by Cam Barber
Then a funny thing happened when it was time for the second presentation.
I’d done a lot less preparation and no rehearsal at all. I figured this one was just about explaining my idea – there was no dramatic effort or formality required. It was just going to be a chat.
The idea was clear in my mind and I simply shared it with the audience, in the same way I had shared it with my manager. I ended with a short summary (message) and suggested next steps - because it made sense to do so.
It was easy.
The audience loved it when I didn’t try so hard!
Following this second presentation I was surprised to receive positive feedback. My manager was impressed and thanked me for the idea. People were engaged! A few commented on how much more relaxed I looked and sounded, compared with my first speech. And everyone I spoke to was able to restate my idea – they got the message.
The big difference was that my focus was on helping the audience understand the idea and it’s value, not worrying about what my hands or body were doing. My body and voice simply followed my clarity and belief in the idea.
Looking back, I can see how damaging the traditional public speaking approach had been. I’d done all that training and practice for what? An incoherent speech in which I had felt incredibly nervous and uncomfortable. Yet, when I ignored all the rules and just talked to my audience during the second talk, I’d managed to get my point across very clearly. And it was effortless.
Later, I talked to my colleagues who also attended presentation skills training, and found that about half of them felt just as I did - that the course had made them more anxious and far more self conscious. It was becoming clear that a lot of public speaking training was shallow, contradictory and impractical. People were wasting energy going in the wrong direction.
Natural style unlocks your talent
Remember, uncertainty is the cause of anxiety (Principle 1). Well, a lot of uncertainty is generated when we believe we have to change who we are, in order to speak in front of a group. Think about it. What if you could be yourself when public speaking? Wouldn’t that reduce uncertainty and require much less effort? Wouldn’t that help you to think clearly on stage?
Ah, but what will the audience think? Don’t they expect a good speaker to act a certain way? Nuh. They don’t. When you radiate your natural style, you are more credible. You are seen as more sincere, trustworthy. You communicate with less effort and think with more clarity.
And guess what? When you’re relaxed in your own skin, it helps people around you relax as well. As French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it:
“When we encounter a natural style we are always surprised and delighted, for we thought to see a speaker2 and found a person.”
The problem with rules
Imagine you’re about to make a big presentation and your manager (let’s call him Mr Rules-I’ve-Heard) decides to give you a last minute pep talk. Here’s Mr Rules-I’ve-Heard’s attempt to share his wisdom with you:
“Body language is everything, so don’t slouch. Use open gestures and a lot of facial expressions and don’t turn your back on the audience - or put your hands in your pockets. It’s not what you say that matters, it’s mainly about your non-verbal communication and the visual look. Gee, I wish you’d worn a power tie. Anyway, remember to smile, think positive and get off to a strong start because first impressions are everything! If you make a bad first impression you won’t be able to recover. Try to have some authority in your voice like JFK or Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King and definitely don’t say ‘um’ or ‘ah’. We’ve gone to great effort to get the slides professionally designed so everything else up there will look perfect. I’m sorry you didn’t get much of a chance to go through the slides, but they just came back from the graphics department. Now remember, don’t look at your notes – it’s unprofessional. Never walk in front of the screen. And by the way, if you feel nervous, take a moment to visualise everything going well – and if that doesn’t work imagine the audience naked. Now, go and knock ‘em dead!”
Does this advice make you feel like you can relax and be yourself in front of an audience? Have you heard some of these gems in the past? It’s probably a bit over the top as an example, because we don’t tend to hear all these rules in one go. They are absorbed bit by bit from a range of people, books and courses, over time.
But the result is the same. Confusion, overwhelm and the implication that public speaking is a mysterious black art that is disconnected from the real world. This advice is not the foundation for a relaxed and natural talk. And do you notice there’s not one comment in all that about the most important thing of all - the message that needs to be transferred. That’s quite typical too.
Rules stop you connecting with your listeners
The best way to connect with your audience is to be genuine. We are more effective when we reduce the barriers between us and our audience, not increase them with a forced style.
Performance rules can be a problem because, by definition, a rule says, don’t think! Don’t trust your own judgement, don’t assess each situation on its own merits, just follow this rule…every time. It suggests there is a single ‘right’ way of presenting and that any deviation from this way is ‘wrong’. In other words, you are wrong if you don’t fit the ‘optimum’ style. This leads to ‘cookie-cutter’ speakers or ‘clones’, as one of our clients recently described the people coming back from a previous training course.
A rule I was taught years ago was that you should make 6 gestures per minute. Not 5, not 7 – 6. But I average about 60 gestures a minute, so the implication is that my natural style was 10 times wrong!
By the way, American psychologist David McNeill, in his book Hand and Mind, suggests that gestures are a natural part of an individual’s thought process. Trying to stop them or control them interrupts your mental flow. He also says there is no point trying to force gestures into some arbitrary rule because they are ‘not subject to a system of standards’. In other words, the best thinking comes when you gesture in a way that is natural to you.
Think guidelines, not rules
In the movie Ghostbusters, Sigourney Weaver plays a woman who is possessed by a demon who attempts to seduce Bill Murray’s character. He says;
“I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people.”
(She kisses him passionately and continues to seduce him.)
“Actually, it’s more of a guideline than a rule…”
His switch illustrates the added flexibility associated with guidelines. Rules are fixed, whereas guidelines can give clear direction while allowing for modification. Rules are terrific for machines and rigid hierarchical systems where things need to be identical no matter where or when they are used, but attempting to make all human presenters identical doesn’t work.
Here’s a story from my teenage years that illustrates the value of guidelines over rules. When I headed out to a party my dad didn’t lay down a long list of rules for me. There was no lecture about not taking drugs or drinking alcohol, not smoking, not stealing or damaging other people’s property, etc, etc. In fact, it would be difficult to come up with enough rules to cover every situation one might face.
Instead, he left me with a single guideline. As I ventured out the door to face the temptations of the world, he simply said,
‘Be a gentleman.’
At the time I thought it was an old-fashioned, boring comment from my out-of-touch dad. In hindsight I recognise the wisdom in my father’s approach.
Guidelines apply to any situation
That guideline was more valuable than a set of rules because it was flexible enough to apply to any situation. His message would pop into my head as I faced various choices and (most of the time) I was able to make good decisions. Rather than mindlessly following (or rebelling against) the rules I was given, his guideline meant that I ended up using my own judgements and making my own decisions. It helped build the muscle of thinking f
or myself.
Now, I’m not a parenting expert and rules can certainly be valuable when you identify that a child is too young to use their own judgement, but when it comes to human-to-human communication, rules shut down your thinking, while guidelines help activate your awareness.
So, a more productive way to think about the rules of presenting is treat them as guidelines.
What’s the difference? A rule says ‘don’t think, just do’, and a guideline says, ‘Here’s a proven path, but use your own judgement for each situation’.
• Guidelines give you more freedom to clarify and deliver your ideas in a way that feels natural to you.
• Guidelines give you direction, whereas rules lock you in a box.
• Guidelines take into account the variation in style between one person and the next, whereas rules assume everyone is the same.
• Guidelines encourage natural style, rules stifle it.
• Rules clutter your mind; guidelines let you focus on getting your message across.
• Rules wake you up to give you a sleeping pill. Guidelines let you sleep.
Most of the apparently rigid dos and don’ts of speaking should be reinterpreted as guidelines.
Here are a few examples:
Rule Guideline
You should have exactly 3 seconds of eye contact with each person in your audience. Eye contact is important to engage the audience – try to catch people’s eyes regularly.
Don’t put your hands in your pockets Putting your hands in your pockets generally looks informal. Decide for yourself whether it matters for a particular audience.
You must follow a particular structure (e.g, you must have three points) Structure helps the audience understand your information – choose a structure that brings your message to life.
You should have six gestures per minute and they should be below shoulder height, but above the waist. The three parts of a good gesture are: 1) the entry, 2) the stroke, 3) the return to a resting position. Gestures can be effective at enhancing spoken communication. Some people gesture a lot, others don’t. When you are comfortable, gestures tend to flow with the ideas that you’re presenting. Let them.
How to find your natural style
Make up your own mind about the ‘presentation rules’. Watch successful speakers doing their stuff. You’ll notice they have different styles, regularly break the ‘rules’, yet look comfortable in their own skin.
You don’t really need a list of steps to find your natural style. Just be the style that helps you think clearly and pursue the pace that helps you breathe comfortably.
Natural Style examples
Richard Branson and Bill Gates say ‘um’ a lot when they speak. Jack Welch gets angry. Bill Clinton sometimes has long pauses and Al Gore is wooden. Who cares? We accept them rough edges and all.
Microsoft was built by 2 men with opposite styles. Bill Gates’ introvert-style with a slow rate of speech and little animation. And Steven Ballmer with a table-thumping, jump-around-the-stage extrovert style.
Steve Jobs was almost laid back when he spoke. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO is animated when she speaks, Meg Whitman, CEO of Hewlett Packard is less so. On TV, Oprah screams and waves her arms in the air while Ellen is funny and engaging without as much animation.
On the public speaking circuit, Tom Peters and Tony Robbins are super-energetic extrovert-style speakers, while Deepak Chopra and Stephen Covey (who died recently after 25 years as one of the world’s most in-demand and highly paid speakers) have a low-key introvert style.
Richard Dawkins’ style is stiff and condescending, but his explanations and message are extremely clear. Eckhart Tolle has a soft, mousey voice and long pauses, but captures audiences with beautiful explanations, memorable stories and quotable one-liners.
Should we teach Stephen Hawking body language?
Stephen Hawking speaks via an annoying computer generated voice, but his TED talk has 7 million views. Yet he has NO STYLE. He can’t move. Who would like to lecture Stephen Hawking on body language?
The common denominator of effective speakers is not style, it’s the clarity of their ideas and the certainty with which they deliver them. Focus on explaining your ideas. You won’t please all the people all the time, but your best chance of success will come from delivering great explanations, in your natural style.
Key points
Ahhh… What a load off your shoulders! You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to compare your style to others. Find a way to relax and be yourself. People will accept your rough edges (as long as you provide clear messages and useful explanations).
2 Okay – Pascal actually said ‘writer’, not ‘speaker’, but the point is just as relevant.
PRINCIPLE 5: YOU CAN CONTROL ANXIETY BY UNDERSTANDING IT
This is a picture of me after smashing my head on a skate ramp. Can you see the black eye and 5 stitches? I went to the Riverside skate park during a mid-life crisis moment in my early 40s. Decided I was gonna learn to ride the half-pipe. Why? Because I’m not too old for that! And I’ll probably look really cool…
The half-pipe won…
So without any practise on these kinds of ramps I rolled towards the edge. I don’t remember the details from that point, because, as you may have heard, when a person is knocked unconscious the mind often erases the memory of the event. But I know from my injuries and the explanations from the kids who peeled me off the concrete, that my legs flew out from under me and my head smashed on the top edge of the metal and concrete ramp, knocking me out instantly.
I slid down the ramp, unconscious, like a sack of meat, coming to rest at the bottom, face down. They told me I was ‘out’ for about 2 mins. When I came to, I wondered what the sticky stuff was on my hands, chest, and face (turns out it was blood), and why a bunch of 15 year old kids were standing over me.
As I lifted my head, one of my new skate buddies said, “Are you all right mister?” I thought about that question for a few seconds, oriented myself, and thankfully realised I was ok. By the way, when they told me I’d been face down for 2 minutes I wondered what these kids were doing all that time. I imagined 1 or 2 of them gently kicking my lifeless body and saying, “I reckon this old man’s dead!”
Anyway, I got to my feet ok, but had a gash above my left eye that was bleeding profusely. Then, a cute thing happened. Some of the kids shared their injury stories with me. “Don’t worry about it mate, we’ve all crashed. I just got the pins out of my arm” said one. For a moment I felt some satisfaction. My mid-life goal was complete. I was one of the dudes! Hanging with the cool kids. (Actually I was bleeding all over the feet of the cool kids.)
Then someone’s mum came over to check my wound and said, “You’re gonna need some stitches, Luv. Better get off to the hospital”. I responded in a sheepish, childlike tone. “Right. Yeah, Good Idea.” I didn’t feel that cool anymore.
Nerve damage? Brain damage?
I came back to reality and headed to the nearest hospital to get my eye stitched. As I was sitting, waiting to be treated, my left arm started to shake. Then my head started twitching like a coked-up zombie. This shaking escalated, uncontrollably, increasing and decreasing in waves like a Geiger counter until my whole body was shaking.
‘What have I done to myself’, I thought. ‘Brain damage? Nerve damage? What an idiot! How could I let this happen?’ My internal voice, critiquing my past actions and worrying about my future, got louder and louder. It was, quite frankly, freaking me out.
I stood up and zombie-twisted my way over to the reception desk. “Excuse me,” I said to the guy at the desk. He looked up from what he was doing and noticed my gyrations. “This shaking you’re doing…” he said, pointing at me. “Is that normal for you?”
“Ahh, no mate! That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t feel right!”
He called a nurse over. She asked me a series of questions, twice, and finally said I had nothing to worry about. “It’s call
ed shock” she said. “Massive amounts of adrenaline are being released in your body as a result of the physical trauma. Are you cold?”
I wasn’t cold.
“You’ll be fine,” she reassured.
Cause and effect
The shaking was a physical symptom of adrenaline, so I could see the cause was temporary and that the physical symptom would soon fade. I knew a bit about the impact of too much adrenaline, so what she said made perfect sense.
I sat down. And had an epiphany!
The extreme shaking didn’t stop, but I noticed my mind was completely calm. It was then I recognised a distinct separation between the physical symptoms (caused by adrenaline in this case) and the ability to think calmly.
The explanation by the nurse made sense and gave me certainty about what was going on in my body. It was now much easier to separate my physical symptoms from my mental response to those symptoms.
And you can too.
I‘ve taught thousands of people to recognise this separation between the physical symptoms of anxiety and their mental response to those symptoms. They’ve learned how to strengthen their ability to think clearly under pressure - no matter how strong the symptoms may be.
Understanding the stress response
The reason for sharing the skate park story isn’t to warn overconfident early middle-aged wannabes about the perils of the half-pipe. It’s to share the realities of the stress response, which can be quite similar in a public speaking situation as it was in that emergency room.
Like a thermostat, the stress response kicks in when you need to be ‘on’. It works in recognisable ways whether you need to be ‘on’ because you’re in physical danger, or because you’re in front of an audience and want your presentation to go well.