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You’re in the middle of an important presentation and have
just finished answering a question when the dreaded moment strikes:
you lose your place. This is no casual hiccup in the flow; your mind
is totally blank and you feel a little like a climber taking a fall,
grasping desperately at empty air. Even if this hasn’t happened to
you yet, don’t worry – it will, says Dianna Booher, CEO of Booher
Consultants, a communications training firm based in Dallas, TX. And
the best defense is preparation. Booher recommends adding these
techniques to your arsenal of presentation tricks to help you
recover when you next lose your place during a presentation:
1. Create a pneumonic or acronym. Break your
presentation down into large chunks and name the pieces. Then create
a pneumonic or acronym using the first letter of each piece. When
you lose your place, simply recall the pneumonic device and you’ll
remember which point you were on. For instance, when Booher teaches
her writing program, she breaks the program down into four steps and
uses the acronym MADE to help remember the steps. If ever she loses
her place, she simply tells herself “MADE” and by doing a mental
run-down of each step, she quickly regains her footing.
2. Adjust your glasses. Have some “filler” activities
you can do to fill a 10-second gap. Ten to 15 seconds of silence
won’t sound unusual to an audience and it’s often all the time you
need to recover your thoughts, says Booher. Some “filler” activities
include taking off or putting on your eyeglasses so that you can
“verify something,” taking out your pen and jotting down some words
on your notepad, or asking the group about the temperature – whether
it is too warm or cool. Another filler activity is changing
locations in the room. After answering a question or concluding a
point, it will seem “quite natural to your audience that you would
pause reflectively and stroll to another spot in the room to move to
your next point,” says Booher. “In the time it takes you to get
there, you likely will have recovered from your memory lapse.”
3. Code your visuals. Glancing at your PowerPoint
slide to see where you were may seem like an obvious recovery
technique, but it doesn’t always work, especially if you’ve designed
your slides well and they contain only a few key words. Booher
suggests placing a subtle color bar or icon in the corner of each
slide to cue you as to which segment the visual belongs in. That
way, all you need to do is glance at the blue triangle in the bottom
corner and you’ll remember you are talking about marketing goals for
the third quarter – and that’s usually enough to get you back on
track.
4. Ask the audience. If the situation is
right, simply ask the audience where you were. By saying something
like, “Now where was I?” you accomplish two things, says Booher.
First, you make yourself look more human and therefore you become
easier for the audience to connect with. And second, you find out
whether the audience was paying attention. If they were, they’ll be
able to answer your question. If they weren’t paying attention – and
you weren’t paying attention because you lost your place – then
something’s obviously wrong and you need to regroup completely by
asking whether you’re covering what the audience needs.
Dianna Booher is author of Speak With Confidence
(McGraw-Hill, 2002). She can be reached at http://www.booher.com/.
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