You’ve no doubt felt the perfect storm of fears that hit hard when you have to give a presentation. There’s nothing quite like it. Still, I was even more nervous than usual on this particular occasion.
It was early in my career, before I joined my brother, when I still worked in advertising. I was supposed to give a big pitch to Loews Hotels, an exclusive luxury hotel brand in North America. This was a huge opportunity for the ad agency I worked for, but it was an even bigger opportunity for me and my career.
I couldn’t afford to get it wrong, so I worked on my presentation all week. I wrote, rewrote, and refined the script, then I practiced it over and over in front of the mirror and in front of my roommates. Putting together the slide deck took many hours as I hunted down files, pictures, statistics, and charts, then designed and redesigned each slide. I desperately wanted everything to be just right.
By the time the conference rolled around on Monday morning, I had practiced the presentation so many times that I had every word and inflection memorized. The slides were as good as I could get them, and I was as ready as I could be.
Then I walked into the conference room and saw the hotel executives sitting there, along with my boss and my creative director. I saw the big podium in the front of the room, the projector on the table, and all of the confidence I’d built up over the weekend just evaporated. There was a lot riding on this presentation, and the pressure was intense. How in the world had I ever imagined I could pull this off?
When it was my turn to speak, I walked to the podium like I was walking the last mile on Death Row. The first slide was on the screen, and all of the hotel executives were staring at me. I had the clicker in my right hand, my left hand pressing the printed copy of my script to the podium. And I just froze. Even though my script was right there in front of me, I couldn’t get the words out.
I really wanted to impress these guys, but my heart was pounding, I was sweating, and the words just wouldn’t come. As I struggled, I suddenly developed a searing anxiety-induced headache. Awkward seconds passed as I tried to somehow collect my thoughts and press on, but the headache was getting more intense. My worst-case scenario had come true.
Fortunately, the creative director realized something was very wrong. Hopping up from his seat, he came to the podium and leaned in close.
“Are you okay, AlexAnndra?” he asked quietly.
“Um,” I stuttered. And he just took over. Massaging my temples, I stumbled to the table and sat down, and the creative director took over my presentation. He made the pitch and saved the meeting, but I felt humiliated. I’d ruined my big chance to impress both the client and my boss. All of my hard work and preparations had been for nothing.
Later, the client gave the following feedback: “We like Alex, but she’s a little too junior.” Ouch! And all because I blew my ten-minute part of a presentation.
Even if you’ve never had an experience quite so dramatic, you can surely relate to the fear we feel when giving presentations. There’s usually a tremendous amount of pressure, especially in a sales presentation where a large amount of money might be riding on a single pitch. Hell, your whole career might be riding on it.
Our fear of public speaking and presentations isn’t merely anecdotal. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 75 percent of people rank public speaking as their number one fear, even above death2. It sounds extreme, but it’s understandable. That day when I froze during my presentation, it kind of felt like a brush with death—career death, if nothing else. There’s even a word for it: glossophobia. According to Dr. Timothy J. Legg, in an article on Healthline, “When faced with having to give a presentation, many people experience the classic fight-or-flight response. This is the body’s way of preparing to defend itself against perceived threats.” He lists the common symptoms of this fight-or-flight response as rapid heartbeat, trembling, sweating, nausea or vomiting, shortness of breath or hyperventilating, dizziness, muscle tension, and an urge to get away3. How many of these symptoms have you experienced? Personally, we’ve experienced almost all of them at one time or another.
Add in a slide deck, and suddenly the fear is compounded.It’s no longer just about getting the words right, sounding confident and compelling, because you also have to make sure your slide deck is well-designed, communicates your ideas clearly, and builds your case well from slide to slide.
That’s fear upon fear. While lots of preparation usually helps, somehow it just can’t take away the terrible anxiety we all feel when we finally stand up and approach the podium with clicker in hand.
The Perfect Storm Of Fears
When you think about it, presentations really are a perfect storm of fears. There’s the fear of failure. There’s the fear of judgment. There’s also the fear that occurs during slide preparation when you’re trying to anticipate the questions that your audience might ask. Despite your best efforts, you just never know what’s going to happen during the meeting. Since you’re putting together a linear presentation, somehow you must try to anticipate any issues that might come up, so you can respond to them. At the same time, you simply can’t anticipate everything, and you know it.
There’s also fear of deadlines and any other time constraints you might be facing. You might be trying to cram a whole encyclopedia’s worth of information about a product or service into a twenty-minute presentation. Finally, there’s the uniquely horrible fear that comes from stage fright, which can produce a whole range of physiological side effects: sweating, stammering, hands shaking, crying, headache, and so much more.
No wonder presentations are so hard. It takes such a long time to put together your slides and make them look good enough to present to a client. Then, as if that weren’t challenging enough, you have to stand in front of a room of people and talk through those slides one by one, fingers crossed that someone doesn’t ask a question you didn’t anticipate.A lucrative deal might be on the line. Your job might be on the line. Your income could be at stake. The success or even the very survival of your company might be riding on a single presentation. Even if none of those things are true, there’s the simple fact that no one wants to look stupid or incompetent.
Furthermore, there’s a vast gulf between a great presentation and an okay presentation just like there’s a huge difference between winning a gold medal and winning a silver medal in the Olympics. Gold-medal winners do the talkshow circuit, appear in commercials, and make graduation speeches at colleges. You can probably name some goldmedal winners of past Olympics off the top of your head.Silver-medal winners are mostly forgotten.
People remember amazing presentations. They remember the people who gave them. Merely okay presentations disappear into the fog of time. It’s the same with movies.Everyone knows the names of the masters of cinema, people like Steven Spielberg and Christopher Nolan, directors who make powerful, landmark films. Almost nobody knows the name of a director who churns out decent-but-not-amazing action movies or mediocre romantic comedies.
So it’s not enough to just survive a presentation without embarrassing yourself. Somehow, you have to amaze your audience. And just like the masters of cinema, if you really want to “wow” people, you have to get all the nuances of a presentation just right. Why is someone like Spielberg considered a great director, while so many other filmmakers are consigned to obscurity?
Because of the consistent quality of his movies, where each scene is carefully considered in the overall flow of telling a compelling story. He’s good at storytelling. He knows how to use the medium of motion pictures to tell a good story from beginning to end. The same goes for presentations. In her book Resonate, Nancy Duarte talks about the importance of using story in presentations to inform, inspire, and persuade audiences. As she put it in an interview, “The greatest communicators have unknowingly used a story pattern. They not only use anecdotes effectively, but their communication followed a persuasive story pattern of tension and release4.”
To create a good presentation, you have to think about the overarching story, the total production, and the role that every element plays. Even then, it’s hard to tell if your presentations are getting better. You either land the sale or you don’t, but there’s no box office to track your success, no professional presentation critics to tell you that you’re mastering the art, no gold or silver medals for presentations, so you’re forever insecure.
A Solution For Every Fear
We believe Structured Storytelling is the solution to this perfect storm of fears. Structured Storytelling is an essential part of Presentation Management, and it’s sorely lacking in most businesses. It’s the difference between a messy room, where everything is just strewn about in no particular order, and an organized room, where you know the place and purpose of everything.
Think of it this way. If your bedroom looks like something from an episode of Hoarders, it’s a lot harder to dress nicely for a formal event, because you find yourself digging through drawers and piles looking for each item that you need. On the other hand, if your room is tidy, everything well organized and put in its place, then it’s no problem at all. Shirts are hanging over here, pants and jackets over there. Shoes are on a rack in the corner, socks in the top dresser drawer.
“Oh, I need my blue hat? No problem. I know exactly where it is. And that matching tie? I know where that is, as well, and it’s ready to go.”
It’s not a perfect analogy, but that’s a bit like what Presentation Management does for you. That messy closet is like your network, with all of your presentation files dumped haphazardly in folders on various hard drives. File names might not be consistent. There’s little organization. Your organization is full of “slide hoarders” who have created a big mess of graphics, spreadsheets, slides, PDFs, and more, so it’s really hard to find what you need when you need it.
But Presentation Management imposes structure and order to all of those files. Your files and content become well organized, and you can grab what you want when you want it, even if you suddenly have to find something with no warning.
When you practice good Presentation Management, your presentations become more conversational because you can follow, adjust, and respond to your audience on the fly.All of your content is tidy and well placed. It’s easier to access exactly what you want when you want it. It’s also easier to give your presentation a good, strong structure because you have access to a Structured Storytelling library where all messaging is clear, consistent, and readily available.
It certainly would have made AlexAnndra’s presentation to Loews Hotels easier, and helped her overcome her fear of public speaking, if she’d had a vast library of content at her fingertips for responding to any questions or concerns.Instead, she had a single linear presentation upon which the weight of a large, lucrative deal rested. Not to mention the actual physical response: a searing anxiety-induced headache.
What if, instead of being a speech presented from a podium in the corner, with a series of unchangeable slides that had to be worked through to reach a final concluding “yea or nay” moment, it had been a relational, reactive conversation with a comfortable back-and-forth? And instead of a preordained ending, it had been a mutually beneficial discussion that was able to take the audience where they wanted to go with readily available information already formatted to present? It certainly would have put her mind at ease. Being conversational does more to build real relationships. It’s friendly, intimate, and lacks artificiality.
Typically, you have to respond with, “I’ll get back to you about that. I don’t have that information with me right now.” That fear of unanticipated questions is one of the biggest contributing factors to presentation anxiety and glossophobia.
What if you could respond to any and every question on the fly with confidence? “Oh, I have a slide about that right here! Just a second.”
And furthermore, what if this conversational aspect of presentations didn’t have to come at the expense of constructing a powerful and compelling slide deck that tells a clear, consistent story from beginning to end just like a really good Steven Spielberg movie? What if every slide you pulled from your slide library was a well-constructed scene helping to tell your overarching brand story?
Presentation Management gives you all of this. Can you see how it eliminates much of the fear that we all feel about giving presentations? Key to its effectiveness is what we call Structured Storytelling. Let’s look a little closer at what Structured Storytelling is and how it works.
2 Pat Ladouceur, “What We Fear More than Death – Information on Anxiety and Other Anxiety Related Mental Health Disorders,” MentalHelp.net, February 2017, https://www.mentalhelp.net/blogs/what-we-fear-more-than-death .
3 Susan Y. Morris, “Overcoming Glossophobia: Causes, Treatment, and More,” Healthline, November 23, 2016, https://www.healthline.com/health/glossophobia#symptoms .
4 Bob Morris, “Nancy Duarte: An Interview by Bob Morris,” Blogging on Business, June 7, 2011, https://bobmorris.biz/nancy-duarte-an-interview-by-bob-morris
