The presentation book Thats worth a look

By: Mohamed Sameh Ismail

Lets grow the presentation muscle

Did you know that there is a muscle in your body that scientists gave it another name other than its scientific name which is the presentation muscle? Where do you think this muscle is located? In the mouth maybe? Haha actually now I can convince you that I can make the pyramids disappear if you were convinced but if you werent from the beginning thats a good thing Actually a presentation muscle is an imaginary muscle with a real impact. Imagine you lift weights and you started today and you kept of lifting weights till the end of the month. By the end of the month your muscles would probably grow and do what it wasnt able to do a month ago, Same idea with the presentation skills, it is a skill that grows the more you practice it. So for those who say that they Cant do a good presentation here is the good news.. presentation skills are acquired skills that are gained by practice. What I am saying isnt just a talk or a theory, it is a proven method I can say, Just take a look at one of the most admired and recognized presenters who used to inspire people on every launch of a new product for his company and I think now you already know who is he, Yes he is Steve jobs. You just cant ignore him when you are talking about brilliant presentation skills but let me get back to the point that presentation skills are acquired. If you have a pc close to you just go to youtube and take a look at steve jobs first presentations in apple when he was for example introducing the 1st Macintosh and compare his performance with the iphone presentation which you will also find on youtube and you would probably say: How did he improve that much?! But the answer is simple, it is the presentation muscle,he trained it a lot till he became insanely great. So lets start the simple and ask some very simple questions to get things clarified. What is a presentation? Presentation is the transfer of ideas or info to another person or a group of people , also presentations became attached in mind with the softwares like power point and keynote so you rarely see someone who gives a presentations without using a software so why are presentations important? Actually presentations became a part of every culture in the whole world, wherever there is a transfer of info or ideas in work,college,meetings or even conferences a presentation comes probably as the most effective and powerful solution. And because of that you have to master the presentation skills because simply they are following you everywhere. There is a very convincing quote for Aristotle what gives you one good reason why you should master the presentation skills, he said Those who can think and cant express put themselves at the level of those who cant think . Just as simple as that How can I know that you have a great idea if you didnt know how to tell it to others? What I forgot to tell you from the beginning that these handouts are just like a guideline to you when you want to make a presentation but it WONT IMPROVE YOUR PERFORMANCE! Actually no book in the world can improve your performance because as I said before it is all

about your presentation muscle the more you train it the more stronger it gets the much more better presenter you become. At the end you cant learn swimming without getting wet! Now lets get started, simply the presentations are divided into two general categories 1- Informative presentations 2- Persuasive presentations Informative presentations are for promoting understanding of an idea or to convey info. So they could be something like presentations in schools and colleges, professors slides on a specific topic that he is explaining to the students or even maybe the end of the year performance presentation for a certain department in a company. Just to make it a bit clearer an example of informative presentations would be: the hazards resulting from fossil fuels like petroleum of gas Persuasive presentations are made to influence a change in belief attitude or behavior of another. They would be something like sales presentations for an individual or a corporate. Maybe for entrepreneurs who are trying convince an investor to invest in their idea or product.it maybe also a presentation in a certain campaign like a stop smoking campaign. An example of persuasive presentation would be: convincing people to use renewable energies instead of fossil fuels to reduce environmental hazards. So as you can see the difference between the two examples of the two different kinds of presentations. We can divide any presentation into 3 main phases: 1-Preparation phase 2-Design phase 3-Delivery phase Lets now start with the preparation phase

The preparation phase

This is the first phase in your presentation, which can be also called the analog phase as in this phase you have to be away from the computer and write down your thoughts and ideas using a pen and a paper. For this phase we have two different start situations 1- You are going to present something you dont know a lot about so the first thing that you will need to do in this phase is to start reading BUT read to a limit! The limit hear is having a personal opinion so that when you reach a point that you cancel your mind and you just say what you read this means that you exceeded the limit and that there is something wrong.Simply because people want to know your opinion about what youve read and what you are talking about not to tell themwhat youve read in the books . I know that it may seems like a shocking fact but yes people can read! So again dont tell them what youve read but tell them what do you think of what youve read. So read to a limit! 2- You are going to present something you already have a good background in so you could skip the reading part if you want but probably you would need to get back to some books just to refresh you memory.then you will move to the most important part in the preparation phase which is the audience analysis. You are actually doing a presentation for your audience not for yourself as you are trying to convey your thoughts ideas or results to them so you need to focus on them not on you. As what you may think is very simple to you might be really hard for the audience to understand. The very famous thing that is used to understand the audience is asking questions about them and if you get the answers and understand them you are stepping a big step forward towards success. These are some of the questions that you may ask to analyze your audience: 1- How much time do I have? 2- When exactly is the presentation? What is my order if there are other who are going to present? 3- Who is the audience? Their age maybe or even nationalities 4- What is their background? 5- Why am I presenting today? What is the purpose of the presentation? 6- What do they expect to listen to? Why would they be interested in my presentation? 7- Do I want them to do something after the presentation? What is it? These are some of the questions that you can use that will probably help you understand your audience and tell you what is required and needed from you to convey your message to them. For example you might now understand from answering these questions that the people who are going to attend the presentation arent from the same profession so they wont like to get

into deep details and that they are just looking to know the pros and cons of something to take a decision whether to invest in a project or not. So you are somehow trying to convince them. So as you can see you are trying to perform audience analysis through these questions to match your knowledge with their area of interest. Now I need to tell you two things to keep in mind in the preparation phase. The first thing is that we learn easily if the information is presented in context. To make this more clearer take 1 min to memorize the next list of numbers and try to write them down afterwards if you could: 3,9,4,1,6,11,7,10 2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16 4,1,5,10,2,5,3,8,10 3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17 I think youve now got the point, after you do this exercise you can see that it is much more easier to memorize and remember things when they are in context, but when things becomes unorganized un related to each other then you are risking the chance that anyone could actually remember anything from you presentation. The second rule I want to tell you is that you need to put in mind that while preparing you already know that people only learn very small amount of info in short times. Probably you are presenting in the range of 20 minutes so dont expect the people to learn too much in these 20 minutes so be focused about the one thing you want them to remember after the presentation. This is just the law of nature a small amount of sugar can be dissolved in a small amount of water. So be precise ,short and to the point. To help you decrease your material and take out unnecessary points you can use the elevator approach. The elevator approach is simple just imagine that you have this idea that you always wanted to tell to a very famous businessman but you never had the chance. But one day you found him standing infront of you in the elevator and you just have the chance to tell him you idea but just in 30 seconds so you can get him interested. What would you say? Is it a very challenging approach? Sure it is but when you do it you can tailor your presentation anytime you want.

Now lets move to how you can organize your thoughts and ideas. Presentations are like stories they must have an intro, a body and a conclusion. To remind you of what we have said before presentations are divided into two general categories,do you remember them? Yes the informative and the persuasive presentations.

Lets start with the informative presentations, there is a very simple formula that you can use to make an informative presentation,the formula is : OIBCC O: opening, the grabbing attention phase how are you going to get people interested I: introduction, what are you presenting and why? B:body, what you want to tell them C: conclusion, summarize what youve said briefly C: closing, last strong words that leave the audience with something to remember As you can see this is a very simple and practical approach of an informative presentation There is also another formula for the persuasive presentations: PREPY P: Point of view, for example smoking is hazardous R: reasons, it causes cancer E: examples/evidences, it kills 50,000 people yearly P: point of view restated, if you want to live a long life give up smoking Y: you, take your first step and attend our next seminar A very simple approach too, these two formulas arent the only ones that you can use there a lot of other strategies that you can get through the internet that would help you in other ways to present your ideas. I just chose those which I thought are very easy and could be really helpful to you now. So by now I assume you already know how to start preparing for your presentation first you go analog and get a pen and paper then you write down your thoughts and ideas and then know the audience and analyze them then you tailor your message to their interest. Now we are going to move to the next phase which is the design phase.

Design phase
You probably now have a good understanding of the first phase of the presentation which is the preparation phase. Now we will move to the second phase which is the design phase,but before we start explaining anything I need to tell you something first.scientists made a lot of experiments and studies that showed something that is really important,which is: people store and access info in 3 primary ways: 1-visually (by seeing things) 2-auditorially( by listening to things) 3-kinesthetically ( by feeling and touching things) Each person in this word store and access info in these 3 ways but probably there is one way which is more dominant than the others. Researchers also discovered something that would be really important to any presenter, it is about how most of the adults absorb,retain or learn: 10% of what they read 20% of what they hear 30% of what they read and hear 50% of what they hear and see 90% of what they do Though these are scientific results you may want to think about them a bit and you may even ask your self is that true? I will try now to get these results closer to you, try to help you imagine them. Do you remember the last time you studied and how much time did it take you to memorize maybe a definition in a book? Especially if you are this kind of a guy that dont read out loud and you read and write silently.do you remember how much you suffered during the exam if you didnt like write it for 30 times to make it stick to your head? This is actually how hard for you to remember a written text, which is the first 10% of how people absorb and retain. The second example is about hearing..you always find it easier for you to memorize a song that you listen to than to memorize a written text right? A lot of us were told this at least once from his parents when you were kids: I just wish you memorize these songs like you memorize your studies you always felt that it took you a year to memorize a single page in a book and it took you few minutes to memorize a song, off course the interest in the subject makes a big difference but not that big, so the rest of it comes from how are you told these words. So these are the second 20%

This brings us to the third part which is the read and hear part which is the 30% part. Ask someone who is really good in memorizing and he would probably tell you that reading out a text is much more better than just reading silently. The reason is that reading out loud a text makes you use two of your sensory organs which are the eyes and the ears,unlike just reading silently which uses one organ. What makes this better is that if one of the organs failed you in one occasion there is a big probability that the other organ would rescue you. So If you didnt remember it in your mind when you are trying to visualize what you read in the book probably you would remember what you said while memorizing. And if you didnt try this before you would better try it and dont forget me in your prayers But lets move now to our targeted way which is the hear and see part which makes 50% of how adults absorb, learn and retain. Movieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees do you remember a lot of scenes from your favourite movie? You probably memorize some of what was said in the movie and the way how people acted. This is the power of see and hear! And this is the power of a presentation. do you know what is very very close to a presentation in the movies? The documentary movies. Movies at the end are motion pictures with the voice of someone who is explaining and a lot of times they just bring a stand still picture in the middle of the movie and the voice Is still there explaining. If you see a documentary movie you would probably remember a lot of it that you will go to talk about with your friends.isnt it true? I still remember this documentary about jelly fish and how they are conquering the oceans though I saw it like a year ago I still remember a lot of the info that were in the movie and that jelly fish used to kill fish especially in china which made fishers and fishing boats in a big problem and a lot of them actually left this work due to this problem. But the good thing about Chinese is that they actually eat anything so they started fishing jelly fish and became one of the dishes there so the fisher men and fishing companies found another way to survive they tried to do the same thing in japan but they couldnt.you know why? Simply because they are not Chinese enough with the story but this what iam actually talking about and this should be the target of any presenter a presentation should be a hear and see experience because it is simply powerful. The last way of retaining and learning is the do something way. If you do something then the probability of forgetting it is reduced to much. Just like if someone is trying to teach you how to drive a manual car, if he keeps on telling you thing theoretically and you fully understand it this doesnt mean that you became a good driver because you have to drive in order to learn how to drive. Then when you learn how to drive a manual car by actually driving a manual car for while, and then you stopped driving manual cars for like years and then you returned back to driving manual you will find yourself still remembering how did you use to drive the car, and this is the power of doing something. So why did we say all these things? I am just trying to make you fully aware of these results to make you choose, how do you want people to remember what you said in your presentation? There is a very famous way for presenting a presentation that I want you to avoid them, because it is terribly bad. It is that guy who thinks of the presentation slides as a document and write every single word of what he is going to say in the slides which actually ends up being a slideument ( a mix between a slide and a document) but this is stupid! This actually questions the reason for having a presentation, why are you there? Why are you bringing all these people to your presentation to read for them what

you have written in your slides,do you think they cant read? Why you just didnt send them a document to read? Even if you did memorize what are you going to say in the presentation and didnt look at the slides, the thing is that people will read! And they wont be focusing on what are you saying.if you assessed the two possibilities in this example you will find people are either only reading or reading and hearing which is the possibility of remembering 30% of lower of what youve said, and I dont think that you showed up in front of people just to remember less than 30% of what youve said . Put in your mind that softwares are aiding tools! They help you to clarify your message to make it have a much more clear meaning but the slides arent the presentation, you are the presentation! a lot of people can actually talk to the crowds without using a soft ware that would help them while speaking and they are still effective but when you have a chance to use a software dont make it a disadvantage, make it something that enhances your message and make it more clear. I am going to show you now a picture from my graduation project presentation which as I think can give you a good example of how you can use the slides as something that enhances your presentation. We were constructing something called solar stirling engine as a graduation project and I probably think that you dont know it if you arent a mechanical or energy engineer and this is one of the drawback of this engine. People arent familiar with this kind of technology so it is very hard for us to convince people and investors with how much our idea is very useful and can make like a huge change in Egypt if this was like a national project that the whole country can work on. Especially that no one in the world has reached the best configuration for this engine. Most of the investors dont like taking risk in something they dont understand too much about. So what happened is that I didnt just write this and make the slide a slideument. I didnt also write it in bullet point as I thought it wont be effective. What happened as you can see in the picture down there is that I took a picture of me with a friend who was with me in the same project and I made it like a comic and that I am telling him that we are going to do this engine and what you can see from his reaction that he doesnt know it, which gets you the point that people dont know the engine which is one of the drawbacks and with me explaining to them more details with the help of the picture things became more and more clear, effective and most importantly memorable.

Here is the rule just to make it clear for you, if you want to write in the slides you can do so but not more than ten words! If you can change words with a picture that is memorable or will make things more clear while you speak please do. Remember you are the presentation, people are here to listen to you not to read your slides, slides are only there to help you to make things more clear to the audience, to help them visualize what are you saying. And if you are still in doubt, yes I am telling you dont stuff your slide with 5 6 bullets because these are more than 10 words! Some of you may ask this question? Ok so what is the use of the presentation to people if they want to study from my slides? Ok here is the rule! Presentations arent for studying, and these slides mean nothing if you arent there, you should be making handouts for people if you want them to study something, but the slides, no! dont give your slides to anyone because they dont mean anything if you arent there. Give them handouts but dont give them slides. Because if you want people to study from your presentations this will make your slides a slideument and you already know how bad is that! Now lets move to the third and final phase of the presentation which is the delivery phase.

The Delivery phase

Before we talk about the delivery when need to talk about practice. Probably you heard before that practice is probably the most important aspect of giving a presentation. After you finish preparation and design you need to start practicing on how are you going to say this to the people? What are you going to ask them? how are you going to move? Your tone, when is it going to be high and enthusiastic and when are you going to keep it low? People sometimes tell you: ok I rehearsed my presentation one or twice or even three times and I didnt do well though, I am not convinced that practice is important or makes a difference. Do you know why did they do bad? Because they didnt do enough! In order to do a presentation that you would look like a master in front of the audience you need to rehearse it for 15 days! Yes 15 days do your presentation alone for 15 days everyday. If your presentation is a 20 minutes presentation have a 20 minutes rehearsal daily for 15 days. I am telling you this because my instructor once told me this and I tried it before and it was my best presentation ever till the time I am writing this very small book. Of course I know that sometimes you dont have the 2 weeks for rehearsing the presentation but if you dont ,make sure that you rehearse a lot more that twice or three times in the given time you have because it will make a huge difference. A difference between someone who looks barely knowing the subject and someone who knows his topic by heart and saying it to others easily. This is the rule of life, you need to train in order to perform well. Soldiers do this, football players, actors and a lot more they just keep on training and rehearsing what are they going to do in each and every situation so that when the situation comes they dont think! They just perform because probably thinking would lead them to under performing. It makes the performance look much more natural and confident, and you need this in your presentation. Now lets move to another point,of course if you attended a presentation training or session before you probably heard that a lot of researches globally showed that speaking to people (public speaking) is one of the most feared things and sometimes it even exceeds the fear of death! Even a very famous American comedian jerry Seinfeld made fun of this by saying: at a funeral the average person would prefer to be in the casket(the box where the dead body is put in) than to give the eulogy( the formal expression of praise for someone who has died recently). When you start asking your friends and start searching on the internet what are the problems that they face and want to overcome while presenting. The first thing they tell you is fear or anxiety. All those people are looking at me! What if I said something wrong? What if they dont like what I am saying? You may even tell yourself Ohh I look terrible today or I am really out of shape, I should have exercised more before I went In front of the audience probably they are making fun of my big tummy now! Or you may even tell yourself well I am not born to be a presenter! Good presenters are natural. Let me remind you of something first before we start explaining how can you solve this problem of fear.Remember when you were probably approaching an exam and you always said that you are afraid

of doing bad though you studied really hard. And then you open the TV and see those scientists talking about positive and negative fear. How we need fear in order to do our best while studying and preparing which is the positive fear. And when you are just few minutes or hours away from the exam you should start thinking that whatever happens in the test you are going to be fine because you did your best. Though you keep on having this fear till the very few moments of the beginning of the exam when you see the first question and become relieved that you know the answer and you start thinking positively that your efforts wont go in vain. And the negative fear is the one that keeps you frustrated even when there are a lot of evidences that you are doing fine and it makes you at the end perform even worse than average. The same thing applies to presentation. you have done your work, you prepared really well, you know what are you going to tell the audience and in what sequence and how to make them love your slides, all these were in the preparation and design phase. But here you dont have a first question that you know, so how can I calm down? Easy easy, make the confidence question to yourself! Yes this is a part that you should do when preparing and rehearsing that will affect your performance. Prepare an intro and memorize it well. This Is the only part am going to tell you to memorize it really really well. The introduction of the presentation is the part where you start to gain confidence and start to grab peoples attention. So it is very important. What you need to do and I always recommend start with a story. There are a lot of other ways that you can start your presentation with but this one is the most one I recommend. But why a story? First of all people love stories and when you relate what you are going to say to a story it becomes much more easier for people to understand. But the most important reason for you to start with a story is that it makes you natural. When you start connecting to the audience through a story people get interested and you could actually see this in peoples faces which grow your confidence and make you start feeling natural and that people are willing to listen to what are you going to say. So this become like the first question in the exam that you know that diminishes your fear and make you confident. Asking a question too is something that will give you confidence, if you asked a good question and ask people to answer people will start replying which will make you feel conversational( that you are having a conversation with your audience) which is going to bring you confidence and you become natural. You should also prepare the transition from the story or the question to the slides and if you do this, you will feel much more confident because you know what you are doing. A lot of people actually always pay attention to things that wont really matter if they are concentrating enough. Like how do I look? Or why people are looking at me like this? Do they like my suit? This is a very famous example that Ive read before, imagine that you own a theatre and you are sitting in a room back there. The audience are concentrating with the actors on stage and suddenly there is fire in the theatre, no one felt that there is something wrong but you know that and you know that the fire is going to grow and reach the main hall. There are two exits but there is one that the fire reached, so what you are going to do is to get on the stage to tell the people to go from that particular exit because there is a fire and. You are really concentrating at this point when you come on stage to save peoples lives. Do you think you would really care about how you look? Or how do people look at you? Off course not, but why at this point you dont care and in other situations you cared? Because you

werent concentrating in the importance of your message. If you really concentrated about how important your message to those people, the thoughts and fears about how do I look and things like this will just go away. One thing you need to make sure you do in order to avoid people getting bored, your tone. Just think of how you speak to people every day and do like that. You raise your voice when you are enthusiastic , you look angry and raise your voice too when you are sad, you keep your voice low when you are sad for example. You have to keep your voice conversational. Dont make your voice a mono tone voice. Seriously people would throw you with tomatoes if they had the chance.

One last Thing

Again this very brief book isnt going to make you a great presenter, these are just thoughts that I think would help you when you are training your presentation muscle. If you think this book is good then you should read the references that I took my information from because I think they are going to be really helpful and useful to you. I also recommend watching ted videos because there are a lot of great examples for great presentations. My references: How to present like steve jobs The presentation zen Public speaking for dale caregie.