WATCH ON YOUTUBE: https://youtu.be/751oQ-erH7Q

Hello and welcome to day 18 of Flash Briefing febri. Today, myself and Peter Stewart are going to be speaking about presentation skills. So Flash Briefing February hopefully you'll have already caught up with what we've been doing this month here on The Voice works Facebook page, we've been bringing you a short snippet every day around 10 minutes long a video you can also listen to it as a podcast, just giving you the the skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing. So whether or not you've never heard a Flash Briefings, perhaps you've got an idea for a Flash Briefing, but you don't know where to start. Or perhaps you've just started it and you want to know the little tips and tricks that you could put into practice to really polish your Flash Briefing. That is exactly what we are here for every day in February, bringing you our experience as Flash Briefing creators but also our experience from our careers as professional broadcasters. So I work For the London Evening Standard, recording news for Google Assistant and I also work for a local radio station as a news reader here in Kent in the UK, and this is Peter Stewart and I work for a big British Broadcasting Company banned me from telling you who they actually are not too difficult to work it out though big British Broadcasting Company. And from London, I produce three daily Flash Briefings, and I've been involved with audio production and presentation for more years than I care to remember actually, but I'll give you some idea by looking the amount of hair that I've got. I call it headphone rub, to be quite honest with you. So today presentation skills and it has to be said that at one stage, I was the only voice and presentation coach for the whole of the BBC. Dan said it in the whole of the UK. So going around and training people in their presentation and their news reading styles, both the radio and the TV. So there's a few tips that over the next few minutes I'm going to be passing on to you about how you come over when you're presenting. And one of the main things is, don't be yourself, okay? Because if you're going to be yourself, there are various styles of you. Okay? And at the moment, I'm overreacting a little bit my end. But hopefully, when you're watching this, it's coming over is quite natural. Now, if I was really natural, it would come over to you watching it as really quiet, really straight laced, little bit boring, and so on. What do I mean by that? So think about it. If you're actually talking to your other half, maybe know in front of the TV or when you're on the way to the shops or something like that. Your voice is probably going to be much quieter, much softer, is not going to be much variety in it. The whole presentation is going to be a little bit flatter as I'm doing now. Now if I was just talking to you, in that kind of voice, that kind of presentation in that kind of way, with that kind of personality, it was going to be so boring, that actually, you would fall asleep. Yeah. So you've got to act up a little bit, you've got to crank up the volume, you got to crank up the personality, you got to crank up the presentation, not over the top to be wildly exciting and manic that some people might think that you're on drugs or something like that. You got to kind of keep it under control. But you got to crank it up a little bit. Okay, be yourself. But yourself. Plus, a little bit more. Turn up that presentation. Turn up the personality, a little bit over act a little bit you plus,

but you've still got to keep that one to one engagement. Yeah. Because if you are presenting to everybody in the whole all of If your listeners were all gathered in a seminar kind of situation, or in a massive hole where you're doing a massive presentation to 100 200 1000 people, your presentation, your production style would be completely different again, because it will be huge, everybody. Thank you for that fellow. Wembley will be that kind of thing, wouldn't it, you will be big, you will be loud, you'll be bold, you have a huge presentation. But just imagine how people would listen to your Flash Briefing, perhaps by themselves, or maybe one other person in the kitchen, in the car, in the bedroom, in the bathroom, something like that. So if you did that huge presentation, you would come over as false. As inauthentic. It wouldn't be appropriate. It would sound odd, it would be too much in their face. So again, you got to tone it down from that but Tone It Up from your Normally, one to one presentation that you might have with a member of the family, you've got to get your message over, you've got to get your message across, you've got to be able to engage. Now another part of this as well as your personality is the presentation. Now, I'm ad libbing to a certain extent. But don't tell anyone. But I've got some notes. I've got some notes, which are just off screen, you can't see them. But you may be able to see occasionally that I just kind of glanced at my notes, just to remind me, the next thing I want to say, and they just bullet points, they are just notes. And hopefully, I know what I'm talking about. I know where I'm going so much so that I don't need a script. And you see the problem with the script is that not many people unless you're a trained actor can actually read from a script in an authentic way and are able to lift the words off a page to make it sound as though they are just kind of ad libbing. Yeah. Most people would read a script and make it sound rather staid, the words would be perhaps lifted and stressed the wrong ones. The magical thing about the human personality and the human voice is that when you know your topic, when you know your subjects, you're going to lift the important words in exactly the right way, almost every single time. The problem is that when we're reading hieroglyphics scribbled on a bit of paper, bit of dried wood, essentially, is what it is. We're still not as human beings. Kind of trained in that way we can learn how to do it, but it's not in built into our psyche into our personality to be able to read these scribbles and to make them sound authentic. We have to be trained into how to do that. So if you've got a script, and you're reading it, you're going to sound too formal. You're gonna sound to stayed. So I would really recommend you just to have some bullet points. If you got bullet points, then you're just going to gloss over that. And then you're going to riff from what you've written down. And even if you might trip up over yourself, occasionally, you might have an r&r or something like that, you will sound much more engaging, your sound much more authentic, your sound much more real, or sound much more friendly, and so on, too polished, and you'll sound too inauthentic, you'll lose that one to one connection. So don't script anything unless you're a fantastic actor. And then when you've recorded your Flash Briefing, or your podcast or whatever it happens to be, don't edit out. Every, every our every stumble, first of all, it will take you forever, potentially, you want to get this done. You want to get it up there. You want to get that content out so people can act on it can be inspired by what it is that you are saying. And secondly, it won't sound as authentic. If You've taken out every slight hesitation. If you've read on sentence after sentence, people will notice and edit at 50 paces. Couple of other tips, smile, have fun, enjoy yourself have a bit of rehearsal. Nobody is that you want to say, ya know what message you want to get across know where you're going with your particular topic with that particular episode with your content for that day, no way it is that people would want to listen to you.

Okay, that's about it. Tomorrow, we'll both be back. As soon as he's going to take the lead tomorrow on day 19 of the Flash Briefing February course. And tomorrow we're going to be talking we've mentioned a couple of times in passing, but tomorrow we're going to be talking about the value of bulk recording because sometimes you know, I've got three daily Flash Briefings, and sometimes you might think to yourself, that's a huge problem to do three daily Flash Briefings. That you into a bit of a bit of a secret, I bulk record them. I set aside a couple of hours every week or a little bit longer every month and do them all in a row. It saves time in the long run, and also saves your sanity too. And Susan's got a whole stack of tips and tricks and tech to help you with that. As Flash Briefing February continues tomorrow. The skill set the mindset and the marketing to build a better briefing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai


Follow Peter on Twitter @TweeterStewart
Follow Suze on Twitter @BigTentSocial