Boredom Slayer

A speaker's guide to presenting like a pro

Richard Mulholland

• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780639926490
• eBook ISBN:
  9780639926445
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Any fool can put together a presentation; this book exists because so many do. There's something sucking the life out of audiences everywhere, transforming them from the very people who can change your business into the disengaged masses. It's called The Boredom … and your job is to slay it! It's time to fight back. It's time to save the world ... ... one bored audience at a time. Whether you're a seasoned public speaker, or getting ready for your first company presentation, this candid and practical guide by renowned global speaker and presentation coach Richard Mulholland will give you key insights. Grabbing and keeping an audience's attention. Structuring talks that command fees and change companies. Dispelling the myths around public speaking that are getting in the way of that standing ovation. Speaking like a true leader. Richard Mulholland is the co-founder of global presentation powerhouses Missing Link and TalkDrawer. He is a renowned speaker and has presented his thinking in many countries including Canada, Puerto Rico, UK, USA, Germany, Kenya, and Pakistan. When not activating his audiences he can be found coaching many top CEOs and TED speakers to activate theirs.

Step #1

Give them a reason to care

‘You can take a horse to water, but …’?

If you’re like pretty much anyone I talk to, you have just finished the sentence in your head, ‘... you can’t make it drink.’ Have you ever in your life heard anything so ludicrous?

To quote my mate Mark Keating, do you know what you actually need?

THIRSTY HORSES!

Seriously, if the horse doesn’t want to drink, why are you taking it to the water in the first place? Just make the horse thirsty.

And yet that’s what 99% of presentations set out to do. They take perfectly unparched people to a lake and expect them to drink. Well, my friends, that is something we shall have to remedy.

I was on a New York City hop-on hop-off bus with my business partner Don Packett and our head of training at the time, Neil Smit. The bus went past the famous Katz’s Deli and the guide explained to us that it was the diner that was featured in the famous scene from When Harry Met Sally where Sally really enjoyed her lunch. I’d momentarily forgotten the name of the actress so I asked the guys. There was some debate as we all drew a blank. ‘Was it Melanie Griffith?’ one of the lads said. ‘Or maybe Kim Cattrall?’

I knew she was blonde, I could see her face even, but I just couldn’t get her name. It was right there.

Marg ...

Molly ...

Aaarrrg.

It was like an itch I couldn’t scratch and because we were travelling and had data turned off I couldn’t even Google it.

Just then the guide, who was sitting a row or two ahead, turned to us and said what y’all have been thinking since you started reading this ...

‘Guys, I think the name you’re looking for there is Meg Ryan.’

Meg Ryan! Yes!

My brain rejoiced. The itch was scratched.

Now, while you may not all understand how I could have forgotten Meg Ryan’s name, you’ll all be able to associate with that feeling, right? That ‘holy crap, it’s on the tip of my tongue’ feeling.

Well, that feeling is the Holy Grail for presenters.

If I can create that feeling at all in my audience, I win. I’ve bought their attention. I’ve given them a reason to care. Let’s explore this.

So I’m sitting at TED and this guy walks on stage. His name is Garik Israelian, he is a charming Bulgarian spectroscopist (yup, that’s a thing), he kicks off his talk:

I have a very difficult task. I’m a spectroscopist. I have to talk about astronomy without showing you any single image of nebulae or galaxies, etc. because my job is spectroscopy. I never deal with images. But I’ll try to convince you that spectroscopy is actually something which can change this world. Spectroscopy can probably answer the question, ‘Is there anybody out there?’ Are we alone? SETI. It’s not very fun to do spectroscopy.

One of my colleagues in Bulgaria, Nevena Markova, spent about 20 years studying these profiles. And she published 42 articles just dedicated to the subject. Can you imagine? Day and night, thinking, observing, the same star for 20 years is incredible. But we are crazy. We do these things.

And I’m not that far. I spent about eight months working on these profiles. Because I’ve noticed a very small symmetry in the profile of one of the planet host stars. And I thought, well maybe there is Lithium-6 in this star, which is an indication that this star has swallowed a planet. Because apparently you can’t have this fragile isotope of Lithium-6 in the atmos­pheres of sun-like stars. But you have it in planets and asteroids. So if you engulf a planet or large number of asteroids, you will have this Lithium-6 isotope in the spectrum of the star. So I invested more than eight months just studying the profile of this star.

How are you doing so far? You still with the guy? I thought not. And here’s the problem, you’re under two minutes into a 15-minute talk.

My mind was fried, this was heavy stuff, it took real cognitive jiu-jitsu to follow. I looked around me and I could see that people were struggling. A few rows over from me was Jeff Bezos, and even he seemed to be in submarine mode. I figured if the founder of one of the largest and most influential companies on the planet is struggling to follow, I probably don’t have to feel so bad.

So I tapped out. And he kept going.

There are two problems here, the most obvious one being the Curse of Knowledge, a concept introduced in the must-read book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, and while I was going to address this later in the book, let’s just take a detour and tackle it now.

Do me a favour quick. Clap the tune of the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner (really, do it). See how easy it is, and how well you’re able to do it?

Now, go find someone else, anyone really, and clap it for them, then ask them what song you’re clapping. If they are like 97.5% of the people tested by Elizabeth Newton in her 1990 Tappers and Listeners experiment, they will have got it wrong.

It seems crazy to you because you played it so perfectly.

That’s the Curse of Knowledge (capitalised for dramatic effe...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• It’s not you, it’s me
• To speak is to lead
• Wait, isn’t leading about listening?
• The happy accident
• Enough history, pal, I bought a presentation book
• Practise in public
• Lies, I tell you. Lies.
• The peanut butter and the pill
• Who’s the hero here?
• Know your audience
• The elevator pitch
• You’re a writer, not a speaker
• Step #1
• Ambulance chasers
• Filling their GAS tank
• Step #2
• Step #3
• Step #4
• Attention!
• Prep your preso
• Putting it together
• A bad workman ...
• Logo therapy
• Readme
• How many slides?
• Propped up
• Let’s talk tech
• Get a room
• R.E.S.P.E.C.T.
• Body language
• Typewriter theory
• The pace of change
• Drawing parallels
• Know your place
• How to poll an audience
• Thinking slow
• Pick your freebies
• Preso profanity
• Humour
• What a live sex show taught me about presenting (for realsies)
• Watch and learn
• Stuff I've written about
• Where I wrote
• Q&A
• Bonus chapter - How to get a standing ovation at TED