Most people that I have encountered in my work over the years will go to great lengths to avoid properly preparing a presentation, preferring to opt for the “I don’t have the time”, “I’ll just speak to the slides” or “I’ll just make it up as I go along” approaches. Of those that do actually devote time to preparation, the vast majority will focus exclusively on selecting their content, structuring their story and building their slides, leaving relatively few who actually rehearse how they going to deliver it. Did you know that 95% of all presentations are dull and boring? is a fabricated headline statistic that I have traditionally shared at the start of my presentation delivery workshops for years, and typically it elicits laughter, agreement or a mixture of both. Despite clearly being an opinion masquerading as a fact that tries to be funny, it resonates because it seems to reflect most audiences’ expectations and experiences. And yet, as I continually assert, no presenter sets out with the intention of fulfilling either.
I also maintain that being a good presenter is not about being inspiring, charismatic or dynamic. No matter how desirable those qualities may be, I wouldn’t pretend to know the first thing about developing any of them, as they are determined by the audience rather than curated by the presenter. For me a good presenter is an effective one, and I am convinced that effectiveness is the by-product of care supported by hard work, dedication and rehearsal. I often describe it as the act of checking your slides for typos and doing line runs while eating cold pizza at 2am on the night before you deliver your presentation. It’s blood, sweat and tears.
So it is with great interest and growing excitement that I recently read a paper called Stress Signalling Pathways that Impair Prefrontal Cortex Structure and Function, published in 2009 by Dr Amy F. T. Arnsten, a research scientist based at the Yale School of Medicine. Admittedly it is not my usual reading material, but having spent time with it and reflected on it, I have concluded that it was well worth the effort.
The abstract describes her work in understanding the impact of stress on the prefrontal cortex (PFC); the part of our brains located immediately behind our foreheads that deals with executive function or the day-to-day management of the thoughts, feelings and actions we deploy in the completion of tasks. It’s where we do our freshest and best thinking, it’s the part of our brain we use to guide us through our days and it’s the part of our brain where we want to operate from if we want to give the best of ourselves through professionalism, precision, flexibility, innovation, creativity and so on. It’s really where we want our presentations to come from, as it is from here that we can clarify complex problems, improvise clever responses to unexpected questions and guide our audience with dexterity.
The PFC is also, Dr Arnsten notes, “the brain region that is the most sensitive to the detrimental effects of stress exposure.” She refers later in her paper to the findings by Donald E. Broadbent in his 1971 book Decision and Stress that pilots who were “highly skilled during peacetime often crashed their planes in the stress of battle owing to mental errors because stress was found to impair the performance of tasks that require complex, flexible thinking.” In order to examine the effects of stress in less catastrophic circumstances, she then shares that “many studies of hormonal responses to stress have used a public speaking task as an effective stressor.”
So here we have a research paper telling us that the stress that is commonly caused by public speaking is one of the best ways to inhibit the exact part of the brain needed to deliver a presentation effectively in the first place. This supports the American performer George Jessel’s assertion that “The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.” If you put them together, this research and quote show why public speaking often tops the list of people’s fears.
“Great – thanks!”, I hear you cry sarcastically, “Why bother, then? There’s no hope! Let’s just carry on giving dull and boring presentations until the end of time.”
But hold on a minute. Dr Arnsten then goes on to say that exposure to stress “could actually improve the performance of simpler and/or well-rehearsed tasks.” Later she writes “these findings in humans are highly consistent with animal studies showing that acute mild stress impairs prefrontal function but actually improves the functioning of the amygdala and hippocampus.” The hippocampus, by the way, is the part of the brain that deals with the forming, storing and recalling of memories. Or, as I prefer to call it, the part of the brain that stores your presentation ready for recall during the stress of a performance, provided you’ve taken the time to rehearse it often enough.
So to recap – standing up about to deliver a presentation is a brilliant way to create stress in an otherwise unstressed human being. That same stress prevents the PFC from being able to magic an unprepared presentation out of thin air, while simultaneously mainlining memories in glorious technicolour from the hippocampus which, given the situation I am describing, could very well be a vivid account of how badly things went the last time you presented without having rehearsed beforehand.
Here’s another way to think of this, which might be easier to imagine. Someone stops you on a dark and deserted street, holds a gun to your head and asks you “what would you say is the best way to achieve next year’s sales targets without compromising the highest quality standards?” I’m guessing you’d probably struggle to come up with an insightful and focussed answer while your life flashed before your eyes, but if instead they had demanded the PIN code for your bank card or smartphone, you’d probably have blurted it out in an instant. This research tells us that those two different bits of information are being drawn from two different parts of our brains; one that wilts under pressure and one that blossoms in it, so it stands to reason that we should exploit the potential created by this neurological wiring – and that means rehearsal. Time-consuming, boring, repetitive rehearsal.
The purpose of rehearsal is two-fold. Firstly, it is to strength-test the transferability of your content from text to speech. To put it simply, while we write in grammatically correct, flowing and complete sentences, we more commonly speak in phrases and clauses because we think as we speak, interrupt ourselves, misspeak, correct ourselves and sometimes come to an abrupt halt. To err is human, as the saying goes, and this is what differentiates speech from text. If your preference is to write a script for your presentation, then the chances are that it would benefit from some simple editing, and the rehearsal process allows you to – literally – hear what these changes might be. By way of example, in a script you might write “A detailed appraisal of these figures reveals a sharp increase in sales during the last quarter” which would be an efficient and arguably elegant way to articulate such a thought in writing, but if you try speaking those exact words out loud, they sound rather stilted and impersonal. Now try saying this: “Take a look at these figures from the last year – here (pointing) you can see a really sharp increase in sales during Q3 – which is great!” I hope you agree that it sounds more natural and is probably closer to something you might say, as opposed to write. Rehearsal allows your ears to catch aural snags like this and then edit your script. If you like to script your presentations verbatim, remember that under pressure we tend to say what we see, so you’d be well advised to adopt this approach for your whole presentation. It’s a process that I call chattifying.
The second purpose of rehearsing a presentation over and over is to commit it to memory through repetition. It’s how we learn people’s names, phone numbers, PIN codes and more – in fact, all the things that we stand a good chance of being able to remember when asked for them while staring down the barrel of the gun. The hippocampus is not only a powerful part of the brain, but it is flexible in that it improves through use. There is research that shows London Cabbies actually enlarge their hippocampus through the effort of learning The Knowledge – the geographical knowledge required of London’s Black Cab drivers that involves memorising thousands of streets, routes, and landmarks within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It’s a personal preference whether you want to learn a script exactly word for word, or the precise sequence of thoughts required to produce an approximated speech that contains all the relevant information in the right order, but in either case it’s a dataset that can be crafted in the prefrontal cortex and then transferred to the hippocampus through the act of repetition. It’s a process that the American author Tim Urban describes as happy birthday level memorisation.
Rehearsing a presentation is, without doubt, hard work and it takes time, and no one should be judged for the fact that they cannot provide or are denied the resources needed for the challenge, but it’s always sobering to remember that audiences don’t care how presenters feel; they care how presenters make them feel.
So, by way of conclusion, I assert that being an effective presenter is a question of making a deliberate choice and committing to a programme of hard work, rather than the expression of a muse-inspired innate talent, and that makes it a level playing field on which any of us can succeed – provided that we don’t compare ourselves to anything other than our own potential.
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