Today I really enjoyed a ‘membawang & lunch’ session on presentations. ‘Membawang’ is a recent Malaysian slang means gossiping. In a village community, one of the pre-wedding activities is peeling off onions (bawang). Performed by makcik-makcik (aunties), they would chit-chat and gossip during this session. ‘Membawang’ with my friend, Dr. SL, was a welcomed activity because we didn’t have to be so academic about it. Yet we learned something about presentations from the session.
We went to a new Syrian restaurant for the ‘membawang’ session. Initially we wanted to go to the tasty Nasi Padang International, but it’s closed on Friday.
The restaurant turned out to be nicer than we thought. Housed in a refurbished old colonial house, Halab serves delicious Syrian cuisine with attentive wait staff. A great ambiance for catching up with SL.
We chatted about the presentations at the USM T&L Symposium. Similar to TEDx, presenters stand on a red circular carpet while delivering a talk for 18 minutes on a current topic.
From the ‘membawang & lunch’ session, we sort of came up with several lessons on presentations. The main takeaways are as follows:
1. Storytelling is the secret sauce for an amazing presentation
SL was telling me about how amazing was Dr Khayriyyah’s talk. Dr. Khayriyyah is 2018 winner for the FameLab International Award. The title of her talk was “How To Be HEBAT?” (starts at 1h 30 minute).
She didn’t spell out what HEBAT is until towards the end. Instead she told stories that conveyed the message. They are her stories.
Baltimore, snowmageddon, building igloo, writing a letter to an insurance company and her dad.
The careful selection of her stories made the audience think, laugh and cry. She made the topic so relatable. They elicited people’s emotions. That’s what a great presentation is.
She wrapped up her talk by re-iterating her points about creating a goal for yourself. That requires effort. And one can have different HEBAT moments at the university. It’s up to oneself to define that HEBAT moment.
Learn more about the secret sauce in academic presentations.
Learn to design better PowerPoint slides. Enroll in these courses on Skillshare!
2. Keep your visual simple
Still on Dr Khayriyyah’s talk. I saw that she kept her visuals simple and coherent with her scripts. I learned that she was at the January PnP workshop where I gave a short workshop on Designing Effective Presentation, similar to a recent August’s workshop. Perhaps she took some notes 😉
Let me share another secret with you.
We eat with our eyes first. Japanese are good at this. Servings of sushi and sashimi are always beautifully arranged in a manner that stimulate our appetite.
It’s an art and science. An obsession, a pride that runs deep into oneself, their cultures and how they work as a society. To appreciate the supreme level of craftsmanship, watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It’s a wonderful documentary about Jiro Ono, a sushi master who owns a Michelin three star restaurant Sukiyabashi Jiro.
For your next presentation, find those visuals that help you tell your story more effectively. I love Pixabay and Unsplash. These two sites provide beautiful photos for free and mostly licensed under public domain, CC0.
Unclutter your slides. Keep to one idea per slide.
3. Practice makes perfect
During our ‘membawang’ session, we agreed on certain things. If you speak in ‘blocks’ i.e. incomplete sentences that your audience can understand, they can still forgive you. Likewise, for technical glitches.
However, the lack of practice would look so obvious on stage. High-pitched voice, mumbling and space-fillers can be quite annoying. Add on the microphone effect, which amplify these unnecessarily 10 times louder.
Another is language fluency. Can you listen me? Umm… that can be a big turn-off for many in the audience. Particularly for such a high profile event like this symposium.
Particularly when the audience are mainly academics.
4. Never cold start a presentation
I remember the experience preparing for my presentation at a plenary session. A week before the session, I wrote down my script. Then, I read out loud. I revised the script several times. I practised reading it out loud first with Evernote’s voice memo on my iPad mini. I listened to the first recording. I sounded so stiff…
I tried to loosen up with vocal warm-up exercises. I use the exercises in this TEDx talk by Julian Treasure. It’s a routine of mine before any workshops. Five minutes into the vocal warm-up, I can hear a big difference in my voice. Deeper and clearer tones emerged. I spoke from my centre and not my throat.
By the end, I realised I’ve made like 10 recordings. On the 10th, my speech sounded fluent. Hardly any mumblings or space-fillers.
I felt confident giving a speech that day at the conference. With the confidence, I improvised my session by including participations from the 500-odd audience. They were a little taken aback by my questions, but participated anyway. Their responses interestingly concurred with my next slides. Good flow. Can’t forget the awesome feeling until today.
Design Better Slides in PowerPoint. Enroll in these tutorials on Skillshare!
Listening is healing
The ‘membawang’ session was not entirely gossiping.
Keeping our handphones off, our personal stories interweaved with professional matters. It’s a good catching-up session with lots of listening. To me, listening is healing. An act of love.
Simply just be there for the company.
People say I’m a good listener. And I appreciate friends who in turn listen deeply. Those who asked and waited for my answer. Those who seek to understand, and help each other understand oneself better. And of course, over coffee 😉
With introverts, it’s not that we want to keep people waiting. To us, it takes time to process the thoughts and images, inwards, before they can be turned into words that make perfect sense to the other. Writing helps to crystallise the thoughts.
Back to the UTLS, my votes for great speech/presentations go to our beloved VC (as always), Professor Dr. Mushtak Al-Atabi dan Dr. Khayriyyah. They spoke from the heart. And that moved people to the core.
Thanks SL for your company. It was a good ‘membawang & lunch’ session. Must do it again =)
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