As Long As You Believe It

• That the speaker knows what she’s talking about.
• That the speaker has something very important or very interesting to say.
• That the speaker cares about what she’s talking about.
• That you should care about what she’s talking about.
• That the speaker is paying attention to, and cares about, you.

You can try to fake some of these things, but the audience will see right through you. I’ve seen very slick, highly paid people speak, but behind the theatrics there’s a deadness in the eyes that says “I don’t really care” that only really inattentive audience members would miss. I’ve seen speakers try to mask ill-preparedness or nervousness with false bravado, but that “caught in the headlights” look in their eyes is a dead giveaway. You either have presence, or you don’t.

There is much to say for preparation and practice as a means of overcoming lack of self-confidence. When you simply read your speech, no matter how brilliantly composed, your audience will conclude you aren’t prepared — and be annoyed that you didn’t just send them the speech so they could read it themselves.

Proper sleep and a modest shot of caffeine can ensure you have lots of energy. But nothing can make you care about the subject if you don’t. To really care, both about what you’re talking about and about your audience, you have to have something really novel, fascinating and/or important to say, to convey to or persuade your audience.

You have to have skin in the game — your success or failure at conveying your message or persuading your audience has to mean something to you and to them. What distinguishes a presentation most from a written report is that with a presentation you know immediately when it’s over whether it’s succeeded. The difference between an audience riveted and animated by what you’re saying, and polite applause at the conclusion of your presentation, is all the difference in the world.

We all want attention and appreciation more than anything else from our fellow human beings. The fact that presentations, like stand-up routines, give us the opportunity to get both, or to miss the opportunity and get neither, is what makes the stakes so high, and what makes so many people nervous about public speaking. Sometimes they try to mask that nervousness with an appearance of being indifferent or nonchalant. Big mistake — that will come across as either arrogance or disengagement, or as what it really is, a sign of nervousness and hence ill-preparedness.

There’s another self-destructive impulse of a lot of speakers not to spend a lot of time going over and over their material until it’s polished and until they know it cold. There are a number of possible explanations for this surprisingly common quirk:

• They find the material kind of boring, so they don’t really want to spend too much time on it in advance. So they convince themselves they’re too busy to prepare thoroughly.
• They are afraid if they over-rehearse, they’ll come across as wooden and mechanical.
• The whole point of all the bullet points on their slides is to remind them what to say, so they don’t have to prepare.
• If the presentation bombs, they have an excuse.

Whatever the cause, under-preparing is a bad habit, and it’s a bit of an insult to the audience. Although I confess I’m still lost without my notes, I no longer use bullet-point slides and I am getting better at this, because it really pays off. The best speakers have only pictures and graphics on their slides, and work without notes.

I’m still a mediocre speaker, and it’s taken me years to reach that level. I’ve learned from experience that there are some things you can do to come across as better than you really are:

• If the audience is small enough, and likely to care about the topic (not just there because the company paid for the jaunt), lay out some useful, interesting, new (to them — you need to know your audience) information up front, throw out some questions or intractable problems that the audience has likely been grappling with, and draw them into a conversation. The audience likely has more useful information to share with each other than you have to give them, so facilitate them to do so. Facilitation is a different skill set from speaking, and requires a deft touch, but it can be a more effective, more valuable to the audience, and easier to do. But it doesn’t work in large groups or when the audience is disengaged.
• Give the audience more than what you cover in your presentation. If you know the size of the audience, hard-copy handouts of well-written in-depth articles, and useful graphics, give the audience something to take away in addition to what you’ve told them. At the very least, give them an annotated reading list and/or annotated links to online articles for further reading on the subject.
• Start with a story from your personal experience. Tell it using fable or other proven story structure. Make sure it’s interesting and has a powerful moral. Practice it on others (to ensure they think it’s interesting) and rehearse it so you don’t need notes to tell it.
• Tell people what to do about what you’ve told them. This may seem condescending or patronizing, but it often works, even with sophisticated audiences. If they’ve been paying attention, they have probably already formulated an action plan in their own mind, and if your short ‘what to do’ list at the end of the presentation resonates with what they’d already decided to do, they’ll say aha! and congratulate themselves (and you) for ‘getting it’. If your list usefully augments what they’d already decided to do, they’ll think you’re a genius. Your ‘what to do’ list should include at least one thing that isn’t obvious, something that shows some imagination. And your list should be practical and not too long.

While these hints may give you a bit of a safety net, they don’t compensate for the lack of presence. So, no matter what:

1. Know your stuff,
2. Focus on what’s really important, really novel or really interesting, and
3. Only speak on subjects you care about to audiences you care about.

Number 3 is the most important. As important as knowledge and focus are, passion is even more important. I’ve seen nervous, tongue-tied speakers muddle through presentations extraordinarily well simply because they obviously felt very strongly and deeply about what they were saying — so the audience made allowances. When people sense that you really care about and believe in something passionately, and want to convey that passion to them, they will go out of their way to pay attention.

The same applies, in a way, to writing. A blog doesn’t give you the immediate and intense feedback that you can get in a presentation or face-to-face conversation, but the comments, e-mails and amount of buzz each article creates give you a pretty good idea of what your audience thought of it.

Much online writing is almost purely matter-of-fact — links to other online information, distillations of books or lists or summarizations of the most pertinent points on any important subject. Many of my most popular posts are synoptic, and their value comes in saving readers’ time and, sometimes, provoking their thinking. Passion is not essential to such communications. But the articles I’ve written that are argumentative, that have a point of view, that take a stand, are the ones that draw the most comment, evoke the most emotion and action, and attract regular readers as opposed to opportunistic ones.

In writing, as much as in oral discourse, what you know and what you can tell are interesting and useful, but what you really believe in, what you instill with every ounce of passion in your heart and soul, is what people remember, what changes them. And what can save the world.