6 core ideas for public speaking | Blythe Coons & Acacia Duncan @ Articulation

Transcript#

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

Well, hi everybody. Welcome to the Data Science Hangout. I'm Rachel. If we haven't had a chance to meet yet, I lead customer marketing at Posit. We're the open source data science company building tools for the individual, team, and enterprise. So thanks so much for hanging out with us today. The Hangout is our open space to hear what's going on in the world of data across all different industries and connect with others who are facing similar things as you.

And so we get together here every Thursday at the same time, same place, except not next week, because next week we will be taking off because we'll be in Seattle for Posit Conf next week. So I just mentioned this, but for anybody who just jumped in now, we'd love to have you join us virtually if you're not able to join us in person in Seattle.

And I really like adding this in now to our intro. But I know people really enjoy connecting with other attendees here. So if you are interested in connecting with other people, I want to encourage you to say hello here in the beginning and introduce yourself. Feel free to share your LinkedIn or role, where you're based, something you do for fun. We're all dedicated to keeping this a friendly and welcoming space, the friendly and welcoming space that you all have made it, and love hearing from you no matter your years of experience, titles, industry, or languages that you work in too.

If it's your first one, I'll add it's 100% okay if you just want to listen in here too, or if you've been joining for weeks. Although we love to get to hear from you live. So there's three ways that you can ask questions or provide your own perspective. So you can raise your hand on Zoom and I'll call on you to jump in. You could put questions into the Zoom chat and feel free to put a little star or asterisk next to it. If it's something you want me to read, maybe you're in a coffee shop or walking your dog or something. And then third, we have a Slido link where you can ask questions anonymously.

With all that, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited to be joined by my two co-hosts for today, Acacia Duncan and Blythe Coons from Articulation. And so as you may know, all Posit.com speakers receive coaching from Articulation. And so this was actually one of my favorite parts about doing a talk. And Articulation has been coaching speakers for Posit.com for the past five years.

But fundamentally, I think where people can get off when I coach them is that they're answering a question that they want to know the answer to. Whereas you want to focus on what question does your audience want the answer to.

Common themes with data presenters

My question is a pretty simple one, I think. Maybe not. I was wondering if you all had maybe some themes that you've noticed in folks that work with data a lot. And I think James kind of touched on one of them just now. But if you might talk about kind of broader themes where folks that work in data or analysis or economists like you and I, Acacia, where we could improve generally, things that maybe where we don't always hit the mark or we're not quite connected.

So in terms of PositConf talks, there are definitely themes. There are story talks, there are package talks, and there are sort of, here's this big idea. Those are the big three. But I think, Arsenis, I think what we see the most is people getting a little bit too bogged down in the details.

And I did see a question early on come into the chat that was like, how do you know how much to tell somebody? And it really depends. It depends on your audience. It depends on how much they know. It depends on how much you want them to know. But it also depends on how much time you have to do that. So a lot of this is like your life's work. And so every moment of it seems incredibly important. And this is sort of where we get into the hero's journey. I want to tell everybody exactly every single step I took and every single line of code I wrote.

And really, it's about, again, to Acacia's point, it's about pulling out these ideas, these bigger headlines. And really, it's about identifying sort of, if you have a lot of time, and let's say that's 10 to 20 minutes, you may want to isolate three big ideas that help you, that you can put all of the other smaller ideas, you can group all of the other smaller ideas into. So if it's a matter of how do I decide what I share, put it all on the wall. And then organize it. See if there are themes around those ideas that come together. And if there are things, if there are outliers, then maybe they don't need to be shared. Maybe they go into an appendix.

Maybe they're not relevant to this topic. But it also goes back to what Acacia said, in that you have to keep returning to the question that you are answering. And it is the question on the audience's mind or that you want to put into the audience's mind. And that should help streamline what you share. There is a danger of a question being too big, too broad. And so you really have to think about right sizing the question that you're answering.

And you know, Blythe talked about an appendix. So I'll just say we could probably give a whole other session on visualization while you're speaking. But I'll give you the headline of it, because I do think it's a mistake that I've seen frequently with data people, not just data people, though. And that is trying to put all of your thoughts on the slide. And the audience can't read and listen at the same time. So the more words you put in front of them, as we're all experiencing, if you're trying to read the chat, you can't listen to me very well. It's really hard to do both. So if you put lots of words in front of people's faces, it's going to be hard for them to actually hear you. If you're giving someone a complex visualization, or you really want them to pay attention to a graph with results, stop talking for a little bit. Give them a moment to actually absorb that information.

Slides versus documents

What do you guys think? I'm a preacher of the slides for your presentation and a document for circulating for reading. Otherwise, you get a shitty version of either it's either a bad document in the shape of a slide or it's slides with too many words. So I do one or the other and kind of encourage folks to do that. But people look at that and they're like, that's a lot of work. And what I usually find is what I want to do first is circulate a written document. And then when it comes time, after lots of people have opined on that and edited and everything, and it's going to come time to share it with a group, I'll reduce that to slides. What design patterns have you guys seen to avoid this thing where we're making a slide deck that is both a shitty slide deck and a shitty document at the same time?

I mean, obviously, some of this is always going to come down to how high of importance, I'm a communication coach, that's not great English, but how important the communication actually is, because this is all going to come down to a battle for your time and what you have time to invest. The more important, the more you would want to lean into everything having a purpose for its use. So while I'm speaking, I want, we call it the walking deck. This is the deck that you would be using while you're talking so that people can follow along and so that you have any little facts you need along the way and you're speaking. And then there would be either a read ahead, which I agree with you. I think if it's about reading, you probably want to go into a different format than a PowerPoint.

And now that I'm learning more about how you guys do things with Quarto and things like that, I'm learning that that would be less difficult than I would find it because I don't understand how to do that. But yes, a document is better for reading. But if you can't do that, you could do the more full deck with full sentences to share. Or if the culture of your company, some of you may work for companies where that's just the culture of the company, you share PowerPoint decks. There is one company we do a lot of work with that's a large bank. And their CEO wants a PowerPoint deck that he can read before the leadership meetings. That means it trickles down to every layer of the business. And they can't change that until their CEO changes the culture.

So then you might have to live within the culture of your company. But keep in mind what you need to do to be successful as a communicator, which is usually lesson what's on the slides while you're speaking. So that would be like one intense set of slides for pre-read. And then when you pitch or do the in-person meeting, maybe a reduction of that with just the most salient points you're trying to make.

You could also share with them that Amazon years ago decided they were done with these terrible PowerPoint decks and they mixed PowerPoint decks. And what they do now is they create a one-page written memo. And it's a very structured format they have to follow. And the beginning of any meeting is silent while everyone reads the memo. And then they talk and they do their usual discussion around it. And the idea behind it, as Jeff Bezos talked about it, was that the slide deck is easy for the speaker and hard for the listener. Whereas the memo is really hard for the speaker or the deliverer and easier for the listener or the absorber. So, you could share that Amazon success story.

Speaking is messy: stress and flow

So, Grace, I saw your question. Just tell me a little bit more about what you mean by the messiness of the spoken content.

So, probably, like an example, you would be prepared or you would have specific ideas to talk about. And then once it's your turn to talk or go through these ideas, it gets all messy and probably the order of the ideas gets interrupted and you don't convey or I don't convey the specific message that I wanted to convey from the beginning.

Okay. That's a helpful explanation. Thank you. So, there are a couple of things happening here. The first I'm hearing is that you might be having some stress responses, which is completely normal. So, Grace, I think one of the things that you're touching on are stress responses and stress behaviors that are coming out. And that's one of the ways we tend to get jumbled up. When we go into a high-pressure situation and we think it's going to go one way and then it gets derailed, we immediately start to backtrack or mess things up. Things don't come out fluidly the way we want them to. So, you need to acknowledge that you're having a stress response. And there are a couple things that you can do to waylay those, to really basically short circuit what's happening in your brain.

The other thing, Grace, that I'm hearing you say is that you get interrupted. And oftentimes, people interrupt because you haven't gotten to what they want to know fast enough. And so, that structure that we talked about a couple minutes ago about giving them the end of the story up front, that bottom line up front, can really help them know that you're going to get there, that this is the point you're going to make, and you're on your way to get there.

Don't forget to breathe. It sounds so small, and it is so powerful. In the moment when you are feeling like things are going off the rails, stop and take a breath. And make sure you take a deep breath, like feel it expand your belly, not just your chest, right? Because you're just going to hyperventilate if you keep it really high. But it is going to make a big difference if you breathe. It's going to give your brain a moment to reconnect. It's going to give everybody a pause.

Yeah. I just want to agree with Jared put in the chat, like the bravest people of all are often the people speaking in not their native language. And having worked with a lot of people speaking English, and it's not their native language. And even for some people who maybe they're just their brains don't think linearly, right? They think in webs. And I think there might be a lot of people in data who think in webs. And that's part of what makes you good at your job. What we mean by that messiness is understanding that that process of going from the web to something linear is a messy process. And there isn't going to be one tried and true, I can always do it this way to make it work. It's accepting that. And that's why this is one of the problematic threshold concepts for people because you can't remove the mess.

And that's why this is one of the problematic threshold concepts for people because you can't remove the mess.

Pace of speech

Yeah. So when I get really excited about what I'm talking about or nervous, either of those two, my speaking speed goes off the rails. I mean, so fast, almost like my words become one long word. It's something that I've worked hard on over the last decade, and I still struggle with it, but I wanted to get some tips or thoughts you have about that, either what you do maybe when you catch yourself in the middle of a presentation starting to speed up, or if you're just going quick out the gate because you're worried about time constraints.

Hi, Marlene. I'm also sometimes an excited fast talker, so I can feel you. I'll give you all like an app actually we've been playing with that you could try out if you wanted to. It's an app called SpeakOh. This is, it's a new like AI-ish kind of tool, but it gives you metrics. So if you wanted to try and measure your voice, first of all, I would question whether it's your internal barometer that's telling you it's too fast or whether externally it's too fast, and these kind of apps can actually help you to determine.

A good rate of speech is somewhere between 125 to 160-ish words per minute. Some people can listen faster than that, like people who listen to all their podcasts twice, and two times speed. But what allows us to listen even at faster speeds, so if you catch yourself, Marlene, talking really fast or anybody else on the call, what you want to do is lean into pauses and breaths. So when you think about newscasters, they actually speak at an incredibly fast rate of speech, but we understand them because they put in pauses and they put in breaths, and we think of those as auditory punctuation. If I were to put text in front of you and remove the periods and the commas and the, um, any sort of punctuation, it would be very difficult to read. Same with speaking. We need the punctuation as listeners. So lean into breathing, lean into pausing.

Now there was a subset of what you said, which is one is I get going too excited, I go going fast with them excited, and the other is I have so much to say and so little time. And if you're in the I have so much to say and so little time bucket, I'm here to tell you that there is going to be a boxing match always between time and content. Time gets to win. So if you are rushing because you have so much to say, you actually need to look at your content and be brutal about cutting because just getting it all in is not effective if people can't listen to it.

Presenting on Zoom versus in person

I think it's always been true. There's this funny little graphic that we used to show when we were helping people transition to virtual presentations. And it's this graph where on the y-axis is interest that people have and the x-axis is length of time speaking. And of course, at the beginning, people have high interest and then it loops down pretty fast to low interest as you continue speaking. And I feel like virtual, the biggest difference is that curve is steeper for most listeners. So your need to be clearer, more concise, and be able to tell people where you're going very early is much higher in a virtual world. People are more forgiving in an in-person environment because they have a lot of other stuff that helps them to come to understanding all the non-verbals, just the energy that's there.

Yeah, go ahead, J.D. I was going to say the first time I presented in a Zoom meeting where I couldn't see anyone's face. So at least here I can see five people. I presented in one where I could see nothing. It was an absolute mind melter. I found it was so hard because I was getting no facial expression feedback. And I didn't know prior to that, that I was incredibly dependent on that. And I spent that whole thing, part of my head screaming, this is awful. This something is going terribly wrong because of the lack of facial expressions. Now I watched the recording of it later and it was fine, but I found that incredibly hard.

Yeah, you make a really good point. And it depends again on your culture, on your company's culture, how you're presenting, but you can ask people to come on camera. It is a pretty big requirement of Acacia's and my work that we are able to see the person we're talking to. And so I had a group of from one company that were not on camera people. And I said, I'm going to need you to come on camera. And they bristled at it, but they did it. And it enriched the experience because then you're not staring into the void. The other thing, and this is a really weird thing, and I haven't done it once yet during this Hangout, is as a speaker, and this is really hard, you want to be looking at their faces and you should just to get their reaction, but you also want to be looking into the camera so that they feel like you're making eye contact with them as well. And that's just one tiny little shift that you can make that can sometimes close the distance.

Being yourself when presenting

So this is where the stress can sometimes get in the way. But I think I read somebody wrote something like, I used to have a boss who put on a presentation voice. And that's not a great idea. I used to have a lot of friends who would put on Shakespeare voices to present Shakespeare. And I was like, we can all just sound like humans when we do. We don't have to sound a specific way.

So it sounds stupid. It sounds pat, but breathing, identifying your stress behaviors, getting ahead of them, those sorts of things. I was recently on a Posit coaching call with Joe Chang, and there was someone who was reading their talk. And Joe said, one of the things I love about Posit is that people make mistakes. And sometimes you'll stumble over your words, but it sounds natural. And that's what he was really looking for in Posit conf talks. And that's what Acacia and I are almost always looking for.

So I think there's a little bit of fear about, well, if I put on this character, it's not me and I don't have to worry about it as much because it doesn't reflect on me in this particular way. But I do think that if you acknowledge the risk and you do everything you can to mitigate it, which is part of the threshold concepts, if you do everything you can to mitigate it, go in prepared, know your structure, know what question you're answering, know what your audience wants, know what your goal is. All of those things are going to help you slide into being you. And also I'm going to ask everyone to do this. Trust your knowledge. Most of the time you are there and asked to speak on something because you are a subject matter expert. So trust your innate, not your innate knowledge, but your learned knowledge. And that is going to be better than anything you could memorize or plan down to the last second in detail. Just please trust yourselves a little bit.

I will only tack on one thing, which is we want to hear your voice. And by we, I mean every single audience member you ever have wants to hear your perspective. They want to hear your authentic voice. So keep that in mind as you're trying your best to do that.

I will only tack on one thing, which is we want to hear your voice. And by we, I mean every single audience member you ever have wants to hear your perspective. They want to hear your authentic voice.

Thank you both so much. This has been so fun. I love this conversation today and I'm so excited to also get to go read back through some of the conversation in the chat too. Thank you all for taking the time to join us today too. If it was your first Hangout today, we'd love to have you back. Again, we have these every Thursday at the same time, same place, except for next week because we will be at the POSIT conference. But thank you all so much. And Blythe and Acacia, I really appreciate you jumping on here with us. It's great to talk about our favorite subject. So you got us on our favorite subject and with such a great group of people. We love the POSIT audience every year. It's a wonderful community. It makes me want to learn R just so I can join the community.