Storytelling Bites 7 - Say it!

"This happens every time, it's soooo unfair!"

You spent an absolute age preparing for the presentation, that should have been a stone-cold classic fondly reminisced about over a chardonnay at the work Xmas do, but it tanked. Half the room are openly looking at their phones, with a fair distribution of faces displaying bemused misunderstanding or concern and is that outright mocking in the corner? 

So, with all that forethought and preparation, why did it go so wrong? And is there a simple way to make it go right, or at the very least, less wrong?

Yes. Yes there is.

The most common reason I’ve encountered as to why this happens is, thank goodness, also a really easy one to work on. We often prepare our presentation by having long hard thinks and either tapping away at a keyboard or scribbling notes down on paper. Two excellent ingredients, but a third here is missing.

If we are apprehensive about a presentation, we are likely to spend far too much of the time we have allocated to it with furious typing, cutting and pasting, intercut with gulps of cooling coffee and palpitations about how it will go tomorrow. We’ll then misspend a chunk of time and emotional energy on the way in to work. We’ll go through it bit by bit in our heads, with an unhelpful variant on ‘oh no, oh god, oh no, I can’t do this, why did I agree to do this…’ on repeat, crowding out the prep.

We then arrive at work and suddenly find our self in front of our audience about to present, blanching.

And as we start to speak, it hits us. This doesn’t quite sound right. On the page it looked like it hung together well, but we’re suddenly rushed for time and worried we won’t get to the end, we’re starting to speak too quickly and have lost our grasp of the meaning we wanted to convey and we’re losing our audience.

Part of the issue, and an easy one to fix, is that we’ve been preparing in our head and on screen or paper, but haven’t yet brought it to the medium with which we will ultimately be sharing it: with our voice.

The presentation is therefore our first spoken draft.

Unlike a written report or proposal, which we would have reread and rewritten, edited for sense and flow, taken out any repeated words or typos, done a word count before submitting, here we are sharing our spoken communication as a first draft, directly with our audience. By doing this we are denying ourselves the chance to make it work best as a spoken piece.

By practicing and editing it by saying it out loud, we can hear it from start to finish, make the necessary adjustments, lengthen or shorten it, get familiar with the sound and shape of the words we speak, swap over points 2 and 4, nail the finish etc, so that it works as a spoken piece.

Our training takes you through a number of spoken exercises that will help you explore, understand and build the content you need to say. These will, through practice, make you a more confident and comfortable presenter, that people enjoy listening to and who uses their time well.