anxiety attacks.

Moderate physical exercise as often as possible is often recommended to help reduce the incidence of stress and give the individual a physical outlet for any symptoms of stress he or she may be experiencing.

And it is also well worthwhile considering a new and relaxing hobby, perhaps one like yoga, to help maintain vitality and physical relaxation.

Anxiety can be overcome. It takes some effort and will power, and often some professional help. But anxiety need not be a life sentence.

About the Author

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Second Opinion for Adderall presciption/ADD Diagnosis?

A few days ago I visited my college health center due to concerns regarding procrastination, inability to concentrate, facial tics, impulsivity, and social anxiety stemming from the possibility of ticking during a conversation. The doctor diagnosed me with ADD/ADHD and prescribed me with Adderall (20 mg XL in morning and 10 mg in early afternoon). I have since taken the Adderall and have noticed my issues have been alleviated. Ironically, even the facial tics have subsided.

If you had symptoms, and the medication relieves them, does it really matter whether or not you “really” have ADHD? It’s not as though there’s some specific abnormality in the brains of people with ADHD that is corrected by stimulants, or they’ll do something bad if you don’t have ADHD that they won’t do if you do. It treats the symptoms, not the cause, so if you have symptoms, and the medication relieves them, there’s no harm in taking the medication.

The only reason you’d need a second opinion from a psychiatrist would be if you tried several treatments for ADHD and did not have a positive response. That would suggest that there is likely something else going on, and it would be worth taking a closer look to figure it out. But if the meds are working and you’re not having any problems, I’d recommend leaving well enough alone. Especially since you run the risk that the psychiatrist will say you *don’t* have ADHD, and they will be unwilling to prescribe Adderall for an off-label use to treat whatever they think it *really* is until you’ve exhaused all possible treatments for whatever you *really* have.

Psychiatric diagnoses are essentially a matter of matching symptoms to things in the DSM, rather than gathering physical data from blood tests or such. The human brain is a complicated thing, and just because your symptoms match up nicely to some list of symptoms doesn’t mean that the actual cause of those symptoms can’t be something totally different. Treatment of psychiatric disorders is a matter of relieving the symptoms, which may or may not be accomplished in a way that has anything to do with the original cause. So if you had symptoms that were bothering you, and the medication you’re taking relieves them without causing problematic side effects, it doesn’t really matter how well your symptoms match the ones listed in the DSM for the disorder that the medication is “intended” for. Whether or not it’s “really” ADHD, it’s definitely something, and Adderall is clearly effective at treating it. Let them call it whatever they want. There’s no point in wasting your time and money asking other people what they want to cal it unless you’re also asking them how to treat it.

But just to clarify from one of the previous answers, responding well to stimulants does NOT confirm that you have ADHD, and stimulants do NOT have a “reverse effect” in people with ADHD compared to the general population. It’s clinically proven that stimulants improve concetration and focus in non-ADHD patients as well. Some people, primarily college students, abuse stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin for exactly that reason (taking them at approximately therapeutic doses, but without a prescription).

Social Phobia. More moot points and procrastinating