Chapter 7

How

This chapter focuses on tools that you can use to better educate, inspire, and engage your audience. From storytelling to how to use PowerPoint, I want to fill your quiver with as many arrows as possible so that you feel empowered to knock ‘em alive!

Storytelling

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.¹

Before we became inundated with content, social media, and YouTube, we told stories. Think back to when you were a kid. What do you do every night before bed? You read books and told stories. I like to say that stories are in our DNA. It is how we have been relating to each other for thousands of years. It has not changed and it never will.

We can all probably agree that Walt Disney is one of the greatest moviemakers of all time. From Snow White to Bambi to Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney was at the helm of some of the most memorable stories of past 100 years. The truth is that Mr. Disney did not need characters on the screen to engage an audience; he was a master storyteller. Four years before Snow White and The Seven Dwarves premiered on the silver screen, Mr. Disney performed the entire story, by himself, for a very small audience. It has been said that Walt told a group of 40 of his top animators to go out, have a big dinner, and return to the sound stage at 8:00 p.m. Always taking care of people, Walt knew it was going to be a long night and he wanted to make sure they were all fed and able to pay attention. At 8:00 p.m. the animators walked into a darkened room with a single light in the middle of the floor. They all took their seats and waited. Walt walked into the room and said what I believe are the seven most powerful words a presenter can ever use, “I’m going to tell you a story.” And for the next three and a half hours, Walt Disney told a story that had been in his head for all his life: Snow White and The Seven Dwarves. He played every part and created every scene all by himself. He became each dwarf, the evil queen, and Snow White herself. At 11:30 p.m., when he was finished, he had not only thoroughly entertained his audience but also convinced all 40 animators to dedicate the next four years of their lives to create the greatest animated feature of their time.

A story is one of the best ways to convince anyone of anything. It is hardwired into the architecture of the brain, and there is no overriding it. We think in story, because story provides a context for the facts so that we can make sense of them. Lisa Cron, in her book Wired For Story put it perfectly when she said,

we are so wired for story that we don’t even recognize its superpowers. Because stories feel so normal and weaved into our daily lives that we think of them as optional. When the reality is that we need stories to grow, change and survive.²

Story allows us to step out of the present, remember the past, and imagine a future.

It has been proven that when we tell a story, especially about ourselves, our Dopamine levels surge. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that plays a major role in reward motivated behavior—it is like a drug in our brain that makes us feel good for doing good things. This is why we feel so good when we share stories about ourselves—it makes us feel good. It makes everyone feel good. So the next time you have to present take the time to turn your presentation into a story. Like Walt Disney, become the characters. Like Chopin, take the audience home. It does not matter if you are meeting with a client to go over website analytics. There is a narrative in the data. When you take the time to find the story in the subject matter, you will engage the audience because their brain chemistry is asking for it.

The Rule of Three

Three Is A Magic Number

—Schoolhouse Rock

The Rule of Three has been around for centuries. It can be found in ancient texts, folklore, modern literature, and just about everywhere. Here are just a few examples:

• The Three Little Pigs
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears
• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
• Stop, Drop, and Roll
• Location, Location, Location
• Duty, Honor, Country
• Veni, Vidi, Vici
• Blood, Sweat, and Tears

“The rule of three is a very general rule in speaking, in writing, and in music that states that concepts or ideas presented in threes are inherently more interesting, more enjoyable, and more memorable.”³ Carmine Gallo goes on to say,

The rule of three is one of the most profound concepts in communication theory. It simply means that the human mind can only hold about three “chunks” of information in short term (working) memory. Since that is the case why overload your audience with 18 messages, or 22, or 30? Stick to three.⁴

We have become proficient at processing information by using patterns, and three is the smallest number to make a pattern.⁵

Knowing this is extremely important for speakers and presenters. We must respect the audiences’ abilities to take in and digest information. How many times have you sat through a presentation and been bombarded with multiple ideas or an immense amount of data and your brain was overloaded? Too often, as presenters, we get caught up in the details and feel this need to tell the entire story. I liken it to the same experience as walking into a 99 Cent Store. There are literally 10,000 items for sale and each one costs 99 cents. It is sensory overload when you walk into one of these stores. The fluorescent lights, the ­colors, and the rows and rows of products. For me, it is simply too much information and I am reminded of the Police song, Too Much Information, when Sting sings:

“Too much information running through my brain

Too much information driving me insane”

The reality is that the audience cannot process more than three things at a time, and frankly, chances are they are not going to remember a thing you said two weeks after your presentation. Carl W. Buehner, along with Maya Angelou and many others, has said something that I believe is one of the most critical things to remember when it comes to presentation skills and public speaking:

“They may forget what you said—but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

There is nothing more poignant than that. As I have said before, when you get up in front of an audience, be it big or small, it is your job to educate, inspire, and engage. You cannot do that if you overload them with too much information. You do not want that to happen to you when you are in a meeting or a theater. Remember to give the audience the respect they deserve. Their brains can only take so much. So choose the three things that allow you to get your ideas and story across.

Let Me Tell You a Story

As I mentioned earlier, I was once the opening speaker at a TEDx conference. It was a big room with a lot of people in the audience. I had them laughing, clapping, oohing, and awing at all the right moments. I walked off the stage feeling that I truly connected with the audience. During an intermission, a couple of people came up to me and remarked on the stories I told and the jokes I made. I thought to myself, “Wow, they were really listening to me.” About two weeks later, I was at another event and was approached by a young woman. She recognized me from the TEDx event. She said, “I saw you a couple of weeks ago at that TEDx event. You had me and my friends laughing so hard.” I asked her what made her laugh and she said, “Oh … I don’t remember what you talked about. I just remember laughing …. Sorry.”

The Power of the Pause

Punctuation is to readers as pausing is to your listeners

—Keith Bailey

Mark Twain said it perfectly, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” A pause at the right time for the right reason can be an extremely powerful moment in your presentation. The pause does three things:

1. Gives The Audience Time To Think
2. Shows Confidence
3. Slows You Down

Gives the Audience Time to Think

Oftentimes when we present we just want it to be over. So we power through it without taking a break or a moment to breathe. This is disrespectful to your audience. Remember, your job is to persuade them to take action and change their behavior. You cannot simply steamroller your way through the presentation. Chances are you are sharing new information with your audience or in many cases a lot of data. It is not fair to expect them to remember it all. The truth is, they will not. But in the moment they need time to absorb what you are saying. A pause gives them a moment to think and process.

Shows Confidence

When you take a pause after you make a strong statement you are not only letting the audience absorb it, you are showing confidence. By pausing, you show that you are not in a rush to get out of there. You feel strongly about what you just said and you want the audience to know that. Let it sink in.

Slows You down

Yes it sounds obvious. When you take pause you stop talking. What I am talking about here is to take a well-timed pause to give yourself a chance to take a breath or a sip of water. Sometimes a pause will give you a chance to gather your thoughts, recollect yourself, or both, after you make a major point or lose your train of thought.

A Quick Exercise #7

Pausing takes practice. It cannot be forced and it needs to be well timed. There are two exercises that can help you understand how the pause can help you with any presentation. First, choose a couple of pages of dialogue from one of your favorite books and strip out all of the punctuations. Take out the periods, commas, quotes, and so on. Have a friend read the punctuation-less version out loud without taking any pauses. It will sound incredibly rushed and most likely take on different meaning. Then you read the version with the punctuation. It sounds different. Doesn’t it?

Second, I want you to tell a story to a friend emphasizing taking pauses. Choose a story that has some tension in it. Perhaps a story about a car accident or maybe an injury. The first time you tell it, be very deliberate with your pauses. Overdo it. Tell the story a couple of times and take note of where you are pausing and how that affects the flow and rhythm of the story. The goal here is to learn how and where to put pauses for the best effect.

Let the power of the pause help you and your audience to take a moment to either absorb the information, to make a point that much more affective or to simply take a break.

As we have discovered, the brain plays a huge role in the way we present and the way the audience absorbs the information. From our neurotransmitters to our hormones, whether we are in the audience or on the stage, our brains help us figure out what to say and how to say it.

Brain Rules

I am a huge fan of Dr. John Medina, the author of a book entitled Brain Rules. In the book, he details 12 rules that explain how the brain works. His rules range from survival to sensory integration to gender. For the purposes of this book, I am going to focus on two rules because they deal with things that can affect and influence your presentation. The rules are attention and vision. In fact, these are two rules that Garr Reynolds discusses in his wonderful presentation “Takeaways & Quotes from Dr. John Medina’s Brain Rules—What all presenters need to know.” I highly ­suggest you find Garr’s presentation on Slideshare and watch it.

Brain Rule #4: Boredom

Dr. Medina puts it very simply, “We don’t pay attention to boring things.” This is an incredibly important rule. Basically, what he is saying is not to be boring. Easier said than done. But if you are boring, or your presentation is boring, then you are going to lose your audience. It is as simple as that. Sometimes this is in your control. You can be more engaging, daring, create tension, sing, and dance. Do whatever it takes to keep all eyes on you and have the audience begging for more. Yet often times losing your audience is not in your control. According to Medina and a study by Hartley and Davies in 1978, audiences tend to lose interest within 10 minutes of a lecture or presentation. It is not necessarily known why this happens, but it does. Hartley and Davies studied professors and their students and found that the students began to lose interest within the first 10 minutes of a 50-minute lecture, only to regain interest within the last five minutes (probably because the class is almost over and the students are eager to wrap things up).

The important takeaway here is that like the students your audiences are going to lose interest and you need to take action to make sure that does not happen. Medina calls this the 10-Minute Rule. His suggestion is to do something emotionally relevant every 10 minutes to regain the audience’s attention. I like to take this a step further and urge you to tell a story, make a nonsequitur remark or do something silly. The goal here is to snap ‘em out of it and reset their brain and attention.

I had the pleasure of seeing Dr. Medina speak in 2006. He was promoting Brain Rules and got booked to speak at a church one evening in a neighboring town. The audience was made up of parents of young children—many of whom did not have babysitters (including my wife and myself)—so the room was packed with more than 200 parents and many young children. It was after 8:00 p.m., and the room was hot and the pews were uncomfortable. Dr. Medina spoke for two hours and had us all on the edge of our seats. I for one never lost interest. At the end Dr. Medina asked us if we remembered the story he told about the car accident or the other story about his family holiday, and so on. We all nodded yes and Medina went on to explain the 10-minute rule, and how he was telling these stories every 10 minutes to reset our brains. And by golly it worked!

The 10-minute rule, like the power of the pause, takes a lot of practice. The best way to master it is to work it into all of your presentations and practice, practice, practice. If you are using slides for your presentation then work in a slide every 10 minutes that resets your audience’s brains. Tools such as PowerPoint have presentation tools that enable you to monitor your timing as you move through your slides. I urge you to use these tools as your practice and rehearse. You will soon see where your 10-minute marks are and be able to work in content to reset your audience. Now as we all know, rehearsal is one thing and the live presentation is another. Things will get delayed and questions will be asked that throw you off your timing. With practice you will be able to feel the 10-minute markers and use them to your advantage. Be patient, this is a skill I am still working on mastering.

Brain Rule #10: Vision Trumps All

Visual aids play a huge role in any presentation. Images support your point and can make an emotional impact. A bullet list is flat, boring, and unnecessary. But a high-resolution image will make a lasting impression. I cannot tell you how many times I have shown images during a Presentation Elevation workshop and the audience reacts more to the picture than what I am saying. In fact, when I see attendees weeks or even months later, they typically remember two things about my presentation—my sense of humor and my slides. Do they remember the details? No. Do they remember what I said about eye contact? Probably not. Do they remember how I made them laugh? You bet! Remember what Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

A lot of how people remember how you made them feel can come from the imagery you use. And it can actually help them remember the point you are trying to make. As Medina puts it, “We are incredible at remembering pictures. Hear a piece of information, and three days later you’ll remember 10% of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65%.”⁶

The goal of any presentation is to make lasting impression. To have people talking about you weeks after you have presented is the best feedback you can ever get. It may not be about what you want them to remember and more about the imagery you used. But at least they remember you.

Take the time to find the right images. It is amazing how much they can impact what you are saying and how they engage the audience.

Let Me Tell You a Story

In 1995 I was finishing my masters in counseling psychology. There was no Internet. There were no smartphones. There were no iPads. We had notebooks and textbooks. As often was the case, one of my professors would complain about how poorly his psychology 101 students were doing. He had not changed his teaching style for years. He lectured; the students read and he quizzed them. Why were they all so close to failing? This was a common discussion in our classes. One day he came in and told us that he solved the problem. He figured that these kids were raised on MTV. They were an image-driven generation. So, for one week, instead of standing up in front of the class and lecturing, he played videos about psychology—interviews, social experiments, sitcoms, and so on. He gave the class pop-up quizzes and the all scored a B or higher. The content was the same as his lectures, yet the delivery was different. He could not engage the students by simply talking. He needed to use a visual medium to get them to learn—a medium they grew up on—a medium that could educate and engage.

That was then. Now, we are overwhelmed with imagery and tools to help us with our presentations. Whether you use PowerPoint, keynote, or Prezi, chances are you use slides for nearly all of your presentations. It has become what is expected. In fact, if you do not have slides, the audiences get uncomfortable. They want more to look at then just you. But we are using slides in a way they were not intended. We create decks for nearly everything!

Swab the Decks

Campfires have been replaced with projector bulbs.

—Nancy Duarte

As the concept of storytelling becomes more and more intertwined with business presentations, we are telling stories more than ever before. Not so long ago we used to tell stories while sitting around campfires. Now, as brands and organizations are using stories to differentiate and engage, we are telling and listening to stories everywhere—especially in the conference room. When we sat around the campfire, all we had was our imagination, our voices, and our bodies to bring stories to life. Now we have projectors that display PowerPoint slides, spreadsheets, YouTube videos, analytics, and anything else we can think of to make our stories more engaging. But the reality is that the more we project the further away we get from real storytelling. Slide decks, be they built in PowerPoint, keynote, or Prezi, have become a crutch and we use them like Linus uses his blanket. We rely on our decks to help us get through a presentation. They give us security and confidence and we feel naked without them. The truth is that you do not need slides to deliver a compelling and interesting presentation. As I have been discussing at length, your unique style and your respect for the audience is what makes a presentation successful—not a bunch of slides. PowerPoint decks should be used only to support your presentation—they should never be your presentation.

What if you show up to a pitch and the client decides to go out to lunch instead of sitting in a stuffy conference room? Where are you going to present your slides—the wall of the restaurant? Of course not. If you cannot get your point across without a slide deck, then maybe you do not know your point in the first place. Of course, there will be times when you will be presenting data and the audience will have to follow along—but those should be handouts and not presentation slides—there is a big difference and I will soon tell you why.

If it sounds like I am standing on a soapbox, I am. And I will be the first to admit that I use slides for many of my presentations. But the slides I build support what I am saying. They do not say it for me. I use big images and as few words as possible. One reason I use slides is to help me remember certain points and to move me along. Another reason is because today’s audiences expect to look at something and I want to respect that expectation. Yet, there is a time and a place to use slides, and this is what I intend to discuss in this section.

First things first:

1. Do you recycle a past slide deck to use for an upcoming presentation?
2. Do you tweak your slide decks until it is time to present?
3. Do you hand out or e-mail your slides to your audience before you present?
4. Do you believe that bullet points are the best way to get your point across?
5. Do you read your slides to your audience?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I am glad you bought this book. Every answer should be no. Do not get me wrong, slides are good and can be useful, but since the dawn of PowerPoint, presenters from all over the world have pretty much taking advantage of the slide deck and ruined it for the rest of us. In 2003, Seth Godin wrote an e-book entitled Really Bad PowerPoint, which he republished four years later. In my opinion Seth should republish it every year. The e-book’s first three paragraphs say it all:

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use ­PowerPoint.

PowerPoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter PowerPoint.

PowerPoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.⁷

We have taken a very powerful tool and continue to use it incorrectly. I do not care if you use PowerPoint or Keynote, chances are you are doing it wrong. I could not write a book about presentation skills without ­allocating a fairly large amount of space to decks and handouts. Every presentation skills teacher and coach has his or her own perspective when it comes to building and using slides. I have come to the conclusion that it is a waste of time telling people not to use slides. You are going to use them, so instead of fighting it, I have come up, with some influence from Garr Reynolds, my 10 commandments for using slide decks:

1. Thou shall only use slides if absolutely necessary.
2. Thou shall never use an old deck to build a new deck.
3. Thou shall stop tweaking your deck 24 hours before thou presents.
4. Thou shall beware the bullet point.
5. Thou shall only use one idea per slide.
6. Thou shall never, under any circumstances, read a slide out loud.
7. A slide deck shall never be used as a handout.
8. Thou shall say no to animation.
9. Thou shall only use high-resolution images.
10. Thou shall not build a presentation around a deck, but rather build a deck around a presentation.

While most of these commandments make sense on their own, let me elaborate on a few.

Thou Shall Never Use an Old Deck to Build a New Deck

How many times have you opened an old presentation deck to start work on a new presentation? It is a common occurrence and you are not alone. There really is nothing wrong with this as chances are you are going to tell a similar story and use some of the same slides. If it is a capabilities pitch, then chances are 90 percent of the pitch is already built. The problem is that you are starting a presentation by using technology, and before you know it, you will be knee deep in slide tweaking and not focusing on building a storyline. One of John Medina’s brain rules is to unplug and go analog.⁸ By this he means to go old school and use pen and paper. Remember, your presentation is a story and your slides are to support your story; they are not the story. Figure out what you want to say first and then see if there is an old deck you can use.

I tend to use a pad of Post-It Notes® and a Sharpie® whenever I start a new presentation. Each Post-It is a slide. It is a great way to generate ideas and start a slide layout on my wall. I can move them around, insert new slides, delete slides I do not want, and all I am using is my imagination. By the time I am finished with this exercise, my wall is covered with Post-Its and my slide layout is complete. Only then can I turn on my laptop and get started in PowerPoint.

A Quick Exercise #8

Chances are good that you have a handful of presentation decks on your computer. Find one and open it up. Most likely, it is a PowerPoint presentation filled with bullet points, clip art, charts, and graphs. Take a look at it and spend five minutes reminding yourself of the content and the purpose of the presentation. Try to remember how long it took you to give this presentation. Now, close the program, stand up, and give the same presentation but without all the slides. Can you do it? Or do you need the slides? As I said before, if you cannot deliver the presentation without the slides, then there is a good chance you do not know what you are talking about.

Thou Shall Stop Tweaking Your Deck 24 Hours before Thou Presents

As I have said many times, a presentation is not a meeting; it is a performance. In fact, your presentation can be thought of as a one-act play and it needs to be treated as such. Meaning, no edits or changes 24 hours before show time. Can you imagine the director of a play walking into the lead actor’s dressing room two hours before show time with new dialogue? It would never happen and the same can be said for your presentation. Any changes the day before the presentation will mess up your timing, your cadence, and more than likely throw you off your game. This is especially true when it comes to ensemble presenting.

Let Me Tell You a Story

I was once ensemble pitching with an ad agency. They brought me in as a social media consultant for a project with an existing client. The team consisted of the agency’s president, a senior account executive, the CTO, and me. We had two weeks to put the presentation together. The president of the agency was a PowerPoint expert and was in-charge of the slides. All slide content was finalized four days before the presentation. Forty-eight hours before the presentation we were well rehearsed; we knew our roles, subject matter and the flow of the presentation. Twenty-four hours before the presentation, the president sent us all a new deck. There were tweaks that changed the flow. We got together as a team to go over the changes, but did not rehearse. All of us, not including the president, were feeling a bit uneasy. The morning of the presentation we were sent a new deck. On our way to the meeting, the president was in the back of the car, laptop open and making changes to slides. He rearranged the order, added and deleted content, and even switched out some images. By the time the meeting started we were presenting version 14. Not only was our timing off, but also we came off confused and bumbling. The presentation was a complete disaster.

Thou Shall Beware the Bullet Point and Thou Shall Never, Under Any Circumstances, Read a Slide out Loud and Thou Shall Only Use One Idea per Slide

Commandments 4, 5, and 6 go together. The idea here is that the content on each slide should be minimal and focus on one idea. If you find yourself creating a bullet list with three points, then you should create three slides. It is that simple. Two things happen when you put up a slide with multiple bullet points:

1. Your audience reads ahead
2. The presenter reads the slide

Basically, everyone in the room reads and no one is presenting. If you are going to read your slides, then just e-mail the deck to everyone and cancel the meeting. With everyone reading, there is no time to perform and engage the audience. It goes against everything I have been saying in the book.

Let Me Tell You a Story

I was once in the audience of a presentation and the presenter opened up with a slide that was just awful. Small font, multiple bullets, clip art and a background that made the words unreadable. But that is not the worst part. The worst part was that he read every single point—every word! By the fifth slide the entire audience knew what was happening. When the sixth slide came up, you could hear the moans and groans. By slide 12, half the audience was gone and the remaining audience members were tweeting about how terrible the presentation was.

His slides looked something like this:

This slide (built by me for this book), if read aloud, breaks all three commandments. Instead of putting all of your thoughts on one slide, keep it to one idea and use an image that sets you up to tell a story.

This all comes back to respecting the audience. Remember The Rule of Three—the audiences can only process three things at a time. By having multiple slides with multiple bullet points, you are disrespecting the audience because bullet points and bad design are distracting. You want the audience looking at and listening to you, not reading your slides.

Below is what I think is a great opening slide for the first bullet point: “I Met One Once.” It clearly shows the emotional tie to dolphins. The image will get an Aww from the audience and allow the presenter to tell a story, instead of boring everyone with a recitation of a bunch of bullet points. It will also allow you to focus on them; to move around, make eye contact, and entertain.

Photo Credit:www.dolphindiscovery.com

A Slide Deck Shall Never Be Used as a Handout

A great presenter once said, “A good slide deck should be meaningless without the presenter there to present.” What he means by this is that if you follow my 10 commandments you will develop slides full of imagery and few words that will mean nothing without you there to tell the story. Why? Because slides are there to support the storyteller not tell the story. This is why you should never use your presentation deck as a handout. If you need to give your audience something to follow along with, then you are going to have to create a separate document. When you follow these commandments you will be creating so many slides for your ideas that your slide decks could total 100 or more slides. Who wants to print all that out when it means absolutely nothing without you there?

Guy Kawasaki has a great concept he calls the 10-20-30 Rule.⁹ While it is focused on Venture Capital pitches, you can adapt some of it for your own presentations. It is quite simple: A PowerPoint presentation should have 10 slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and contain no font smaller than 30 points. It is the 30 point that resonates with me the most. When you have one idea per slide you have a lot of room on the slide. Increase the font size. Make it big. Let the people in the back see it clearly. So often slides use small fonts that make it near impossible to read from a few rows back.

Ensemble Presenting

So much of what I talk about in this book applies to the individual. From your personal style to how you build your slide decks to how the audience perceives you. I have been focusing on you and your relationship with the audience. This works if you are giving a TED talk or keynote at a conference, but for the most part more times than not, you will not be presenting alone in a pitch meeting or a work presentation. In fact, you will most likely be presenting with a team. This could include peers, your boss, or both. It could be two people or six people—it all depends on the meeting and the purpose of the presentation. Now, a majority of what I have discussed in this book can be applied to your presentations whether you are alone or in a group. Yet, when you are presenting with a group the dynamics change. I call this ensemble pitching and I equate it to performing like a Jazz ensemble. There are moments to take a solo and times when you should simply hang back and be quiet. This takes patience, practice and, most importantly, the ability to listen.

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen

—Duke Ellington

What Duke saying is that as a musician you have to listen to what your bandmates are playing: the notes, the phrasing, and the emotion. Every solo is a story—it has a beginning, middle, and end. You have to be able to read the cues and understand the difference between a horn player taking a breath or ending his or her solo. It is an intimate experience between the band that when pulled off smoothly, the audience can simply enjoy the music not knowing what is actually happening between the musicians on stage.

Like jazz musicians, when you present as an ensemble, you have to be able to read each other. You have to know when it is your turn to solo and when you should just sit back and listen. More often than not your roles will be set beforehand and each member of the group will know when he or she will drive the presentation and take control of the slides. Yet, much like jazz musicians, you need to know the song’s structure and the chord progressions. And more importantly, you need to be able to improvise. Most people think that improvisation simply means to make it up on the spot. While that may be true, the fact remains that a jazz solo or improvisation is based on a set chord structure, not unlike a script. While your presentation will have slides and a script, you have to be prepared when one of your teammates goes off-script and begins to jam.

In Jazz, improvisation isn’t a matter of just making any ol’ thing up. Jazz, like any language, has its own grammar and vocabulary. There’s no right or wrong, just some choices that are better than others.

—Wynton Marsalis

How many times have you pitched with your boss and he or she goes completely off script and on a tangent that sends the entire presentation down a rabbit hole? Or a client throws the group a curve ball question that no one was expecting and suddenly you are in a free form jazz jam? This is not necessarily a good or bad thing or right or wrong. As Wynton is saying, it comes down to the choices you make, such as, who in the group should take over? Who has the best ability to answer the question?

I had the unique experience of pitching with a business partner of 14 years. And before we were business partners, we played in two bands together. We each knew how the other played and how we spoke. I could tell when he was finishing up and when he needed help with a tough client question. We were able to play off each other flawlessly and it worked most of the time but not all the time. Rare is the pitch team that is perfectly synced, though. You could be ensemble presenting with people you recently met or coworkers you do not really know.

Let Me Tell You a Story

I was once asked to help a small agency put together a social media pitch for a large consumer goods company. I helped them organize their story and construct their slide deck. A week before the pitch they were ready to rock and roll. I got a call from their VP of business development who asked me to join them on the pitch. I was surprised because I was hired as a pitch doctor and did not work for the agency. I told the VP that it would be a bad idea because what if the client liked me and wanted me to work with me on the project. He assured me that it would be okay. So I flew to Dallas the day before so I could meet with the team and we could practice the morning of the pitch. I was feeling confident because the script was solid. We planned on meeting at 8:00 a.m. and the pitch was at 4:00 p.m.

I walked into the room at 8:00 a.m. and met the three other people I would be pitching with. The first thing I said was, “So when you guys present together, who typically takes charge and runs the meeting?” They all laughed and one of them said, “We’ve never pitched together.” Oh my! It turns out that one person was brand new, another was a consultant like me and the other two were not the best of friends. For the next six hours we crammed and jammed. We focused on each other’s strengths and weaknesses. I took them through a few of the exercises I have detailed in this book. We spent a two-hour lunch telling stories about ourselves. I wanted us to know about each other and see how we each told stories. We were not the Miles Davis Quintet, but we were not a garage band either. Needless to say, the presentation was not a great, but it was not a train wreck. We stuck to the script, but lost our confidence when the client threw curve balls at us. We simply were not prepared.

It is important to know the people you are presenting with. What do they love and hate about presenting? Do they get nervous? Do you like them? You do not have to go out and start a band together, but there are a few things you can do to learn more about each other’s styles and ­presentation skills.

1. Spend Time Together: Have lunch, get coffee or chat by the water cooler. Ask questions about each other’s weekend, favorite movies and restaurants. Do they like sushi? Do they play video games? iPhone or Android? Gauge the way they answer questions. Throw in a curveball question and see what kind of reaction you get.
2. Take Calls Together: Invite team members to conference calls and sit in on theirs. You do not need to participate in their calls and they do not need to participate in yours. This is a chance for you to hear them in action. Listen to how they take questions, how they react, the way they begin and end the call and take notice if they use humor, or if they are good at small talk. Again, you want to learn more about their style.
3. Band Practice: If you have an upcoming pitch, then of course you are going to practice. Even without an impending pitch, you can still practice. Go into a conference room with the team and make up a pitch. Make it fun, funny, and have a good time. Pretend you are selling lollipops to a bunch of kids. Anything. There is no audience, so you can make mistakes. The purpose is to begin to work together. See who is better at opening, at closing, at making jokes. Get a feel for each other’s timing, cadence, inflections, and body movements. You will soon tell when your pitch partner is wrapping up a point, giving you the opening to take a solo. Keep doing this. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, wrote that the Beatles practiced 10,000 hours in Germany before they took over the world in 1964.¹⁰ Or, as my piano teacher, used to say, “Practice makes permanent!”

The objective is to figure each other out, to be able to end each other’s sentences, to be smooth with transitions, and how to jam.

Setting up the Room

Remember that your presentation is not a meeting; it is a performance. Therefore, the room you are presenting in needs to be set up so that you feel comfortable and the audience is ready to be educated, inspired, and engaged. While you may not be in complete control of how the room is set up, there are a few things you can do to ensure a workable and pleasant atmosphere.

First, get to the room early. Set up your laptop, check all your connections and that you are able to project onto a screen or a wall. Clean up the table. Remove any papers, menus, napkins, paperclips, and so on. Straighten all the chairs. Make the room as neat and clean as possible. The reason for doing this is to get rid of any distractions. You want all eyes on you.

Figure out where you are going to stand. If there are windows in the room, then you should face them. Do not give the audience the chance to lose interest by watching planes or clouds go by. Figure out where you think the decision makers are going to sit and stand closer to them so you can maintain solid eye contact. Have your laptop on the table facing you so you can see your slides and do not have to turn around to look at them on a scren. I tend to stand on the side of the room opposite of the door. This way I can see everyone who walks in and greet him or her as they take their seats. It is your time to shine. So appear that you are in charge and ready to take the audience on a journey.

Chances are your presentation will take place in the morning or after lunch and you are more than likely going to have a sleepy audience. You need keep them awake and alert. Thus, turn on all of the lights. While it is a performance, it is not a theater. When you dim the lights you dim your audience’s ability to stay engaged. On that note, when you get into the room, find the thermostat and turn the temperature down. The goal is not to make it freezing but to cool the room down before the meeting begins. The logic is that it is very hard to cool down a room, so have it on the cool side before the temperature rises from all the bodies in the room. The last thing you want to do is freeze people out of the room. But it is better than a room full of sweating people—especially the presenter!

Let Me Tell You Story

When I was a freshman at Boston University, the university was running out of classrooms and lecture halls, so they rented space from a movie theater on campus and held classes there in the mornings. I happened to have a class at 11:00 a.m. in Theater #1. This was the last class before they started showing movies in the afternoon. The room was clearly set up to screen movies—the chairs were comfy, the lights were in a constant setting we liked to call dusk and the aroma of freshly popped corn wafted its way to our noses. There were no desks, so the professors handed us pieces of plywood to rest on our laps for note taking. Needless to say, if I was not dozing off, I was hungry and craving buttery popcorn. It was a complete disaster for the professor because he could not engage a bunch of drowsy, comfy, carb-craving students. Talk about external distractions!

Top 10 Things to Do Before You Present

There’s always a Top 10 list for something. Top 10 Best Restaurants in London, Top 10 Things Marilyn Monroe Loved, Top 10 Van Halen Songs. You name it, there’s a list. I wanted to keep with the trend and close out the book with a simple Top 10 list for you to check off before you make a presentation. So many of these are going to seem completely obvious, but believe we all need to remember them. So, behold—The Top 10 Things You Must Do Before You Present Using Your Own Laptop:

1. Clear Your Cache: The last thing you want is an unwanted URL automatically popping up in your browser. Be it something naughty or plain silly. I suggest clearing your cache “from the beginning of time.”
2. Close Outlook (or your mail program): There are many people out there who have yet to turn off the pop-up that alerts the user that a new mail has arrived. The audience does not need to know that you received an e-mail—let alone an invite to lunch or some completely inappropriate spam about manhood.
3. Close Your Instant Message Program: Like your mail, we do not need to see a bunch of pop ups from colleagues asking if you are available for lunch or your significant other asking you to pick up Thai food tonight.
4. Check Your Speaker Volume: If you plan on showing a video or playing a bit of audio you need to make sure your laptop is hooked up to speakers (never play audio through your tiny laptop speakers) and that the volume is at a respectable level. Having to tweak volume during a presentation looks sloppy and could throw you off your game.
5. Save Your Presentation On A Flash Drive as a PDF: There are many reasons why you may not be able to use your own laptop for your presentation—your battery died, you do not have the correct adapter for the projector, you have a Mac and they only have adapter for PCs, and so on. Whatever the reason, you will be prepared because you saved your slide deck as a PDF on a flash drive. You save it as a PDF so that all of your fonts, spacing, and so on are preserved. You may lose your transitions and animations, but you were not supposed to have any of those in the first place (see Chapter 7).
6. Close All Your Browser Tabs Except The Ones You Need: How many times have you seen a presenter open their browser and they have 10 or more tabs open? It not only looks sloppy, but it is distracting and frankly too revealing. We all look at things, click on embedded links and have our favorite pages, but there is no reason your audience needs to know this.
7. Move Your Presentation to Your Desktop: Have your PowerPoint or keynote file named appropriately and smack center on your desktop. There is no reason to keep your audience waiting for you as to sift through your files and directories. BONUS: Clean up your desktop while you are at it. Even if you have 100 files on your desktop, organize them.
8. Change Your Desktop Image: I cannot tell you how many times a presenter has made the switch to the projector and a desktop image of their kids or the cats has popped up on the screen. There is no need for this. Keep it professional and clean. Choose a default image or a simple solid color.
9. Make Sure Your Wireless Remote Works: If you are going to stand up and drive your slides using a remote, make sure it works.
10. Take a Deep Breath: Not necessarily something you need your laptop to do, but do not forget to take a deep breath and have fun because it is showtime!