In this video, Steven (behind the camera) fires off seven presentation-related questions every speaker should master, and I answer each one on the spot. Feel free to jump to the one that you find most useful to you.
1. How Do You Greet an Audience in a Presentation?
At the back of the room, not the front of the room.
Typically, even if I’m in an arena and it’s totally normal for me to be hidden away in a green room in the back, or on the stage, or sitting in the front row just waiting, I find that my nervousness turns to usefulness with the group when I’m in the back of the room greeting people. I say, “Hi, welcome in.” I’m all mic’d up. I’m ready to go. But I’m saying hi and greeting people as they’re coming in, because it reminds me that this presentation is not about me. It’s about them.
2. How Do You Introduce a Presentation to an Audience?
Easy: a long, boring PowerPoint presentation. Just kidding.
You will notice a profound shift if you walk into a room and the first sentence out of your mouth is a question to the group. Maybe there’s a little nicety or a hello if somebody is introducing you. But when Will and I wrote Ask Powerful Questions in 2017, he and I traveled all over, speaking about how to ask powerful questions and teaching organizations. I’d walk on stage and immediately say, “Hey, y’all, I got a question for you. When you meet someone for the very first time, what questions do you typically ask?”
Even in a room full of 3,000 executives from different finance companies and credit unions all around the country, they were not ready to participate or interact with the keynote on the stage. But this does wonders. I can hear the handful of answers in the front rows, and I echo them back out to everybody. Then I say, “All right, the entire premise of our time today is just to do a science experiment on what happens when we don’t ask, ‘What do you do? Where are you from? Do you have kids? How was the flight?'”
So when you’re introducing a presentation, pick one to three easy-to-answer questions people can answer in a word or a phrase. Think of it as a conversation starter for the whole room. Ask your audience, and actually invite a response. Right away, you’re introducing people to the topic, but you’re also inviting everybody in. When they shift into participation mode, they think, “Ah, okay, I’ve got to do something right now.” Something really magical happens when you get an audience to speak in the first 2% of a gathering.
3. How Do You Present Properly in Front of an Audience?
Make crazy faces while you’re drinking water.
I almost failed public speaking in college, so I’m highly qualified to give this advice. My professor, who I will shamelessly name as Dr. Aaron Bacue, almost gave me the lowest grade in all of college because I wouldn’t use my hands as batons to direct the audience’s attention. Now, Aaron’s an awesome guy. I’m just me. When I talk, this is what happens to my limbs. They’re uncontrollable.
Most executive presence coaches and presentation coaches focus all their attention on how to present better: how you stand, what you do with your hands. And while I want to take some of that into account, I’m not interested in making people better presenters. I am interested in actually inviting you to stop presenting. Stop worrying about how you present and start worrying about how you’re inviting the audience in to participate and engage in what you’re doing.
So how do you present to an audience? Have an outline that only includes the ways you’re going to ask a group to participate. It can be a separate outline if you need it to be. 99% of presenters on Earth compete in the land of consumption. They’re trying to be more entertaining. They’re trying to get your attention. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but for the most part, you could put it on YouTube and watch it at two times speed and save half the time. The most impactful speakers, presenters, and facilitators really turn the podium around and invite the group to participate in an experience where they get to share their own expertise and their own experience.
4. How Does the Size of an Audience Affect the Presentation?
Most people would say a lot, right? Even event organizers will reach out and ask, “How many people can be in your group?” Most people have a limit in their head. They think that over 20 people, it can’t be personalized enough.
For me, this is a structural facilitation problem. If I have a thousand people in a room, I can create a very meaningful, very intimate learning experience by saying, “Hey, everybody, in a moment, I want you to break into groups of three and answer this question.” As long as that question allows people to connect to each other, ties deeply and meaningfully to the purpose of why they’re there, and invites people to share their expertise, that is really useful collaborative learning. It feels like you’re just having coffee with two other people, even though it’s in a very large audience.
The size of your audience does not matter as long as you’re practicing The Contribution Method. Now, there are nuances to this. When I’m running something in an arena with fixed seating, I’m not going to try to get 6,000 people moving all across the stadium. We’re doing things that people can do within 360 degrees around them. But if we’re in theater-style seating in a hotel ballroom, we can fill the spaces, take up the front, take up the back. I have people actually get out of their little zone.
5. When Giving a Presentation to a Large Audience, You Should…
Get ready. Hold up your hand. If you’re just reading this, hold out one hand. Every time I share one thing with you, put a finger down. There will be five of them. You ready?
You should give people something meaningful to do in the first minutes leading up to the official start time. In the first three minutes after you begin, you should give them a reason to lean in, or invite them into one super-quick, shared attention-getting experience. For example: everybody in the room, cross your arms. That’s a shared experience, a context hook that brings people together.
You should, pretty much at all costs, break large groups out into small groups. Peter Block, a friend and mentor of mine, has a delicious quote: “Small groups are the units of transformation.” If you’re in a large group trying to make an impact, trying to transform people’s mindset, break them out into groups of three. The transformation that will occur in those small groups is far greater than anything you’re going to convince or manipulate or cajole from the stage. These small group moments work like icebreakers for large groups, except they’re tied directly to your content.
You should design your content as an experience, built for active participation. Do you see how I did that in the beginning? Hold up one hand; reduce a finger every time I share an idea. That’s just a tiny way, even in a YouTube video, that I invited your engagement.
And lastly, you should close the group in a way that leaves them wanting to come back. Ask yourself: does the thing I’m going to do in the last five minutes give everybody the feeling, “Oh, that was really cool. I want to come back for more”? If not, cross it out and try something else.
Want ready-to-use questions and activities to build participation into your next session? Download our free printable cards, book excerpts, and more here.
6. How Do You Involve the Audience in the Presentation?
This is going to challenge you. Are you ready? If you’ve been given 10 minutes for your presentation, give half of it to the audience. That’s how you involve them. If you’ve been given 60 minutes for a keynote, give 30 minutes to the audience.
If you want to involve the audience, you have to give some of your time that’s focused on me, me, me and your content, your content, your content back to the audience. My recommendation is to start with half. Start with giving 50%, because what’s going to happen is you’re going to end up talking a little bit more, going off-kilter, sharing a story.
Here’s how I involve an audience. I have a topic or something I want to teach. I come up with a question that allows people to discuss it, think about it, and exchange some of their own experience, thoughts, and expertise related to that. I invite them to share in small groups. I bring everybody back, and I ask them, “What struck you about that experience?” Now what I say is in response to what they have shared with me. It’s totally adapted to a conversation, and they’re completely involved. It doesn’t matter if there are 400 people in the room; it feels much more like an intimate conversation than some large-scale, pre-scripted keynote.
7. How Do You Create an Effective Presentation for a General Audience?
Here’s what I’ve learned. I used to send a needs assessment out to everybody that I spoke with. After sending 10,000 surveys out, I got essentially the same body of responses. I would ask people, “What’s a work-related challenge or problem that keeps you up at night?” And then a second question: “What do you think is the root underlying cause of that?”
When I turned everybody’s answers about the root underlying cause into a word cloud, the word that showed up biggest was “lack.” A lack of respect, a lack of communication, a lack of time, a lack of money, a lack of resources. None of that was people saying, “I am contributing to the lack of respect.” It was a feeling of lack. Somebody else’s deal.
So if you want to make a presentation applicable for a general audience, and you want to really hook and invite them in, you have to empathize. My friend and mentor Matt Church would say that expertise without empathy is noise, and I would say it’s just plain rude.
It doesn’t matter who you’re presenting to; I bet they’re human beings. Unless you’re a dog trainer, you’re probably presenting to people, and people have the same handful of cares and concerns. They care about time. They care about status and reputation. They care about money. They care about doing good in the world. They care about whether they belong or not and how they look. When you can frame your presentation as benefiting one of these five or so general human concerns and needs, people will care. It does not matter who they are or where they came from. We share these common understandings and needs.
Want to Learn More?
If you want to stop presenting and start learning how to really invite and practice The Contribution Method, come to one of the two live things I host per year. Register your interest for the Connectors Summit this December, a live experience where facilitators, trainers, and leaders come together to practice, connect, and reset. Or join The Contribution Method masterclass this spring, where you’ll learn to design sessions people actually want to be in.
Have an awesome day.
