In earlier reviews I’ve recommended Jerry Weissman’s earlier two books, Presenting to Win: The Art of Telling Your Story, Updated and Expanded Edition and In the Line of Fire: How to Handle Tough Questions...When It Counts. Presenting To Win shows how to structure and design presentations while In The Line of Fire gives advice on how to handle tough questions and answers. His new book, The Power Presenter: Technique, Style, and Strategy from America's Top Speaking Coach, fills a gap between the first two books: how to actually deliver the presentation. Like the first two books, Weissman’s latest is a worthy addition.
The Power Presenter offers advice I have not seen elsewhere. Most noteworthy is his recommendation for the presenter to think about how the audience is doing to shift the natural focus away from the “How am I doing?” concern that bedevils most presenters. While Presenting To Win talked about designing your presentation by constantly thinking how your presentation will benefit your audience, The Power Presenter tells the presenter to continuously ask how your audience is doing to counter-act the normal concern about how you, the presenter, are doing. This differs from the usual recommended solutions such as visualizing your audience naked or other tricks to distract you away from being concerned about how you are doing.
The Power Presenter also gives unique advice regarding eye contact and the use of pauses. Weissman tells us to make eye contact with one person in the audience, deliver an entire thought to that person, pause while moving on to another person in the audience then deliver a full thought to the new recipient. He contends this approach converts your presentation into a number of one-on-one conversations with the pauses allowing the audience to absorb your points while you take time to formulate your next thought. I haven’t tested this idea yet but I can see how this will make a presenter look confident. I definitely will apply Weissman’s ideas.
Weissman also takes a different approach on a key question every presenter asks: What do I do with my hands? The current thinking, based on a presentation skills class I took at work and observing TV personalities, is to hold your hands together at waist level in front of our body. Weissman instructs us to let our hands drop at our sides in a “touch-and-go position”. This means you drop your hands for an instant, gesture with one or both hands then drop back to the rest position. He claims this method provides several benefits. First, your hands have to travel a longer distance which makes your gestures more pronounced. Second, dropping your hands avoids the hunching of the shoulders produced by the “body wrap position”. Plus there are other benefits. And third, it opens your body to the audience, showing your confidence to face them openly as opposed to protecting your midsection with your arms.
I do want to comment that Weissman never says how he concluded why certain behaviors or gestures work. Is it based on empirical research? His own personal testing? He doesn’t say. His ideas make sense but I find his silence on this subject interesting.
I’m looking forward to using Weissman’s ideas. I’m sure they work if for no other reason than the impressive list of clients Weissman says he has worked with over the years.
