19. Presenting and Persuading as a Leader

When you're presenting our ideas, you're doing it for a reason.
The objective may vary, but the REASON is to persuade your stakeholder - be that the CEO of an organisation, your peers or even your kids - to accept your way of thinking and agree to a course of action.

Michelle Bowden is an expert in presentation skills who has over twenty years experience of teaching people persuasive presentation skills, who teaches people how to present their ideas in a way that changes the audience's thinking, feeling or attitude toward something.

Here are my main takeaways from our chat.

An idea is only an idea until you can communicate it in a way that drives it to be adopted.

If you're trying to persuade someone to purchase something, negotiate terms, or even trying to get your kids in the car, you're presenting.

A lot of people think presenting is just speaking in front of a room full of people with a lectern and a microphone. That couldn't be further from the truth.

Michelle defines presenting as: any form of communication, be that one-to-one or one-to-many, where your objective is to change the audience's thinking and behaviour.

If you want your emails to be more persuasive, your meetings to be more successful and to become a better communicator overall, you need to work on your communication skills.

You can get anything you want if you're good at persuading, and you can get it a lot quicker.

Less meetings, less back-and-forth, less mucking around - more getting to the point and getting your outcome.

If you can express yourself clearly and confidently in your career, you can improve your chances of getting the jobs you want, and accelerate your career progression.

Michelle has a three-phase approach to presenting: 
· Analysis
· Design
· Delivery

Analysis is where you work out what YOU want to achieve as the presenter, and what your AUDIENCE need to hear from you. What are their issues and conflicts? What are their pain points? What is their current state, and what if your desired state for them?

Design is where you put your message together. What most people do when they want to present is to download their old presentation slides, shuffle them into some kind of order, and squeeze their presentation to fit a time frame. Instead, Michelle recommends a combination of the 4Mat model of presenting, combined with her own linguistic patterns that allow you to combine words and sentences to communicate effectively and persuasively to achieve your goal.

Finally, Delivery is where you stand and deliver your presentation. Where most leaders seem to get stuck is that they focus the majority of their attention on this aspect of their presentation. And while delivery IS important, you can mitigate the nerves that cause you to commit the cardinal sins of using too many filler words (um, ah, you know) and fidgeting, by directing most of your preparation time towards the Design phase of your presentation.

When people get nervous, it's generally because they haven't done your analysis and design properly beforehand, and have rehearsed with an ineffective message. Rehearsal is a very important part of your presentation, but there's no point in rehearsing if you haven't crafted your message well.

Once you know you've taken the time to do you analysis and design well, and the design is going to meet your needs and the needs of your audience, you'll naturally be more confident, knowing that your message is clear.

In my own career, I used to run a team of around 150 people, and we had a weekly round-up where I would have to present to a very large room of people. I used that opportunity each week to improve my presenting skills until I became unconsciously competent - but I wouldn't have achieved this without regular practice and diligent preparation.

 
But what about the do's and don'ts of presenting?
Are filler words really THAT bad?
And what are the match and mis-match filters?

To listen to the rest of my chat with Michelle - including her tip on why you should NEVER cross your legs when presenting - listen here.