sacha chua :: living an awesome life

When one of my mentors asked me if I could do a session on presentation skills for the new interns who are coming in as part of IBM's Extreme Blue program, I said yes, of course. =) Great opportunity to give back and learn.

Here are the key points I shared and learned in the session today:

1. Look for inspiration. It's easier to get better at presentations when you know what good presentations look like, sound like, and feel like. Watch videos or download podcasts from TED.com to see what passionate brilliance is like. Check out Slideshare.net to see what kinds of presentations real people put together. Pick up tips from books such as Presentation Zen (also blog), Slide:ology (also blog), Rainmaking Presentations, The How of Wow, and Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins. Be inspired.

2. Figure out what you want to say, why it matters, and how you want to say it. Let's tackle those parts one by one.

What do you want to share? Many people make the mistake of thinking they don't have anything to say because they're not experts. As a result, they don't volunteer for presentations or submit ideas to conferences.

Why does it matter? Again, many people make the mistake of thinking that all they need to do is inform their audiences. Every presentation is an opportunity to influence, to persuade. Every presentation is an opportunity to help someone think differently and even take action. Figure out what you want people to walk away with, and why they would care about your message. Talk in their terms.

Make your presentation even better by figuring out why it matters to you. That's how you tap into your passion and energy. Why do you care about the topic? What do you bring to it that nobody else can? What do you want to get out of the presentation?

Whenever I prepare a presentation, I look for ways that I can learn a lot from it. That's why I love handling lots of questions, because questions tell me what people find important. Questions let me pull more ideas out of my head and get them into a form that I can share. People in the audience share their experiences and insights, too. If something really stumps me, well, that points me to something I can learn. This adventure is one of the reasons why I love giving presentations. And that's why I can bring so much energy and joy to my presentations–I'm doing it because I want to do it.

When you know what and why, how becomes much easier to figure out. You can play with your toolbox to see what fits. Bullet points are one way to do it. Try full-screen stock photography, or individual words with lots of whitespace (or black backgrounds), or purposeful animations. Try Creative Commons-licensed pictures from Flickr. Try telling a story. Try not using slides. Try using a scenario. Try finding statistics. Go ahead and experiment. Go ahead and play.

3. Practice, practice, practice.

There's no shortcut here, and no matter what other people might tell you, stage fright never goes away. But practice can help you get better at harnessing that nervous energy. Practice can help you figure out and remember what you want to say, why it matters, and how you want to say it.

The obvious way to practice is to sign up for more presentations. But even if you don't get that many speaking opportunities, there are plenty of other ways you can practice. You might try explaining what you do and why it matters during conversations. You can speak up during meetings. You can prepare slides and post them on Slideshare or other services, even if you don't have a presentanion scheduled.

I find blogging to be an incredibly useful way to practice thinking and speaking. Most of my presentations start as blog posts. If you're interested in something, write about it. If you're really interested, write again and again. In the process, you'll learn about the topic, and you'll connect with other people who are interested. Then you can turn your notes into presentations, because you've already done the hard work of thinking about what you want to say and how to say it, and you know it matters to you.

So the next steps I want to convince you to take are:

- Look for inspiration. Start with ted.com. =)
- Figure out what you want to say, why it matters, and how you want to say it. Experiment. Explore.
- Practice, practice, practice. There are lots of opportunities to learn how to present, and not all of them involve a stage. (Or a stuffed toy, which I occasionally use.)

How can I help you become an even better speaker?

(I've omitted the IBM-specific parts here. Ping me internally if you want a link to the presentation and the recording!)

Tags: presentation, speaking by Sacha Chua
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The second session in the Taking the Stage women's leadership program I'm taking at IBM was called The Power of Voice. We learned about some of the vocal habits that undermine people's confidence and rapport, such as trailing off or using a rising tone at the end of sentences.

We also had a short discussion about what makes presentations engaging. Many of the participants mentioned enthusiasm and passion–if not for the content, then for something beyond that.

The three key tips I picked up were:

1. Breathe deeply from the diaphragm so that you can support your voice.
2. Open your mouth both inside and out, because that affects your tone and articulation.
3. Resonate using different areas of your body: head, chest, and others.

I've thought about finding a speaking or presentation coach who can help me learn how to make even better use of my gift of spreading enthusiasm. I'm good at collecting and retelling stories. I'm good at finding something worth being excited about, sharing my enthusiasm, and helping people remember why they care about their work. I'm good at mixing presentations up with creative approaches. I'm good at scaling up – getting more value from the effort I put into making a presentation. I'm good at handling questions and dealing with the unexpected.

The first thing that can help me become an even better speaker would be to learn how to use even more vocal variety. I'll start with varying tempo, then I'll learn how to vary pitch, and maybe even learn how to bring in different accents and sound effects. These will help me build more dramatic tension into storytelling, use emotional modulation, and pick the right voice. Articulation would also be good to improve.

I can practice on my own with vocal exercises, aerobic exercise (to increase my breathing capacity), and perhaps even podcasts. I can also practice in my presentations, which usually come once or twice a week during conference season. Once I get my work permit paperwork sorted out, I'll sign up for Impatient.ca's longform improv classes. In the meantime, I can look around for acting workshops or speech coaches who won't charge an arm and a leg, and I can check out lots of books from the library on how to improve speech.

Other things I can work on in the future: storytelling, navigational structures, vocabulary =) (richer words! more concrete expressions!), improvisation, humor, rhetorical structures, illustration… There's so much to grow into!

I'm interested in this for a number of reasons:

• I learn things much more effectively when I teach them, and learning how to communicate well lets me enjoy communicating even more. It keeps me excited about learning and teaching.
• If I learn how to communicate more effectively and more engagingly, then I can deliver more value when I give presentations–and I can scale up even more when I write or share recordings.
• So many opportunities come to me because of my presentations and knowledge-sharing. The better I get at this and the earlier I improve, the more cumulative effect this will have over time.
• The better I can communicate and the more control and range I have, the more I can do professionally and personally.
• If I can help other people develop their communication skills, then this will scale up even more.
• It's fun!

Next actions: Check out library books on voice training, and ask for quotes from voice coaches in Toronto. Waiting for paperwork: sign up for improv classes, and look for acting workshops.

Tags: kaizen, leadership, presentation, speaking by Sacha Chua
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UPDATE: Here's the recording! =)

pre-session notes

This is a placeholder for "Awesomest Job Search Ever", the talk I'm giving at the Social Recruiting Summit today at the Googleplex. It'll eventually hold notes from the session, and if we're lucky, a recording and a transcript as well. =)

I plan to tell the story about how I got to do what I do at IBM. The three points I want to make are:

• Because the company learned more about me through my blog, they got a great sense of who I was, what I was good at, and what mattered to me.
• Because I met so many interesting employees through their blogs and social networks, I really wanted to join the company. Relational onboarding was awesome, too.
• Because we both knew more about each other than in a normal job search, we could create new opportunities.

I want to convince recruiters to take the following actions:

• Help their companies and candidates learn how to use social media to tell stories and to connect.
• Help people connect before, during, and after their job search process.
• Look for ways to create opportunities that go beyond the typical job search.

Please feel free to leave comments with questions or further thoughts. You can also e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com. Looking forward to hearing from you!

—
UPDATE: Susan mentioned that she found one of my presentations. That's probably this one:

Another thing that you might like:

More presentations on Slideshare

Tags: conference, presentation, speaking, web2.0 by Sacha Chua
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"Maybe I should take a break from presenting," I said, "and focus instead on writing blog posts and articles so that I can build up more material."

W- nodded. "You have to pace yourself," he said.

It was Monday morning, and I had a talk scheduled for 3:35 that day: "The A, B, Cs of Boomers, X, Ys, Zs: Reaching Different Generations Through Social Media". I sent in my slides a week ago, so I didn't have to worry about that. I knew which stories I wanted to tell, so I didn't have to worry about that. But I still felt the nagging doubts of stage fright.

I mentally ticked off the remaining talks I'd promised to do: "Awesomest Job Search Ever" at the Social Recruiting Summit, "Making Presentations that Rock" at IBM, and "I.B.Millennials: Working with and Learning from Generation Y" at the IBM Technical Leadership Exchange. If I juggled everything well, I'd be able to do all those talks while keeping my project manager and my manager happy. I'd be doing a talk a week. After conference season, I could take a break, study more, write more, draw more, and experiment more.

First things first. Gotta get through the 3:35 to 5:00 talk. A tough timeslot even in the best of cases–who has energy at the end of the day? But a friend had recommended me to this, and the organizers had said that the nonprofits really needed tips on getting across to generations. I'd given talks like this before, starting with I.B.Millennials at last year's IBM Technical Leadership Exchange, and ending up with keynote segments on the demographic revolution and the multigenerational workplace. I'd never talked about it in the nonprofit context before, but I'd read a bit about nonprofit marketing, and I hoped that many of the things I learned doing Web 2.0 consulting in the workplace would transfer to the nonprofit sector.

I packed my presentation kit (laptop, power cord, presenter remote, mouse, voice recorder, webcam (just in case), courage) into my rolling case (gotta watch those ergonomics!) and headed out. From previous talks, I had learned that planning nothing else (no project work, no deadlines, nothing) during the day of a presentation really helped me relax because I had enough buffer time to take care of things. Besides, I was curious about the other sessions, and I wanted to pick up whatever I could.

I arrived at the conference centre and snuck into a few sessions. The more I listened, the more I itched to give my own presentation. Part of me listened to the speakers and actively participated in the discussion, while part of me was listening to myself–to snippets and sound bites that might make it into my talk. I took notes on the current session and on how I was rearranging my own.

Do other speakers have this experience? I'm having a hard time describing it because it seems so odd. I hear my own speeches, in my own voice. I can tell that I'm not actually hearing them in person–I don't hallucinate, if that's what you're wondering –but it's definitely me. I don't hear the full speech, just little bursts, but that's enough to convince me that I can do it. Then I roll the words around on my tongue to find out what they feel like, and I know the performance will be fine. By the time the organizer introduces me, I'm ready to discover just how I'm going to get from point A to point B – how we'll fill in the gaps between those bursts, where the topic and the audience will take me.

That's one of the reasons why I don't script my talks as much as other people do, and I don't include as many slides or talking points as other speakers do. The less text I have on slides, the more flexibility I have. The fewer slides I present, the more flexibility I have. I prepare the bones of a performance: the key message I want to communicate, the key actions I want people to take, the stories that will help people understand what I have to say and then act. The rest comes during those pre-talk visualizations (… audiolizations?), and in the interaction between me and the audience, strengthened by echoes of blog posts I'd written or things I'd said or heard.

This is what it's like to be up on that stage, and it's exhilarating. It's an improvised dance of discovery, where the reactions and questions and comments of the audience help me unlock more stories and ideas, and where we all learn more.

How can I teach other people this? Is this a good start: "Imagine listening to a confident version of yourself give the talk. What does it sound like? What does that feel like?" Can I help people become more comfortable with speaking if I tell them that it's okay to not know all the details going up, and that discovering the way can be lots of fun? =)

Tags: presentation, speaking by Sacha Chua
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This is a placeholder for the talk on "The A, B, Cs of Boomers, X, Ys, Zs: Reaching Different Generations Through Social Media". I'll update this post with recordings and notes by June 10. In the meantime, here are the slides, and some links to useful resources:

Key message: There are generational and age-related differences, but they're not as big as you might think based on popular media, and ther eare plenty of opportunities for you to reach out and help make a difference.

Please feel free to post your questions as comments, or e-mail me (sacha@sachachua.com) if you'd like to learn more. I look forward to continuing the discussion!

Stories:

• Canadian Opera Company
• Room to Read
• Ryan's Well
• Toronto Public Library
• Kiva

title: The A, B, Cs of Generations X, Y, Z (and Boomers, too): Reaching Different Generations Through Social Media) in the conference agenda

Tags: presentation, speaking by Sacha Chua
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