Hacking Your Passions

I like this list of characters created to exemplify different kinds of speakers you want to avoid being – but the best part, to me, is it was created to pass the time while surviving a bad presentation.

One of my favorites to read about (and least favorite to experience firsthand):

Oscar Overtime (Thomas Too-much): Oscar is in some ways the extreme opposite of Umberto – he prepares way more material than he has time to deliver. Consequently he ends up going over his allotted time. He’s mastered the art of ignoring frantic signals from meeting moderators and cues from annoyed audiences. He’s prepared all that wonderful material and he’s going to deliver it (all), come what may.

What I like about Oscar is that the core of the problem, like so many bad presentations, is he had himself in mind when he made the presentation – yet the point of a presentation is your audience, not you.

I learned two new words today – anaphora and epiphora.

• Anaphora -  The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs; for example, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills” (Winston S. Churchill)
• Epiphora – the repeated use of the same word or word pattern as a rhetorical device; for example, “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as child.” (I Corinthians 13.11)

I ran into the first (and then through Googling stumbled on the other) as I read this article at Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen site regarding the recent concession speech Barack Obama gave in New Hampshire. Your perception of him as future leader of the free world potential aside, he can definitely give great presentation.

To give yourself one more edge to remaining calm and collected when you’re about to give a presentation, make sure you’ll be able to keep your breathing moderated with this little exercise on how to reboot your lungs. I haven’t tested this out prior to talking to a group yet, but just sitting here at my desk doing it certainly made me feel a bit better.