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Sticky Learning Lunches #25: Give Your Presentations Oomph
Today’s topic, Online Presentations Lack Oomph part 1. Use the ‘ONLINE POWER’ mnemonic to be a more powerful you online and a great online presenter.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Monday. Welcome to this week’s start of sticky learning lunches. We’re just waiting for the last couple of people to get into the room. We’ve got a few more seconds until we start for today. I’ve just seen a typo on my front screen. So if you can spot the typo. There are no prizes for this, just for entertainment. If you can spot the typo, put it in the questions box. Let me know that you’ve seen it, ’cause I’ve just seen it at the 11th hour. Welcome.
Nathan Simmonds:
Welcome everyone. Make sure we’re, as we’re doing this, we’re just waiting for those last people to arrive. Setting everyone up for success as normal. Should there be audio sound with this as well? Have we started? Yes, there should be sound. Can everyone hear me? ’cause Luke can’t right now. Can everyone hear me? Yes. I’ve got, yeah, Luke, this may just be you. You may have to do a restart. Let’s get that in there.
Nathan Simmonds:
So making sure we’re setting everyone up for success today. So, phones out. Let’s make sure we’re seeing the phones live. He says, let’s get this on flight mode. Zero distraction, a hundred percent attention on yourselves and your development right now. Let’s get into this drinks at the ready, making sure everyone has a drink available. You’re gonna stay hydrated. And then making sure you’ve got a blank page ready to get your keepers down. So you’re gonna write keepers at the top of the page.
Nathan Simmonds:
And keepers are the things that you want to keep hold of the bits of information that you wanna be reminded of when you go back and reread those notes and come up with new ideas as you start to embed that. Good. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter. The home of sticky learning idea of these lunchtime micro learning sessions is to help you be the best version of you right now in this situation.
Nathan Simmonds:
Whether you are working from home or whether you are returning back to the office and also preparing you for the return back to the office as well. Today is all about online power. It’s about the power of presentation, it is about the the power of presence when you are delivering online content and you are speaking whether you are presenting or whether you are engaging with your team. We’ve been doing it for a few weeks now,
Nathan Simmonds:
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve been doing it to its best or to our best yet. And we may have got either complacent or picked up bad habits along the way. And this session is gonna be about helping to put some new skills in because this is the reality. This is the new state of play. This is part of the toolbox we’re gonna be using more often than not to support people’s mental health fulfillment and job satisfaction.
Nathan Simmonds:
And that’s what this week’s these next two sessions today and tomorrow are gonna be about. First of all, last week we did four sessions around the mind coaching model. It’s a model that I designed in the MBM lab to help leaders have better, stronger, and more robust mental health conversations. Fully aware, this is Mental Health Awareness Week I believe.
Nathan Simmonds:
Correct me if I’m wrong, last week’s tools. Were all about having the right conversations this week and in fact, every week, okay, if you haven’t seen last week’s training around supporting mental health conversations as a leader or a HR professional, we’re gonna share the link to last week’s sessions in the chat box so you can go back and watch those later on. Again, to support you and your leaders having the right conversations at the right time with the right people this week. Presentations.
Nathan Simmonds:
How’s everyone feeling after doing eight weeks, nine weeks of video conferencing of Zoom calls? How are you all feeling right now as a result of the number of video conferences that are going on in the questions box? Let me know how you’re feeling right now about this. One Word answers two word answers. Tired. Yes. Thank you, Susan. Zoomed out. Tracy, if only we could get zoomed out and get a little bit of distance connected. Nice. But Christopher, good to see you again.
Nathan Simmonds:
Darren boring presentations are frigging boring. Yes, agreed. Stuart excited about learning some best practices. Yes. Getting used to it. I’m not sure we’re supposed to be getting used to it, but we also need to exhausted and personal and work too much. This is my third today. Yeah. Interest. Tracy, do you know what? Thank you to you, Tracy, for being here for your third one day when you could have quite easily cup of tea back garden.
Nathan Simmonds:
Interested? It’s starting to be up and down. Yes, agreed. Colin, do you know what? Last week was the first week that I had had enough, quite frankly, you know, I, I’ve reached my, my limit and Darren referred to this in a, in a LinkedIn post. My social battery was completely depleted. I I was, I was zoomed out. I really know it’s, I’d had enough of the interaction and the contact that way because we’re, what we’re doing is we’re tired eyes, absolutely is. We are attempting to connect, but actually we can’t really connect.
Nathan Simmonds:
So there’s a, there’s a dissonance of what’s going on. And part of this presentation and the content today is, is helping you to understand that a little bit more. What we’re seeing is we’re seeing an image of somebody and our brain, although we can see them, we can’t touch them, we can’t smell them we can’t interact physically with them. And there’s a dissonance in your brain that is, is having difficulty computing this. And as a result of that, it’s starting to make us feel tired.
Nathan Simmonds:
And we’ve, we’ve seen this at the beginning of, of the lockdown process and we’re seeing it throughout at different points in the day. And as Tracy said, this is a third zoom meeting or or web conference today. So when your brain is doing this, you’re making your brain work at least twice as hard trying to connect with people. The other thing to think about is actually where your eyes going. So getting into the mnemonic that we’ve got on online power the first one is on my eyes.
Nathan Simmonds:
What we mean by this is as we’re presenting or we’re presenting to people, it’s starting to get really clear on where people are looking at and how we’re helping them to relax their eyes and use their eyes in a better way. So the first thing that we can do is, there’s a 20 20 20 rule on this. When we are working online and we’re working in computers, like this is taking 20 minutes, sorry, every 20 minutes, taking 20 seconds to look at something 20 feet away. So we’re adjusting our focus and that’s helping just the rest eyes a little bit coming away from the screen.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you’ve got a window that’s overlooking your gun, go and look at green, not blue. And if you know what I mean, when it comes to technology, really helps to replenish and refresh. The other challenge that we’ve got is when we are presenting online, is if we are working with people, especially in a Zoom environment, how many people can you see at one time? If you are in a zoom, if you’ve got it in gallery mode, how many people’s faces can you see at one time when you are doing it? What’s the, what’s the most we can see? This is, I mean, this is, it is been a while since 1225. Crikey, 20 to 25.
Nathan Simmonds:
And that’s at one time. So the other part of what your brain is doing, and I don’t know the age range of the people in the room here, we get people on Zoom and it’s like the beginning of the Muppet show. Do you remember the credits on the Muppet Show When it zooms out and you can see all the individual characters no way can you see all those people. So although I’m looking at the screen and I wanna see the person who’s talking, if I’m all I’m presenting, I’m trying to gauge everybody’s reactions.
Nathan Simmonds:
And so my eyes are going all like this and I’m trying to take on too much data, too much information. And of course as the presenter, it’s making it more difficult for me to concentrate on me and to, and to keep my energy up because I’m using that extra brain power. I’m trying to check everyone else’s expert expressions. So that’s the first part. Number two is not back to back.
Nathan Simmonds:
Talked about this in time management, in, in, in better planning meetings is making sure that your meetings are not back to back. It’s absolutely vital that when we’re doing any meeting, let alone online meeting and it’s, it is more of a trap with online meeting is that we’re leaving the space between each of the conversations we’re having. Why one, so we can back up this and give our eyeballs the rest of our brains at a decent break.
Nathan Simmonds:
But two, so that we’ve got chance to decompress mentally from the last conversation, update our notes, update what our actions, and then prepare ourselves for the next conversation. Prime example is these training sessions at 12 o’clock. I make sure that I have a break and I’ve got everything ready for this conversation. At quarter two quarter to 12, we come online and we make sure that we’ve got all the right links to share with you.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’ve got the right actions, I’ve got the right notes, everything set up in the right places, microphone, all of these elements. But I’m doing that in the first 15 minutes to make sure that the technical stuff is in place so that I don’t have to think about anything. If we’re doing back to back sessions and the trap is ’cause oh, I’m at home, I don’t have to walk to another meeting room, I can do this session, then this session, then this session, we are not giving our brains that chance just to decompress, declutter and come into the next conversation.
Nathan Simmonds:
Fresh ready and fully attentive depending on the people that we’re speaking to and working with. Really important. Make 45 minutes the new norm, not 60. Who has heard of Parkinson’s law? Yes or no Parkinson’s law? No, no, no. Good. No. I am pleasantly surprised that I get to share this with you. Wonderful people for the first time.
Nathan Simmonds:
Parkinson’s law states that work will work, will fill the time allotted to it. Work expands. Yes, Colin. So whatever time you give to something, the work will expand to fill that time. If you set your meeting for an hour, work will fill that out. That meeting will fill the hour. If you set the meeting for 45 minutes, you’ll get the same amount of work done in 45 minutes. So starting to understand this with anything that we do, bookend your bookend each the start and finish of your sessions. But just give yourself 15 minutes, just a little bit more leg room to mentally stretch yourself.
Nathan Simmonds:
Number three is lighting. Hence the reason you may have noticed if you go back and look at the first training sessions. The first sticky learnings, the first sticky learning lunches. The wall behind me is a different color. Although it seemed like a good idea with the lighting that my windows over here facing right onto the wall that puts me in full light. The whiteboard’s glossy the sunshine. You couldn’t see what was written on it.
Nathan Simmonds:
So understanding where your lighting is and what support you’ve got to make sure that you are illuminated. If the sun is behind me, I’m completely dark. You can’t see anything. So start to have a little play and a little tweak. And what can you see here? This is actually a, a light ring that I’ve purchased over here with an LED system, although it’s very bright. I count. I need to get a softener.
Nathan Simmonds:
Again. It’s just giving me that extra little bit of light just to help support just enough. Still not perfect, but we’re getting there. Have a think about where your lighting is coming from. Ideally you want the light coming towards you and you want it a little bit softer depending what you’ve got behind you. And you also don’t want it to be completely blinding either. So maybe a blind or some sort of sheet just to help thin it out a little bit. Just so you are not staring at the screen screwing your face up like this. Or with sunglasses on trying to cope with the summer of sunshine coming through.
Nathan Simmonds:
My favorite one, interpersonal. If you have reservations about the content you are delivering on what you are doing or concerns or reservations about how good you are and what you are doing or that you’re not comfortable with your con with your content, this is one of the key elements that’s gonna make it even worse. One of the comments that came up, you know, is, is about boring presentations becoming even more boring. This is the part that makes it worse. When we start to worry about what people are thinking about us, when we start to worry about, well, whether or not they’re gonna like the content.
Nathan Simmonds:
Do I look okay? All these different elements and we start taking the owners off yourself and or that the message primarily that’s being delivered, we start to shut down and we start to read things off scripts. The trap is we fall into this a that we haven’t got an audience in front of us because I’m looking at you in this camera. There’s a part of my brain that starts to say, yeah, but no one’s here. And you start to go like this and I’m just gonna read the information here and yeah, thank you very much for coming today.
Nathan Simmonds:
And yeah, so this is a virtual classroom for no, I know full well that right now there are 24 individuals on the other side of this screen all looking at me, listening to what I’ve got to say to help them deliver a better presentation. I deliver to you exactly the same way as when I’m in a classroom delivering to a classroom. Although I have a smaller window quite literally to move around in rather than the classroom, the training room environment, I still wanna make sure that you are with me. And that means certain hand movements. That means me pointing around the screen occasionally.
Nathan Simmonds:
That means me asking questions and pulling you into the conversation. Who here right now has been in one of these training sessions before? Yes or no? Who’s been in a sticky learning lunch with me previously? Got a few yeses coming in, got a couple of nos. And for those that haven’t, thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate you. How many times have I asked questions even today or previously where I’ve asked you yes or no? Have you experienced this? Yes or no? How are you feeling? No, I’m asking you questions to bring this in.
Nathan Simmonds:
Why? Because I at least five times a session. Exactly. Because I want you to be part of this conversation with me. I want you to, I want to connect with you. I want to have a conversation with you. I want you to answer the questions in your head so that you can start to build the action so you can start to build the learning. ’cause If I’m just standing here reading off the slides or reading off some scripts with you, how engaged will you be with me? Let me change that question. How many people have been to an online presentation in the last nine weeks where someone just read off power, read read off the screen on PowerPoint and you went and did something else instead?
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people have done that in the last eight weeks? Yes. Three times. Shoot me now I might as well read a book. I have, I yes, no, I even saw an advert for this thing where you can for your mobile phone and what this person had done, which was a student, they’ve taken a video of themselves pretending to be watching Zoom, put it on the camera and then put it on this prop and put it in front of the camera and then went off and did something. So they even made it look like they were there.
Nathan Simmonds:
So this interpersonal thing, I probably have to be, I wanna say I have to be more engaging, but you know what? I’m exactly the same in real life as I am in this state, in this connection. ’cause I want the conversation. But if we get caught in the trap that oh, there is no one here and I’m just gonna be talking to this and in fact I’m not even looking there, we’ll get onto the, in the where you are putting your eyes in a minute. We lose the people. The people in our teams disengage with us.
Nathan Simmonds:
They don’t feel the connection, they lose the humanity, they lose the involvement and the inclusion and that psychological safety starts to diminish. Which is why we have things like mental health awareness week, which doesn’t need to be one week. It needs to be every day, just a normal conversation when we help lift people up.
Nathan Simmonds:
But if people aren’t feeling included or pulled in, they’ll go and do something else. They’ll have more than one window open. And that’s the problem with life generally is we have more than one tab open and we’re busy doing something else in that tab rather than actually focusing on the tab that we need to be in. I hope this makes sense for everyone. Does this make sense with you? Yes or no? Are you with me on this one? Yes. For yeah. Yes it does. Yes, yes, yes. Good, good, good, good, good. The trick question, I did it on purpose. So where else do we wanna be?
Nathan Simmonds:
The need to move. Nature has a really interesting technique whenever it’s being attacked by a predator. One of the techniques they use is you’ve got fight, flight, flock or freeze The four F’s, you might probably only hear two of them fight and flight, but the other two are flock and freeze. Okay? Freeze. You often see one of the initial things as ever do, Peter turns up, lion turns up,
Nathan Simmonds:
Everyone stands still just for a minute. Okay, yes, he’s definitely seen this. Now let’s run. So what happens when we go into this kind of the adrenaline kicks in, some of us freeze so we become like this and we’re just like, yeah, okay. Yeah, that’s it. So there’s a need to move. There’s a need to be dynamic. Dynamic. Your brain picks up movement from these predatory survival instincts. Your brain picks up that movement. So as I move, as I’m doing this, as I’m pointing to different things, as I’m saying, we need to get a hundred percent attention. I’m making sure that you are picking up on that and you’re tracking more of me than anything else.
Nathan Simmonds:
So when we’re delivering content, I need to be moving backwards and forwards and giving you that different angle. And it’s the reason why sometimes I’m like this, but then I come back and I wanna take the center point and talk to you again. Engagement far out the brain. So you’re looking more at me. If you’re doing the zoom thing, what you may find is some people will be, but I want you to be watching me. I want you just to see that.
Nathan Simmonds:
Should I stand up in on, on presentations like you do If you can, some of the presentations, I sit down for me, I enjoy standing up. It keeps my brain active, it keeps me, you know, working out where I’m gonna go. You also sound different when you stand up as well. And intonation and presentation, you know, is, is from the shape of me. If I’m at my desk in my laptop, and we’ll get to that. And the last part here, whoop wrong pen is eye line.
Nathan Simmonds:
Do I want to be over my laptop, stooped over with my shoulders, with my chest closed so people can’t hear me or I’m restricting myself physically? Or do I want to be standing up so that I can actually project what I’m saying to people and put some air behind it? Colin says, standing up opens the lung capacity. Absolutely. So when we have this eye line is working out where I’m looking as well, where do most people starter for 10? Where do most people look when they’re doing video conferencing? Who knows the answer to this one eyes center of the screen at themselves?
Nathan Simmonds:
My question to you Colin, was gonna be whose eyes it is the center of screen at themselves on the screen. Great. Why? ’cause They’re moving. Brilliant. But the problem is, and you can see exactly where my eyes are tracking to ’cause my questions are boxes over here screen, not camera. Exactly that Stuart. Or if I’m looking over here to see the attendees, you can see where I’m looking Now if you are looking at me, am I looking at you? No. So how do you feel? Do you actually feel any in that connection engagement?
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s super important that when we are doing this, I know where I am, I know where my hands are, I know everything else that’s going on. So I wanna make sure as much as possible I’m looking at the camera because then as you are looking at me, you feel an a level of a higher level of engagement and connection. So it’s important we understand this and we make it at eye as best we can at eye level. I have a little bit of a hotpot is the right word, maybe I’m using an Ikea bar stool to make sure I can get the laptop at the right height. Why?
Nathan Simmonds:
Because I don’t have a boom arm. I don’t have all the camera equipment and technical stuff. I’ve got the right height with the bar just about eye level because I’m six foot six and I require quite a bit of height for this so that I can look at you in the eye. If we have it down here and we actually have the laptop at this sort of angle and you get to look up my nose, it’s not a very pretty site. Plus you also feel like you are being looked down upon.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s important we understand where our eye line is on what we’re looking at and also where we’re putting our eyes so that people feel that connection with us as well. Move yourself around, open yourself up, interact with people, get them on board, ask questions. Get them to engage in different ways. Another way that we can do the the engagement piece is use scales as well. I’ve done this before in some of these presentations you would’ve seen on a scale of one to 10, how we feeling right now? One terrible, 10 amazing. So asking questions where they can start to think about themselves. Get your lighting right so people can see your sunny faces.
Nathan Simmonds:
Give yourself time to get ready, decompress, and get ready. And give yourself and the people you are working with an opportunity just to rest their eyes. Get ’em to look at, you know, 20 every 20 minutes. Look at something for 20 seconds or 20 feet away. Go and get green instead of blue light. And this is the first part of the online power content to help you deliver better better strategies and create better engagement with your people in your conversations.
Nathan Simmonds:
Hope this crikey. 24 minutes more miracle I’m ever on time with this content. What was useful from today? Hit me up in the questions box. Can I let me know what was useful from today’s micro learning? Today’s sticky learning lunch, what’s been useful that you, you’re taken away from today? Top three headlines, what would be most valuable for you?
Nathan Simmonds:
2020. 20. Good. Need to move where you look and projection. Absolutely. Plan. Absolutely every one of my sessions is planned Anil. Every one of them is not. This stuff isn’t made up on, there are elements that are added to it, but we have to strategize what we’re talking about and we’re gonna talk a bit more about that tomorrow. Eye line with camera. Great. Reinforcing the need for eye contact. Completely Eye line 2020. Think about eye line. Breaking it down into sections I can focus on.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. Absolutely. So work on these key things. Parkinson’s Law four s. Good. No, back to back. Yes. Good, good, good. So there’s a lot of great takeaways and it’s making sure that you’ve got those written down. You’re gonna start implementing them. Couple of things, we’re gonna link you up with one if you have not registered for tomorrow’s training session.
Nathan Simmonds:
The link is in the chat box right now for you to go and register for tomorrow’s ’cause we’ve still got this whole mnemonic that Darren so lovingly created is called online power. So we have another five key points to work on tomorrow with some key, key elements to include some other techniques that I use to get you engaged. Different questioning, different engagement techniques to help you take that presentation up. Another level, really important.
Nathan Simmonds:
Number two, mental health coaching cards. Look, we talked about this a lot last week. I talked about it at the beginning, beginning of this session. Very briefly, if you have not or do not know about the mental health coaching cards and you haven’t got your own packet yet, they are on our website now. They are five pound, they’re to help you and your leaders have stronger mental health conversations to support your wellbeing.
Nathan Simmonds:
Questions, what questions have you got for me right now? Someone I’ve forgot to ask you what questions you’ve got for me. Someone’s just said about the question. Sarah, thank you very much for jogging my memory. What questions have you got for me right now? Question that Sarah gave me was I can’t make tomorrow. How could I get the recording of it? We will send it via carrier pigeon as long as you’re registered, Sarah, you will get a link to that to the video content.
Nathan Simmonds:
And at the end of that we will send you a copy, a link to go to the recording so you can watch that as well. And we’ll make sure you get that. What are the questions have you got for me regarding what we’ve covered today regarding presentations? You are very welcome sir. Pleasure. You’re very welcome John. Getting a few thank yous in not many questions. Okay. Piece some kind of a kind of peaceful end to this, this session.
Nathan Simmonds:
Oh, here we go. If I’m sharing my screen to display content, should I apply 20 20 20? Yes. In some sense. One as always with PowerPoint, ultimate power corrupts ultimately ultimate PowerPoint just boils the living pants out of people. So if we are doing a screen share, we wanna make sure that it is not content, you know, like text rich, no, we wanna make sure that it’s images that we can talk people through, that we can engage them in that dialogue. We don’t want them lost completely in this and not paying attention to what’s being said. So maybe go know flip between screen sharing and you know, face-to-face and bringing up the right elements at the right time.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you’re doing a long session, have a break. No. Call it if people need to take nature breaks or whatever, set yourself your sessions up with incremental moments where you can stop and just go and get a breath of fresh air. Pick up a fresh glass of water and then come back to it. ’cause If you, you’re losing people through that, how much of your message is actually gonna get across, especially when we’re in very technical spaces and we’re talking about a lot, you know, a lot of technical things. We need to kind of break it down and let people’s brains adjust and and digest
Nathan Simmonds:
Hope This was useful. On a scale of one to 10, and I want honesty, one being not at all, 10 being absolutely. How useful was today’s content to help you with your online presentations? 8, 10, 9, 9. This is good. Good, good, good. Eight, nine. Thank you. Thank you. Nine. Amazing. Good. Tomorrow I’m gonna dig into a few other techniques that I use to help engage people. Some different questioning techniques, some different elements, some different mindset stuff about presenting online that I’m gonna help to expand a bit more on.
Nathan Simmonds:
I will do my best not to swear, but I might have to just to get the point across tomorrow to help us shift what I do to help me shift my mindset on what I’ve learned to do over nine years of leadership development. From doing Toastmasters, from doing the coaching skills and things I’ve had to tell myself personally.
Nathan Simmonds:
So we might use some kind of stronger language just to get that point across, which I’ve done for myself. It was a good starting point. Look forward to tomorrow, Jane. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. Thank you. If you have not registered for tomorrow, the link is in the chat box. Do so now, now get your mental health coaching cards as well and start sharing those with your leadership team. Let’s get those on tables. Let’s start building stronger conversations. Let’s make a difference in the mental health space at work, please.
Nathan Simmonds:
This is one of my ultimate goals, my ultimate personal goals. And also the last thing, I’m gonna call out virtual classrooms. If you have seen any of the previous sessions, if you are enjoying this session, if you would like to have a deeper conversation with us at MBM, how we can help you strengthen your leadership team and help them become more incredible in yesterday, let us know. We’ll get the link in for the virtual classroom into the chat box as well so you can click on there and see what we’re available to do so we can help you and your teams go even further.
Nathan Simmonds:
Everyone, thank you very much for today. So very appreciated and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow at one o’clock UK time. Have a great rest of your day. Thanks a lot.
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