I present today, but I lost my voice! What do I do?
By Isaac D. Castillo (@isaac_outcomes)

If you present enough, you will encounter the situation I have today at #Eval14: You woke up this morning and have lost your voice. And of course, you present later in the day. How can you possibly recover in time to present?

Well, don’t worry. I am here to offer some advice that comes from decades of experience presenting in less than ideal situations.

First, do not panic. You can easily recover your voice for a 60 minute presentation. The key with recovering your voice comes in awakening your vocal cords. So, how do we do this?

Start by drinking hot beverages. Hot tea with lemon and honey is ideal, but any hot beverage will do. The hot liquids will help to loosen and awaken your vocal cords – getting them ready for use. However…..

Stay away from dairy products. As any speech coach will tell you, consuming dairy before a presentation is a bad thing even when you are feeling good. But if you have lost your voice, dairy will make things worse. Dairy products coat your vocal cords, making them more difficult to use. So, you can still have your coffee, but make sure you have it without milk or cream.

Next, keep eating. You may not feel great, but it is important to keep eating for two reasons. One reason is that you need your energy, and food is energy. If you are hungry, you will feel tired, and it will make your vocal cords feel worse. Another reason is that food will allow you to again get your vocal cords ready to use – although you aren’t talking, you are still moving your vocal cords when you swallow, which helps get them ready for use.

Finally – don’t use your vocal cords more than you have to. That means that you probably need to limit the number of conversations you have with people, especially right before your presentation. You are simply saving your vocal cords. Many people encourage gargling with mouthwash or water before you speak – but I think this is a horrible idea – it stresses your vocal cords at a time when you want to preserve them.

Right before you speak – drink some hot liquid, have a quick snack and speak aloud for 60 seconds to get your voice ready. Then start speaking. Make sure to have plenty of liquids at hand to drink while you talk – you will need them, but you will make it through! I promise.

Good luck and have a great presentation!

Who is Isaac? Before Isaac began working in the evaluation field, he was an All American college debater. He has taught public speaking, presentational speaking, and debate to high school and college students, as well as adults, for over 20 years.

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Part 3: Is Your Audience on Facebook?

When people ask me what is going on in my mind when I give a presentation, I answer them by saying: “I’m reading the audience.”  But what exactly does that mean? 

In presentations, nonverbal communication works both ways.  In previous posts I have discussed how your movement and gestures as a presenter can further emphasize your presentation.  However, your audience is using nonverbal communication as well – and learning how to interpret these cues can help you turn around a struggling presentation or allow you to make your content truly inspirational. 

As a presenter, you not only have to present your material, you have to observe audience members to see if they are paying attention to you or if they are updating their Facebook status.  But how exactly do you do this?  

I look for people’s behaviors.  Engaged audience members will look right at you, will shake their heads in agreement or disagreement, will take notes, or ask questions.   Audience members who have lost interest will be taking notes or working on devices but never look up or at you, will be holding side conversations, or will yawn or look around the room continuously.   All of these are signs that you have lost some members of the audience and that you will soon lose many more.  This is the time to change things up and re-engage people.

So how do you re-engage your audience when you have lost them?  That is where you can use some nonverbal techniques such as movement around the room, verbal techniques such as changing the volume of your voice, or even changing the flow of your presentation.   Telling a personal story or giving a real world example also frequently gets people re-engaged.  

The key thing to remember once you have lost your audience is that you need to do SOMETHING different.  That something different may be something as simple as moving around the room or telling a new story, or it may be more drastic like taking an unplanned break.  Don’t be afraid of these situations – like a good evaluator, just keep in mind that sometimes an approach will fail and you will need to implement a different presentation approach to improve the outcome for the audience! 

Additional Resources:

• More tips on specific things you should be looking for when reading your audience: Supercompetent Speaking: Reading Your Audience
• Why should you care about reading your audience? 4 Geek Excuses for Bad Presentations
• You have lost your audience, now what? What to do when you’re losing your audience

Tips for Beginners:   See eye to eye.  Making eye contact, even only briefly, is important.  It provides you with the opportunity to make a connection with an audience member, and it holds their attention.  Try to make yourself switch eye contact with a different audience member every minute of your presentation.

Tips for Veterans:   Improve your ability to read the audience quickly.  Try this little exercise (you’ll need help from 1 or 2 people to act as an audience).  Give a practice presentation, and have your helpers sit in different parts of the room.  At regular intervals (no more than 1 minute, no less than 15 seconds) the helpers should hold up SIMPLE math problems (1+1= ; 5-3= ; 2×3= ; etc.) in the audience, and you should be able to read them, and answer them (aloud or in your head) while still giving your presentation.  This will train your brain and your eyes to be looking for cues from the audience, interpreting them, and doing something about them during the course of your presentation.

Tips for Experts:   Engage the daydreamer.  Nothing brings someone’s attention to you like actually directly engaging them in your presentation.   When I see an audience member losing focus or working on something else, I often directly engage them in one of several ways.  I may ask them a question or ask them to provide an example.  I stand or sit down next to them and tell them one of my stories or examples directly.  These approaches get daydreamers to re-focus and provide a change of pace for the rest of the audience.

–Isaac Castillo, @isaac_outcomes

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Related Posts from Isaac:

• Part 1: Getting Handy in Your Presentation
• Part 2: Movement as Speech
• The Volume of Your Presentation
• The Best Presenters Focus on their Audience

After writing my previous guest post on conference presentations, I’ve been thinking about them a little more.  Specifically, what to do when something goes wrong. I don’t mean a glitch, I mean, horribly, terribly WRONG.

There’s the usual suspects when you think about what might go wrong with your presentation. You forgot your flash drive on the plane, your socks don’t match, you forgot to wear socks, the projector doesn’t work, nobody except your mother is in the audience, EVERYONE is in the audience—the list goes on and on. The over-riding worry is that you are going to come off looking like an unprofessional, inarticulate doofus in an ill fitting suit.

I’m here to tell you that these worries pale in comparison to the worst presentation I’ve ever seen, and how the presenter turned it around.

This was in 2009 at a professional conference, and the room was full. Not just of regular geeks like me, but also with big famous geeks who have stuff named after them. The presentation started well enough, the equipment worked, the presenter was wearing socks, and was reasonably articulate. And then he flashed on the screen a slide that made the whole room gasp. From this slide, even I could tell that the study that he had designed, and worked so hard on, had a giant, fatal flaw. He had made a whopper of a mistake in the design of the study. I saw it. I looked around, and could tell that EVERYBODY had seen it. I considered sneaking out of the room so I wouldn’t have to watch the inevitable bloodbath.

A big famous geek raised his hand, and the surprised presenter was soon sporting a horrified expression, as the magnitude of his mistake sunk in. Everything he had done was tainted. And here is what he did. Instead of explaining and getting reflexively defensive, he said. “Oh, boy. Look at that,” pause, “That’s a problem, isn’t it? I can’t believe I missed that.” Instead of smelling blood, the audience rallied to his defense, pointing out (kindly) how it was easy to miss, and then they started brainstorming ways to fix it. Basically a room full of smart people were working together to salvage his study.  It went from a presentation to a brainstorming session. The presenter was furiously taking notes. It was uplifting, and not only that, I learned more from the brainstorming than I ever would have from the original presentation.

So. The lesson is –don’t ever get defensive. And don’t worry about the socks.

— Jen Hamilton, @limeygrl

I hope you enjoy reading Mika Yoder Yamashita’s explanation about the best presentation she’s seen. Mika’s my evaluation friend from the Washington Evaluators, and the best presentation she’s seen was a systems dynamics presentation at the Stevens Institute.

— Ann Emery

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“The best presentation I saw was a presentation by a professor at Stevens Institute, and it was a quick walk through of systems dynamics (a part of systems thinking).  It was 20 minutes (and the presenter mentioned at the beginning that he would be talking for 20 minutes).   There are a couple of factors that I think made me to think this presentation was great.

First, there was a kind of book reading assignment.  The presentation happened as a part of a book club meeting.

Second, the book was difficult to me.  I did not read deep into systems dynamics before beyond Sociology 101 class, so it took a lot of my brain to go through the book.

When the presenter made the overall argument in the theory into a  concise diagram, I thought “we are seeing the same thing.” Yes, the presentation lost some details, and because it was simplified, I am sure the message was open to interpretation.

The purpose of the presentation was not to convey the same message. It was a warm up or quick introduction to a discussion.

Of course,  we could see the diagrams projected on the wall, and the presenter used probably 10 slides or less.   I do not remember if there was a handout, but since the presenter walked us through the diagrams, no need to read a handout.”

— Mika Yoder Yamashita

We were recently chatting about some of the less-than-perfect trainings that he’s attended. “They just run through their PowerPoint,” he lamented. “I wonder why?” I asked. “Well, because they don’t like their job,” he guessed.

“Or,” he went on, “if they made the PowerPoint themselves, then they probably put a lot of effort into the PowerPoint. But building a PowerPoint isn’t the same as building a presentation.”

I wonder whether this a common misconception among presenters? Do we forget that a great presentation involves a lot more than just building a PowerPoint?

– Ann Emery

Here’s a guest post by my former supervisor, Isaac Castillo. Isaac is one of the most talented public speakers in the evaluation and performance management field. In fact, I watched this video a few days before I interviewed with him and was sold by his comfort in front of the camera. I thought to myself, “Here’s a guy who really knows his stuff and can explain it to others!” Unfortunately those skills are much too rare in the evaluation field.

I hope you enjoy reading Isaac’s reflections about presentations.

– Ann Emery

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“Good presenters, and good storytellers, can work their magic in any setting, using many things (or nothing) to help communicate their points. So the best presenters have to be flexible enough to respond to their audience, their environment, and the pace of their presentation.

On Sunday, I delivered an opening plenary for a national conference, and got through the first part with good audience feedback and energy. But I noticed a lag in interest halfway through my time, and did something rarely done: I stopped and encouraged the audience of 100+ to take a break. There was no break called for in the schedule, but I read the audience and recognized that if they were to get the most out of my last few messages, they needed to relax for a few minutes and come back refreshed.

I think most presenters focus on their content – and will deliver this content in the way they think is best. The BEST presenters focus on their audience – and these presenters will rarely deliver the same content in the same way. They will make changes based on what they read their audience and environment to be at the time.”

– Isaac Castillo