Creative Streak

#5: How to Break Your Presentation with Conversation

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."  It covers initial points on how to ask questions of the audience, how to lead exercises, and how to facilitate discussion and debate.

This post originates from an earlier one (“Want To Show How Intelligent You Are?”) although that purpose was slightly different.  There, my point was that presentations should be clear, succinct or prioritized – not an elaborate display of brain power, or an unending litany of details, facts and charts.

Related to that post, my point here is that lecture-based presentations – that is, when you do (nearly) all the talking – are often not effective at helping the audience listen.  You might be able to carry the burden of the speech for 10 minutes or so, but if your presentation stretches longer, say to an hour … well, even your mother wouldn’t find you that interesting.

There are several ways to break from the lecture and build rapport through discussion.

• Ask questions
• Conduct exercises, or
• Lead discussion and debate

What Good Listeners Do

Funny how some advice from the stone ages – say, 1971 – can remain relevant. This morning I found an article using the anagram SAFE, from What Good Listeners Do, by Karen Middleton at the American Management Association. Similar to Peter Drucker's SMART objectives, it has many forms and renderings. Here's my own variation, broadening it slightly from its original area of client service.

The best listeners are "SAFE." They ...

Support the speaker, encouraging he or she to tell their story, using their own words, from their own perspective.

Ask open-ended questions, to keep the speaking talking, to elict more information to add depth and detail, and to understand what the speaker is truly trying to say.

Focus completely on the speaker. They don't allow any distractions – especially their own opinions, positions, agendas or egos – to prevent them from hearing the speaker.

Empathize with the speaker, their feelings and their concerns.

Empathize is the most vital aspect of listening. In his book The Lost Art of Listening (perhaps the best overall book on the subject), Michael Nichols says: "Listening is the art by which we use empathy to reach across the space between us. Passive attention does not work."  Elsewhere, Nichols paraphrases himself when he found himself not listening to a client: "I wasn't interested in them, I was more interested in me."

If you were listen more closely to one key person in your life – personally or professionally – how might your relationship with that person change?

#4: Be VARK

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

When you’re an audience member, listening to a speaker, do you realize how you are taking in information? How are you processing what's being said? How does it go from the speaker's lips to your brain?

Perhaps you’ve never given it much thought. If it's a particularly boring presenter, perhaps you thought nothing was going in. But in reality, there's a lot more than think.

Psychologists believe individuals are bombarded with as many as 10,000-12,000 sensory stimuli per second from the environment around them. According to Suzette Haden Elgin, in her book Business Speak, “If attention was paid to every one of those sensations, the result would be information overload. To avoid this, humans reduce the incoming information to manageable quantity, noticing some and discarding others, remembering some for short-term (working) memory, indexing other for long-term memory storage.” Elsewhere, she continued: “No later than the age of 5, we discover which one of the senses works best for (us), which is more useful to process information.”

#3: Break Your Presentation Into Chunks

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

In 1956, psychologist George Miller at Princeton University concluded from research that individuals normally only retain seven serial-order items of information (give or take two items) in their short-term memory. The theory became known as "Miller’s Law," or also "Miller’s Magic Number."

Since that time, additional research has shown that the idea of 7+2 is less exact than suggestive. Some claimed the "real number" was 5. Others – probably highly caffeinated, can’t-wait, A+ type people – strongly believed that they (the audience) will only remember one thing in their short-term memory. More so, if you follow the Ides of Twitter, they'd also suggest this one singular statement would also be no longer than 140 characters.

I myself think the magic number is 3. I use the Goldilocks Principle to prove my hypothesis. Two statements sounds like not enough, and four statements sounds like too many to remember. Therefore, 3 is “just right.”

#2. Know Your Audience (Part 2)

This is another post in a series from "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

This is the second of two posts on knowing and understanding your audience. The key point here: Who is your audience listening to? You, or the Little Voice in the back of their heads? The first part - What type of audience are you speaking to? - is posted here.

There’s an odd truth to listening, and it’s this: every time you speak, there are two voices in the conversation. Your audience hears your voice, they listen to what you say.  The other is more complicated, and (almost always) is louder and more credible than yours. The audience listens to "the little voice in the back of their heads."

You may remember a time when you were speaking to the audience, and you realized by looking at a specific person that they were not listening to you, they were listening to themselves. I’ll admit it too. Sometimes – even when I’m speaking – I’m listening to my own voice talk about the participants. In other words, they’re using their Little Voice on me, and I’m using my Little Voice on them. Funny how we ever listen at all, isn’t it?

#2. Know Your Audience (Part 1)

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

This is the first of two longer posts about knowing and understanding your audience. The key point in this post: What type of audience are you speaking to?  The second part – Who is your audience listening to? You, or the LIttle Voice in the back of their heads? – is posted here.)

When I ask workshop participants to describe their audience, I typically get answers which define the audience’s demographics, such as their gender, their titles or jobs, age, department.  That’s a good start, but there are two further – and more important – steps to learn about the audience to enable them to listen better to your presentation and its ideas.

1. Who is your audience, and what type of audience member are they?

2. What do they know (already) about your presentation topic or subject? 

Who Is Your Audience?

There are three questions to ask about your audience. First, what’s your relationship to them?  Do you have any credibility to them?  To paraphrase the famous Harvard Business Review article: Why should anyone want to listen to you?  Depending upon which research you prefer, as much as 50% to 70% of your audience won’t start listening at the beginning of your presentation until they have a strong understanding of why you are a subject matter expect about your topic. That means you need credibility from the get-go.

If you don’t have two credibility, you have only two ways to establish it: you either tell the audience why you’re the expert, or you get the person introducing you to establish why you’re the expert. If your lead-in doesn’t know how to introduce you, tell them in explicit messages how to do so.

#1: Get To The Point

This is one in a series from my earlier post "10 Things You Can Do To Help Your Audience Listen Better."

As quickly as possible, you should tell the audience …

• the purpose of your presentation – from their point of view, not yours
• what your objective is for speaking – from their point of view, not yours
• what action you want the audience to consider or do at the end of the presentation – from their point of view, not yours

Notice a theme?

Obvious perhaps, but the first and best way to prevent your audience from not listening to you: stop talking about you. On your first date with the person who you knew you were going to spend the rest of your life, did you talk about you all night? (Hopefully not.) You shouldn't do the same to your audience. Talk about their favourite subject: them.

10 Things To Help Your Audience Listen To Your Ideas

While preparing for a listening skills workshop last week, I went back over a number of good books on listening from my bookshelves and the local library, as well as re-read some excellent resources online - including a few of my earlier posts on the topic.  (Check the Listening category for the entire group of posts.)

But, when I was actually facilitating the workshop – watching how some people were listening, some others not so much – I was reminded that there’s some important tasks that the presenter should do to help the audience listen better too. 

The list below is not necessarily my own, but a collective project between me and all of the 3,500 people who’ve attended my workshops over the years.

Here’s the list. Click on any point below to jump to more detail.

How to Listen: 4 Methods

As a continuation of the post on Listening (22 April 2009), there are four basic ways to reply to your respondent's answers. Each will demonstrate that you're pro-actively listening to the respondent, and will also in turn, will increase the efficiency of your listening.

1. Paraphrase

Perhaps the easiest listening method, paraphrasing means re-stating an answer in different words without altering its meaning. It shows you’re listening, it shows the respondent that you’re thinking about what they say, and it ensures you understand their answer.

For example: “So what you’re saying is this: (repeat their answer but use different words or phrases).”

2. Itemized Response

This method helps you to clarify and simplify a respondent’s answer, particularly if their answer wasn’t clear or organized. You simply repeat or list the key points. For example: “Let me see if I understand. The problems you’ve outlined are (Point A), (Point B), and (Point C).”

Listening (Questioning Principle #3)

(This is the third in a three-part series on the basic principles of questioning, starting on 20 April 2009.)

The third questioning principle is possibly one of the most difficult things to do in the world: to listen, perhaps because we spend so much of our time trying to tune out things going on around us.

Listening is actively hearing what a person is saying – or not saying – and analysing the answers for understanding and insights. There’s four simple principles of good listening.

1. Look receptive. This is more than simply looking interested. Eye contact is essential, as is facial language (like nodding) and body language (such as leaning forward slightly.) Speakers also tend to work harder when they see the listener is actively involved.

It’s also good to bring a pad and pencil: first (obviously) to write important things down, but also, it demonstrates to the respondent you’re interested. But, if you think you’re going to hear elaborate or complex answers, it’s also good to bring a voice recorder (if the respondent says it’s OK) to ensure you stay connected to the answers.