It All Starts with Your Story

Jeff Raikes' case in point applies to every presenter. Persuading your audience is, above all, a matter of being prepared with a logical, compelling, relevant, and well- articulated story. You need to know where you want to lead your audience, your Point B, and how you will get them there. To do that, you need to focus on the most essential elements of your story, arrange them in a lucid flow, and convey them with frequent emphasis on the specific benefits, the WIIFYs, your audience will enjoy if they heed your call to action. Finally, you need to support your presentation with Less Is More graphics that express your ideas clearly. Your audience is then free to concentrate on you and your discussion, Presenter Focus.

If you prepare a presentation that includes all these elements at their optimum, a remarkable thing happens: Your speaking skills improve "by themselves ." Knowing that you are fully in command of your story inevitably enhances your self-confidence and poise, resulting in a far more polished and convincing presentation. That's the discipline by which most persuasive battles are won.

Are the specifics of the presenter's voice and body language important? Absolutely! Think of the diligently crafted story and graphics as a highly sophisticated communications satellite, and the presenter as a powerful Atlas rocket. NASA spends millions of dollars and thousands of hours building such satellites . If the rocket, the delivery system, is defective, the satellite doesn't go into orbit. The same is true of the presentation. If the messenger is defective, the message goes awry. The well-designed substance needs an effective delivery style to lift the payload into orbit .

However, if I asked you to work on your delivery style before your story and graphics were "baked," it would be like asking you to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time. For this reason, I have deliberately excluded delivery skills to emphasize the focus on mental clarity.

There are a couple of other important reasons for this story focus. In the first place, businesspeople are not performers, nor are they receptive to being treated as performers. If you were to focus on delivery skills up-front, you'd feel pressured to perform. If instead you focus on the story first, you can approach those skills in a natural and conversational manner.

This raises a subtle but rather potent point: When most normal businesspeople stand to speak, they experience a sudden rush of performance anxiety. A study cited in the Book of Lists , by David Wallechinsky, ranks speaking before a group as the highest anxiety-provoking event, topping fear of heights, insects , flying, and even death. The human body's instinctive reaction to anxiety is increased adrenaline flow, which makes any possible natural behavior almost impossible . Fight or flight follows . Clarity of mind diminishes performance anxiety and allows the presenter to be conversational.

Clarity of mind diminishes performance anxiety and allows the presenter to be conversational.

Another reason for excluding delivery skills in this book has to do with how the presenter's behavior relates to the graphics. In cinema and television, armies of creative and technical people spend extravagant amounts of time perfecting the synchronization of the images and soundtrack. The composite is then merged onto a single screen, defining and confining the audience's point of view. In a presentation, the viewing field, the audience's perspective, widens considerably from just the slides on the screen to include the presenter's body language. The presenter's narration, an entirely separate signal, serves as the soundtrack. Therefore, in a presentation, it becomes even more important to synchronize all these diverse transmissions.

Unfortunately, all too often, the images on the presentation screen, the presenter's body language, and the presenter's narration all run at vastly different rates of speed. Slides designed in the Less Is More style free the presenter to do less and to say even less about the graphics, allowing the presenter to concentrate on adding narrative value. Further support for Presenter Focus.