As long-time readers know, each year I write down goals for the next twelve months, something I’ve been doing for about twelve years now. This year one of my goals was to “dramatically improve” my presentation skills. In truth, this is a goal every single year but this year I made sure to put it to paper and then I proceeded to read a bunch of books and blogs on the subject. I’ve also spent a lot of time analyzing the presentation styles of those around me, since I have ample opportunities to do that at work.

Why the push? See, about halfway through last year I found myself presenting to medium-sized groups of people (from fifty to a few hundred people) bi-weekly instead of, at best, quarterly. That was clear motivation to get better. No one likes to completely suck at something you have to do all the time. Plus, if you’re not a halfway decent communicator, you’re probably not a halfway decent leader either.

Of course, I’m still far from good at it. This stuff, like most anything else, takes a ton of dedicated practice and attention to really nail it. The difference between star performers and everyone else is that the people who care to get better use deliberate and corrective practice. They set specific goals, respond to feedback, and look at the process of improvement as a long-term thing. Others don’t, they just go through the motions. This isn’t just me speaking, by the way, it’s been exhibited in research by Psychology professor Dr. K. Anders Ericsson.

Now, before getting into the tips & tricks, remember that there’s always room for improvement, but it’s unlikely you’ll ever be perfect. Perfection is a pipe dream. But you can absolutely make your presentations better, in some cases much better, and you can always become better at public speaking. So make sure to have the right expectations going in and then just commit to the process fully.

Look, presenting is hard. Putting together presentations is hard too. It’s all quite scary, especially if it’s not something you do often. I remember a few years ago when I wasn’t doing this regularly, the nerves prior to presenting were so intense that I could barely sleep the night before. If this describes you, then maybe one of these tips will help you get over the proverbial hump. Look at this as just the beginning of a lifelong journey. Here we go.

1. Have a Single, Short, Memorable Takeaway.

Before you put your presentation together, figure out what you’d like the one key takeaway to be. Not two or three… pick a single one. If people remember one thing, they may be motivated to dig up #2 and #3 – but if you confuse them with a bunch of things your presentation was supposed to be about, the odds of them remembering anything goes down.

One fun way to do this is to think about what the tweet would be for your product, service, or pitch. We do this at Microsoft when we prepare our public blog entries and Carmine Gallo recommends doing this in The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Limit yourself to 140 characters just like you have to do on Twitter and again you’ll find that the constraint helps you focus your message. When you use, say, 100 words no one will remember it.

For instance:

Microsoft SkyDrive (http://skydrive.com) is quickly becoming the world’s most powerful cloud service.  [true, by the way]

2. Avoid the “Slideument”.

Garr Reynolds coined the term “slideument” to refer to what happens when we don’t exercise restraint when we prepare our presentations. Lazy people use bullet points because they don’t know what they’re supposed to say. Presentations that look and read like documents are NOT good presentations. They’re handouts or memos, and so you should just use them as such.  You’re better off having a single slide than a bunch of Word documents and Excel sheets filling the screen.

• Limit all slides to no more than 10 words. Use large fonts.
• Use full-bleed stock photography or simple, interesting graphs to complement and amplify your words.
• Use the slides’ notes field in PowerPoint or Keynote for your own notes, which will be shown in Presenter View if you need them. Make the type HUGE and give yourself subtle cues so that the notes are glanceable, otherwise you may just end up reading them again.

Learn more about how to design beautiful slides in Presentation Zen.

3. Start with a Story.

What better way to break the ice than to do a “cold open”? This means that instead of jumping right into the guts of your presentation, tell a quick personal (and hopefully entertaining) story that’s peripherally about what you’re going to talk about. This serves two purposes: one, it helps the audience get to know you better and two, it grabs their attention right off the bat, setting the tone for the rest of the talk. They may start to realize that this isn’t going to be a waste of time like most presentations.

4. Realize You Are an Entertainer.

When you’re speaking in front of a group of people, the first thing you have to realize is that you are their entertainment for the hour. You’re putting on a show, you aren’t reading to them during story time. If you think about it as a show, it can change the way you approach things. People need to be entertained or they will start looking for stimulation elsewhere. For starters:

• Don’t ever, ever read from your slides or read from a script. Did you notice Brad Pitt reading from index cards during Ocean’s Eleven? You are the performer. Perform.
• Don’t become a talking head. The best presenters keep their audience engaged by making them a part of the presentation. Figure out how to do that and you’re golden.
• Don’t do an “early reveal”. Time everything such that you get the biggest impact from your words. Putting up slides that say everything you’re about to say means the audience is no longer listening to you – they already know what you’re going to say, and they were so focused on reading that they didn’t even listen to what you just said anyway.

5. Connect With the Audience With Real Energy.

If you’re standing behind a podium picturing everyone in the audience naked, things may not end well for you. Entertaining is about connection, it’s not about giving people a “talking to”. Think about some of the best presentations you’ve attended and chances are the presenter(s) were active, authentic, used simple language, and exuded passion for what they were talking about.

There are lots of ways to do this, but some of the easiest:

• Get away from the podium right away. Use a remote to control your slides (never the space bar) and make sure to effuse energy.
• Make eye contact with people. It may feel creepy at first, but there’s no better way to keep people’s attention.
• Maintain an “open posture”. Don’t throw your hands in your pockets or cross your arms the entire time. Keep your hands up and open.  Pretend you’re holding a basketball.
• Have a conversational style. Don’t try and sound smart. Use short sentences and never use words most people in the audience won’t understand.
• Don’t be afraid to talk about how excited you are about what you’re talking about – it can be infectious provided it’s real. Use inflection in your voice to show your excitement!

6. Change Your Mode of Delivery Every 10 Minutes.

This recommendation comes from Brain Rules, a book I read a while ago (and have blogged about before) and I think it’s genius. At about 10 minutes of the same thing, people start to check out. Rule #4 in Brain Rules is “We don’t pay attention to boring things”.

How does this apply to your presentations?

“You must do something emotionally relevant at each 10-minute mark to regain attention.” says John Medina. If you drone on for 50 minutes on a set of text-heavy slides, you should just assume that at the start of minute eleven, no one is following you any longer.

You have to mix it up. Introduce a new speaker. Show a video. Engage the audience. Play some music and break into song (no, don’t do that). Shift to a product demo.

7. Rehearse… Like… Crazy.

If you’re hosting an unscripted Q&A, it’s going to be hard to rehearse. But for a planned presentation the most important thing you can do is nail your timing and delivery. Oddly enough, the only way things are going to sound natural is if you’ve said them before! You should rehearse at least 3 or 4 times through for every new presentation you’re going to deliver – there’s really no better way to make it good.

In Only Perfect Practice Makes Perfect, I talk about this:

Practice may not actually make perfect, but if you aren’t practicing perfectly, you have no shot. The more you practice the right way, the more you’re creating routine – or “muscle memory” as the coaches call it. Your brain understands sequence and your nervous system reacts more quickly as the pathways are grooved. The more this happens, the better you become at the task at hand and the more natural it all becomes to you.

In order to really practice “perfectly”, you should do a dress rehearsal in the room you’re going to present in. You should have people around to give you feedback. You should also try and rehearse while you’re fresh and not half asleep.

And most importantly, practice your presentation in order, all the way through without stopping. If you mess something up or forget something, don’t worry about it. It happens. When you’re really presenting you don’t get a “do over” so don’t give yourself one during rehearsal.

Take practice seriously – it’s something most people don’t do and should!

—

This is a very short list of things, primarily to whet your appetite. If you’re actually interested in this stuff, there are some great references out there. Here are the books I’ve read – I’d strongly recommend all of them. If you can only read one of them, I’d probably start with The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. As silly as the title sounds, the book itself is a great first step down the path.

• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo. Ever wonder how Steve Jobs did it? This book analyzes his various keynotes and comes up with very simple and well-articulated steps to achieve similar success with your presentations.
• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. Garr’s books, in particular the first one, help you realize just how important the art of design is for your presentations. This book will change the way you think about your slides and you’ll start to view them less as a crutch, and more as an amplifier of your words.
• Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson. The first book I read on the topic back in 2005 when it first came out, Beyond Bullet Points is a phenomenal book comparing your presentations to a movie script with three acts. Storyboarding is a big part of the approach. My only wish is that Microsoft Press had read Garr Reynolds’ book before designing that cover!
• Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. In typical Scott Berkun fashion, this book is an entertaining and fun read about the various things public speakers have to deal with. Definitely worth a pick-up.

Good luck!  Let me know how it goes.

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If you don’t know what I mean by shipping, you might want to read Real Artists (Plan to) Ship first.

Shipping is hard.  It’s especially hard if you’ve never done it, or simply haven’t done it often enough to know what it feels like.  You suspect that ‘inspiration’ will pull you through it, yet in reality inspiration usually doesn’t last more than a day or two.

Inspiration is an ephemeral feeling that tricks you into thinking it will always be there.  Of course, it can’t be… and won’t be.

Inspiration has never shipped anything.  Grit is how you ship. If you think you’re always going to be inspired and that you can just “lean on” that feeling everyday to power you, you’re going to fail.  It doesn’t work.  Inspiration will disappear as soon as the caffeine leaves your blood stream, you get distracted, or you wake up with a headache.  You need a model for shipping, something that helps get you through the emotional dips you’re bound to experience.

When you’re inspired, you don’t expect to have dips in your motivation.  You’re above that.  You’re made of steel.  The feeling will last forever.  People who ship know better.

The art of shipping is the same the world over, no matter what the subject is.  Paint, code, words, chords, clay, whatever. If you’re creating anything from nothing and expect it to see the light of day, you’re looking to ship something. Creating something without delivering it may still be considered art by some, but it’s not shipping.

When we hire new program managers at Microsoft, one of the most important things we look for is people who are good at all phases of the product cycle.  We expect people to be strong at the beginning, coming up with creative ideas and unique approaches to solving tough problems.  We look for strength in the middle, people who are able to execute and get the team through the grind without giving up.  And we want people who can pull the team all the way through to the finish line, dealing with the (very hard) act of pushing something real out the door to a few hundred million users.

This means that the best people are the ones who can decide what to do, figure out how to do it with the team, and then start it, drive it, and ship it.

Anyone can have an idea.  And just about anyone can write a strongly worded email or document about how “obvious” that idea is and how everyone who doesn’t “get it” is an “idiot”.  But the people who are able to sell the idea, line the people up, and bring it all the way to the finish line, imperfections and all, and then do it over and over again are the real stars. 

The funny thing is how these people usually aren’t the same people who think they’re superstars just because they have some ideas.  The best people are too busy shipping to care what you think.

One of the first steps toward shipping anything is to plan to do so.  But you have to be ready for the ups and downs.  The emotional cycle of shipping is essential to understand, otherwise you’re going to quit with the first emotional dip.

If you can’t relate to how the “downs” of a project are going to hit you emotionally, you aren’t going to last through the peaks, valleys, and huge psychological trips you’re going to experience.  Your mind is going to continually try and get you to give up.  Fight or flight.  So you need tools in your arsenal to push back.  To think, “I know this feeling, I’ve felt it before, and I’m not going to give up on this.”

The following is a quote from Chip and and Dan Heath’s book, Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard about how IDEO, a top design firm, looks at shipping new things (emphasis mine):

Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO, says that every design process goes through “foggy periods.” One of IDEO’s designers even sketched out a “project mood chart” that predicts how people will feel at different phases of a project.

It’s a U-shaped curve with a peak of positive emotion, labeled “hope,” at the beginning, and a second peak of positive emotion, labeled “confidence,” at the end. In between the two peaks is a negative emotional valley labeled “insight.”

Unfortunately this mood chart is nowhere to be found online.  The closest thing found is from the Kanban blog which is a very similar cycle, though might overemphasize the second dip.  I’ve found the reality to be pretty close to this however:

Knowledge is power, and knowing that you’re going to go through these kinds of fluctuations can help you prepare yourself or your team for them.  One of my own personal tenets is that things are never as good – or as bad – as you think they are.  This model emphasizes that.  When you know you’re going to feel a certain way, you can get ready for it in whatever way works best for you.

But the truth is: there’s nothing better than shipping.  Which is why enthusiasm runs highest at that point.  Very few things compare if you consider yourself an artist of your craft.

Related posts:

1. Real Artists (Plan to) Ship
2. Protect Your Time: 8 Ways to Stay Focused on Important Stuff

As a part of an overall approach to personal growth, it’s important to know when your mind – which is far more complex than many of us give it credit – is working on your behalf and when it isn’t.  Or, to put it more specifically, when it thinks it’s working on your behalf… when in reality it’s doing the equivalent of tying your hands behind your back so you can’t hurt yourself… but can’t eat or drink either!

In so many ways, our minds have adapted almost too well over millennia.  In an effort to protect us in the short-term, we can frequently be hurting ourselves over the long haul.

The self-serving bias is like that.  It’s the tendency to see ourselves as responsible for our successes, but to see others – or the circumstances – as responsible for our failures. 

This is so clearly a coping strategy – we do this to protect our self-image, improve our confidence, and keep ourselves from dwelling on the negative.  We also do it to (at least seemingly) protect the image of ourselves in the eyes of others by playing up the good stuff and deferring blame for the bad stuff.

But is it healthy?  Is that really who we strive to be?  Someone who takes the credit and assigns blame?

I doubt it.  Most of us would probably say that this doesn’t describe us at all.  That we’re great about giving credit where it’s due and taking blame when things don’t go well.  And of course, most of us would be kidding ourselves (there’s that damn bias again).  Because who you think you are and who you actually are are rarely the same.  That’s one of the core tenets of psychology.

Not a day goes by that you don’t witness the self-serving bias in action if you’re actively looking for it.  In sports, you typically want to win.  So of course you’re going to believe that the umpires or referees have it out for you if you don’t.  At work, you want to be seen as someone who makes things happen.  So when they don’t, it can’t possibly be your fault, right?  And in politics, you want to be right.  So everything your candidate or party says can be seen through that lens.

Is this inevitable?  Are we doomed to demonstrate the self-serving bias whether we like it or not?  Of course not   Where would the fun in life be if we couldn’t change ourselves and become better people?

Step 1: Learn about the self-serving bias

Naturally, like many things in personal growth, the most important thing you can do is to learn about the self-serving bias.  Watch the video above, read a little bit on the web, and think about how you exhibit this in your own life. Knowing that the self-serving bias exists and that we can all be lured into its trap can help you avoid it in the future.

PsychWiki as usual has a good write-up and a list of references you can refer to.  The relationship to self-handicapping is especially interesting to me.

Step 2: Value failure and take accountability

The best way to succeed is to double your failure rate. - Bill Gates

It sounds cliché but failing is the only way to grow.  If you don’t take pride in your failures and use them as opportunities to learn and adapt, you’re handicapping your progress.  Failing is all part of the process.  Start accepting the fact that failure isn’t always someone else’s fault and start owning up to it.  The people around you will respect you more and you’ll all be able to learn from your mistakes moving forward.  Yes, it’s hard to admit you’re to blame – even partially.  But it’s critical to overcoming the self-serving bias.

Step 3: Find ways to give others credit

Taking credit for everything is something children do when they don’t know any better.  It’s far more fun to help others succeed provided you do it genuinely.  Give others an opportunity to shine even in situations that don’t seem “important”. 

Helping others grow and get recognition can have such a profound effect on you that it can outweigh any perceived benefits of taking all the credit to begin with.

Bottom line: Be aware that you probably have a tendency towards the self-serving bias.  If you find yourself exhibiting it, refer back to this post and straighten yourself out!

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If you work in the tech industry, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase, “Real artists ship”.  It’s a quote attributed to Steve Jobs, the founder and current CEO of Apple, as a motivator for the development team of the original Macintosh computer.

In this context, shipping means getting your product out the door and into the hands of the world.  But it could mean submitting your term paper, completing a big sale, or finishing a year-long boat renovation.  Life is full of projects like these that could go on indefinitely, but ultimately have to ship in order to make a difference. 

If these projects don’t ship, they’re just hobbies.  If they don’t ship, they were just fun ideas – and ideas are a dime a dozen… everyone has good ideas.  But shipping… that’s hard.  And the rewards of shipping are reserved for the few that are able to do it, not the people who first thought of the idea.

The “problem” with starting a project with the expectation that it’ll ship is that it imposes all sorts of constraints.  The technology isn’t where you need it to be, you don’t have the time you need to do everything you want to do, or you don’t have the people or money.  In order to truly think “outside the box” you need a team that’s twice as big with twice as much money and faster computers!  Of course that’s all bogus.

Constraints are why things ship.

If you didn’t have a deadline to submit your term paper, you could tweak it forever.  If you didn’t have customers waiting for the next version of your software or competitors breathing down your neck, you could add every feature you’ve ever thought of.  You need constraints to really think about how to best solve a problem.  Constraints are good.

The most important creations in the world are the ones that have shipped.  Creating without constraint isn’t creating… it’s just messing around.  Michelangelo didn’t mope around in Italian coffee shops instead of painting the Sistine Chapel because the ceiling was too big or he didn’t have enough time.  He shipped it.

Seth Godin has a great quote in his (highly recommended book) Linchpin where he discusses shipping:

Artists don’t think outside the box, because outside the box there’s a vacuum. Outside of the box there are no rules, there is no reality. You have nothing to interact with, nothing to work against. If you set out to do something way outside the box (designing a time machine, or using liquid nitrogen to freeze Niagara Falls), then you’ll never be able to do the real work of art. You can’t ship if you’re far outside the box… Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done.

I love that.

I’ve shipped a lot of things in my life, as I’m sure you have too.  And not a single one went out the door, including every post on this site, without me thinking, “Is it really ready?  Did I do everything I could have done?  Yikes, it’s not ready.  I need more time to get it right!”  The times when I pushed through the fear were because I had a plan.  When I had to come up with a plan ahead of starting, I’d already felt this fear once before, so I knew how to deal with it.

This is why it’s important to plan from the start to ship.  To be clear that come hell or high water, shipping something is non-negotiable.  Planning to ship is the difference between you and 99.9% of the world that never ships anything.

It’s critical that your plan to ship is comprehensive.  If your plan isn’t trusted, what’s the point?  You need a plan that you believe in through and through.  Even if the world changes around you, you’ll at least have a framework to deal with it.

A plan proves to your scared self that you’ve already done the research and you’re ready to go. This way, you feel that the path to shipping has been predetermined.  It’s much harder to second-guess yourself or your team when your plan is written down and sitting right in front of you.  The person (or group of people) who wrote that plan were confident – they were sure – that the plan would succeed.  Trust those instincts even if you don’t feel them right now.  Because shipping matters.

Most importantly, planning gets all the arguments (or “thrashing” as it’s often called) out of the way before they matter.  You debate (and ultimately decide) during planning, either with yourself or with others, so you’re not debating in the end game when it’s too expensive to discuss.  With any project, changes are always 10x costlier at the end than the beginning. 

You can always spot a well-run project by how little thrashing there is at the end.  The disaster projects are the ones that look great / on-track until the last 10%, and then they become thrash-fests.

That’s not to say the end is ever easy.  It isn’t.  It’s always hard.  But at the end of the project, you need to be focusing on the little things because the big things were already discussed, debated, and decided long ago.  If you’re still debating the big things near the end of the project, you’re done for.

The two biggest reasons for failed projects: 1) Complete lack of planning, and 2) Poor planning.  Projects with good planning become well executed projects that ship.  Projects that aren’t planned, or are planned poorly, become poorly executed projects that don’t ship – or ship late.

No one will remember the projects that didn’t ship 100 years from now.  You only have a shot at getting them to remember those that did.

We have a phrase we use at Microsoft all the time when a decision is made.  Ship it!  It’s the geek equivalent of saying, “We’ve reached consensus, we don’t need to discuss again, now the most important thing to do is to get it out there.”  It’s also more fun than saying “Yup, I agree”

Ultimately, shipping is what matters!

Related posts:

1. How it Feels to Ship Stuff
2. Make Your Training Harder Than The Real Thing

To put it another way:

• Thermometers like to criticize once a direction is chosen.  They’re always first to notice when something is wrong, but can’t take the necessary steps to fix it.  They’re the armchair quarterbacks of the world and are great at telling you what you already know.  The thermometer has an ability to lead only in so much as hindsight is 20/20.  They can’t plan or adapt to changes.
• Thermostats take the temperature of the room first and then put a plan in place to adapt.  They’re the leaders and the visionaries, and the people you rely on to stay calm in a crisis and lead you to the next level.  Thermostats are able to work past criticism and negativity and push forward even when the odds are against them.  Thermostats exhibit self-control and stability.

Naturally there are corollaries in the business world but what about for personal growth and achievement?  When I read this I immediately thought about the high-achievers I know and how they approach their lives.  They’re all gifted in keeping things in balance and staying in control – events and people don’t inject drama into their lives because they don’t let them.  They understand the factors at work and adapt accordingly with time to spare.  They aren’t prone to wild swings in “temperature”.

This description also reminds me of one of my favorite Bruce Lee quotes, which is a key lesson in Zen philosophy: “Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.”  Thermostats are masters at adaptation.

Thermostats don’t like to spend time with thermometers because it’s almost always counter-productive for them, making everything harder than it needs to be.  Thermometers hold people back through negativity and second-guessing while thermostats do what needs to be done.  It’s all about learning, adjusting, and driving ahead.

So… are you a thermostat or a thermometer?

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