The workshop was sponsored by my clients, The Traumatic Stress Institute, a division of Klingberg Family Centers.

All forty of these amazing individuals had been trained in Risking Connection, a philosophy that supports the transformation to trauma-informed care and advocates for relationships and connections as the best treatment for healing traumatized children and adults.

In this workshop, we elected to focus on a specific skill with the field of presentation and public speaking – story telling. This blog post is designed to motivate and equip you to:

“Never make a point without telling a story. Never tell a story without making a point.”

Why tell stories?

Stories remain one of the most powerful forms of communication. They not only are effective in capturing and holding the attention of children, but can mesmerize adults as well.

The purpose of telling stories during your presentations is to engage, to entertain and to teach. All of these attributes make story telling a dynamic technique for professionals who desire to be high engagement presenters.

Mastering the art of story telling can increase your presentation persuasion power and make you a more engaging speaker. Stories are also a sure fire way of opening your presentation.

Brain researcher John Medina, author of Brain Rules, suggests that story telling in presentations is a very effective way to “wake up” your audience and re-engage them. His brain scan studies show that the human brain fatigues every ten minutes or so. We must do something at minute 9 and 59 seconds, or we lose them. Medina recommends story telling and use of metaphors. (p.s. buying Medina’s book is a no-brainer. I highly recommend it!)

What’s makes an effective story?

Your story must be clear, it must be compelling and it must be concise. Your stories should also be relevant to the context and audience in which you are telling the stories. Lastly, your story telling effectiveness will be influenced by your story content and your delivery of the story. Effective stories can be told in the shortest amount of time possible. Don’t drone on with your story or your audience will be wondering “where is she going with this?”

How to shape your stories
Here is a simple formula that you can practice to tell effective stories as part of your high engagement presentations. It’s called the Incident-Point-Benefit story telling technique.

The great part about this story-telling template is that you can create many different points and benefits from the same story, depending upon your audience and what you are trying to achieve.

Each time you tell your story, you can draw a different point and different benefit, depending upon what you are trying to achieve in your presentation.

Caution: never tell a story that you are still hurting from. If you find yourself feeling angry, bitter, sad to the point of tears, then you are not ready to share this story in a public presentation. Save it for later.  Being overly emotional during story telling can negatively affect your audience and alter your outcome.

Resources to help improve your presentation and public speaking skill set

• Download the free workbook Power of Personal Narrative
• Download the 3-part story telling template. Use this template to write out your signature stories.
• Click here to access more free resources to help you improve your presentation

Need more?

This story-telling training module is now available as part of our half-day training workshops series - ideal for working professionals who are time-starved but want to advance themselves professionals. Here are the other modules now available to you in this series:

• Workshop #1:  Success by Design: How to Effectively Plan and Organize Your Presentation Content
• Workshop #2:  The Power of Personal Narrative: Story Telling for Greater Presentation Impact
• Workshop #3:  Improve Your Presentation Visuals: PowerPoint Do’s and Don’ts
• Workshop #4:  Masterful Delivery: vocal power and body language intelligence for presenters

If you can spare a full day or two days to advance your presentation skill set, check out our Level 1 and Level 2 training workshops to mastering the art of high engagement presentations.

We also offer 1:1 executive presentation delivery coaching to help you prepare for a “high stakes” presentation. When your upcoming presentation really matters to your career or business, your best investment is to engage an expert to help you prepare, practice and polish.

Contact Kathy McAfee at (860) 408-0033 or leave a comment below and we’ll be in touch with you shortly to discuss your specific needs and challenges.

So, what can you do to produce a better outcome? Two areas that most professionals need work on are:

1. Planning. Don’t skip this vital stage. Don’t copy/paste from an old presentation and fool yourself that you are planning. You’re just being lazy. Discipline yourself to use the Clean Sheet Thinking method of pre-planning your presentations. It takes just thirty minutes to get a high level game plan together. Thirty minutes will make you much more laser focused.
2. Practice. I mean live rehearsals, not flipping through your slides nodding your head that you recognize the content. Diligent practice will turn you from a reluctant or average presenter into a strong, confident, powerful presenter. Ask a group of peers or trusted advisors to sit in on your practice session and give you focused feedback. Alternatively, hire an executive presentation coach to critique and coach your presentation delivery. This will help you mitigate risks with high stakes presentations.

Read about other common presentation pitfalls. Don’t be lazy or unaware. Get motivated about your next presentation!

It’s critical that you spend time scripting, practicing, and rehearsing these sections of your presentation. Never wing it. Plan it. Commit to memory. Time it.  Walk it through.  Practice it until you have it near perfect. Execute it brilliantly.

Here are five strategies for creating a more powerful opening and closing to your presentations:

1. Take them to the promised land;
2. Avoid palaver or idle chatter;
3. Put the good stuff upfront in the presentation;
4. Avoid the weak wind down;
5. Your energy will make all the difference.

Here’s more insight into each of these five strategies:

Take them to The Promised Land. The idea here is that you must grab their attention immediately. Capture their attention right off the bat with some powerful statements. Give them a compelling WHY they should listen to you.

Avoid palaver or idle chatter. Resist the temptation to waste the precious few minutes of your presentation opening with a general greeting such as:
“Good Morning Everyone. I hope that you all slept well and that you are as excited as I am to be here for this meeting.” While civil and polite, this is just meaningless chatter. It’s a waste of your time and theirs. They know that it is morning. It’s up to you to make it good.

Move the Good Stuff Up Front. I was working with one key marketing executive at a leading financial services firm. She had made some powerful statements about mid-way through her presentation. We pulled those statements up front to create a gripping beginning. Think of it as re-arranging the furniture or pictures in a room. A little change can make all the difference in impact.

Avoid the Weak Wind Down. Your closing comment(s) is the second most important time in your presentation. Most presenters never consider how they are going to close the presentation. They just let it happen, usually by either running out of time or asking a throw-away question like Are there any questions? Don’t let your presentation close by itself. End solidly and with purposeful intent. Demonstrate one more time that you are expert in your field and clearly in charge of this presentation. Seal the deal.

Your Energy Will Make the Difference. There is no substitute for a genuine enthusiasm and belief in your topic. The energy you bring to the presentation by way of your voice, your movement, your passion, and your creativity will go miles toward creating a more powerful, lasting impact. You have control over the volume on that energy. Personally, I like to start with high energy, but you choose the intensity level based on the response you wish to create and your preferred style. Stage it. Choreograph it. But at the very least, think about how energy will play into your presentation.

Some of my favorite techniques for opening and closing a presentation include:

Techniques for Presentation Openings:

1. Tell a Personal Story. Get personal. Launch immediately into your personal story. Assume a casual, friendly posture to make it feel like it’s just you and one other.
2. H.M.O.Y. which stands for How Many of You Have… Start with questions that get people immediately involved by raising their hands. A series of three H.M.O.Y. questions is a fun and easy way to start your presentation. Here’s how it might work…

Let me begin by asking you a few questions…
How many of you came here today to learn more about the state of our business and our changing relationship with customer ________?  [Raise your own hand high…and pause.]
That’s great…
How many of you came here today to find out if and how this situation might impact you and your specific line of business?   [Again, raise your own hand high as an example of what you want them to do…and then pause.]
That’s great…
How many saw a bunch of your colleagues going somewhere and followed along because you thought there must be free food involved?  [Raise hand, pause and allow for the laughter.]
That’s great….
Well my name is _____________ and today I’m going to share with you_________

Techniques for Presentation Closings:

True confessions. I have always been challenged with how to close my presentation. I would never plan it and just pray that it would go well at the end. The result was that I usually over talked, rushed and ran out of time. Aware of my weakness, I have pushed myself to plan ahead and to experiment with my presentation closings.

I have recently had a lot of fun using physical prop to create a lasting visual memory. Using a simple everyday object, you can create a memorable and meaningful connection between the object and your key message. I have successfully used Boomerangs, women’s shoes, and river rocks. Get creative and leave them with something to remember you by.

Here’s an example of how I used a Boomerang to close my Motivated Networking Follow-up presentation:

Check out our Presentation Tips for more ideas on how you can become a more powerful and motivated presenter.

To raise the bar on the presentation skill and confidence of you and your team, call Kathy McAfee at (860) 408 -0033 or check out our presentation training workshop series The Motivated Presenter:

• Level 1: Essential Fundamentals of High Engagement Presentations
• Level 2: Advanced Delivery Techniques for High Engagement Presentations

Here’s to your presentation success!

I had one such “learning experience” this week. I was given the opportunity to share networking tips and facilitate a group exercise with 800 women during the afternoon  networking reception at the BWF – the Business Women’s Forum in Hartford, CT on September 29, 2009. I had given a workshop called “Motivated Networking Follow-Up” to a group of 100+ professional and business women in the morning. It was an absolute home run by all measures. I was feeling pretty good. (read more about the highlights from this event)

Then it happened.

The audience at the afternoon reception did not respond to me or my message. The wine and appetizers were captivating the women’s total attention. Their need to unwind and just relax proved to be more compelling than my introduction and presentation content. They had had their fill of listening and learning new things for the day. They just wanted to spend some quality time with people that they knew. Few were interested in participating in the “Facilitated Introductions” networking exercise that I had designed.

What was my biggest mistake? I wasn’t flexible enough to respond to the situation. I stayed the course and proceeded as planned hoping to engage enough people to make it work. I even moved onto the floor, me and my wireless microphone, to see if I could engage more people. This was the longest 3 minutes of my speaking career. As my good friend told me the next day “We felt so badly for you. You were dying up there.”

I knew I had lost them. I could see it; sense it; feel it; hear it. I lost them at my instruction “put your wine glasses down.” Big mistake. Never separate people from their liquor or dogs from their bones.

The “could-a / would-a/ should-a” afterthoughts. So here I am, unable to sleep – a full 36 hours after the event- tossing and turning and playing out various scenarios. I just made sense for me to get up and to write them down and share my thoughts. Some of these alternatives just might have worked.  Here are some of my creative ideas for how I might have responded to this challenging situation:

1. Could I have followed in the footsteps of the morning keynote speaker Victoria Labalme and done my own version of the Park Avenue Shuffle? A fellow Stanford University graduate with more guts than tennis racket re-stringing company? I think  I would have danced to Mark Shepard’s song “Adventure Girl” – a tribute to comedian and fastest talking woman & adventurist, Fran Capo.
2. Would I have thought in the moment to invite all of the workshop leaders up on stage with me, including L. Kay Wilson, Karen Hinds, Debbie Fay, Jill Butler, Lena West, Veronica Holcolm, Barbara Phillips, Faith Roberts and the others? I would have inspired them with the old adage “Dance like no one’ s watching” or as author/professor/feminist Gina Barreca humorously rephrases “Dance like you’ve never been hurt before.”
3. Should I have been more creative in my presentation and taken a bigger risk? For example, I could have come dressed in my black belt Tae Kwon Do uniform and demonstrate a few choreographed “forms” and/or self defense moves and shared with the 800 women that networking is a good defense against an economic downturn or potential lay off situation. Having your network in place before you need it is just a  good, sound career management practice. So why are most women hanging out with the friends and colleagues that they see everyday? You should be “talking to strangers” and expanding your professional network.

Most of these “rewriting history” ideas are all about movement and the element of surprise. They are about be daring and bold and unexpected. Perhaps I was constrained by my prepared PowerPoint presentations (yes folks, I cheated on my PowerPoint-FREE diet!) Or perhaps this was just one of those tests that life puts you through to see how you’ll respond and how you’ll handle yourself.

I am proud that I have spent more time laughing at myself rather than beating myself up over the event.  I wouldn’t have traded the opportunity even if I knew the outcome. All PR is good PR, they say, and I believe them. And, I believe that feedback is a gift, even if it is negative criticism.

I am curious to hear from those of you who attended the 2009 Business Women’s Forum. What was your take on the afternoon reception? What would you have done in my shoes. (perhaps I should have worn the magical green shoes!)

Ahh….I feel like I can now get some sleep. This burden is off my chest and I feel empowered by being able to write about my thoughts, feelings and ideas. I guess this is the POWER of blogging. Best yet – it’s cheaper than therapy!

Thanks for reading…and for adding your comments below.

– Kathy McAfee – America’s Marketing Motivator

Photo credits: Cynthia R. Lang Photography (860) 953-2299