CREATING ENGAGING PRESENTATIONS: HOP OFF THE MONOTONE MONORAIL

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Kate Nugent is a facilitator, coach, performer, director and—lucky for us—our guest blogger for the month of March! You can read more about her here.

You’ve just finished a lengthy presentation. Your audience is filing out of the conference room and a colleague approaches you.

“Nice job,” he says.

Because you are a leader with high emotional intelligence and the desire to improve, you ask him for more specific feedback.

He pauses and then says, “I think you could use more voice modulation.”

Maybe you already know what this statement means; my experience is that it is code for you are speaking in a monotone.

When my generation thinks of monotone, we think of the teacher in Charlie Brown movies delivering a flat, colorless, wordless tome backstage. But not all monotones are this obvious. A monotone means just what it says – same tone. No variety. You are in monotone if you are speaking with the same cadence and tone for a sustained amount of time. A monotone can be high-pitched or low-pitched, flat or energetic. The point is that when you don’t vary your tone and cadence, over time your audience becomes lulled and ceases to hear the actual words.

Last year I was coaching a high-potential junior executive in a consulting firm. She was incredibly intelligent and hard-working. Her presence issue was that she spoke in a high-pitched voice that delivered a breathless, fast, sing-song kind of message. This type of monotone made her appear younger than she was, and less confident.

Here’s what seasoned actors know: they know exactly what their intention is, intention defined as what they want the “other person” to do, feel or understand. Watch carefully the next time you see Morgan Freeman or Meryl Streep in a movie – most often they are focused on their scene partner, listening intently and targeting their dialogue towards a very specific outcome.

I asked my client what she wanted her audience to do, feel or understand. She paused. “I want them to be interested in what I’m saying. I want to educate them.”

These are both important things – the only problem here is that the intention of “educating” or “informing” can be a one-way ticket to data-dump land, courtesy of the monotone monorail.

“What if you wanted to motivate them to action, or excite them about the prospect of working with you?” I asked. She nodded tentatively.

We then took her formidable slide deck and began to break it down into intentions, or what The Ariel Group has coined as passionate purposes. She wrote the passionate purposes in the corner of the slides to keep her on track; she started by welcoming the client to the meeting, then reassuring them that her consulting firm was not there to radically change their business and then inspiring them about the possibilities for the future.

My client reported back after the presentation. One of her senior managers was in the audience and approached her afterwards. She was told that her “personality came through” and her “delivery was much more natural” and that her “modulation was much better.” Success!

Focusing on your passionate purpose targets your message and makes it very clear to your audience how you feel and how you want them to feel. Most importantly of all, it helps you hop off the monotone monorail and stride towards inspiring leadership–and with any luck, a promotion.

Do you break your presentations into passionate purposes? What other tricks or tips do you use to avoid putting your audience to sleep?

Tags: Acting,classroom stories,facilitator advice,kate nugent,presentations,presenting