Chris Evans’ apology for smile failure is a lesson for all business presenters

Britain’s most popular broadcaster made an apology to his audience recently as he admitted learning a lesson from watching himself on the iPlayer. It’s a lesson that business presenters could also find useful and, while I am not always a great fan of filming yourself, this is one of the best reasons for getting the video camera out.

This particular lesson was all about ensuring that your facial expressions and body language match the message that is coming from your lips. I find this comes up most frequently when I am coaching Finance Directors as they prepare to present their company’s latest results. Rightly, they see this as an important matter – they are reporting back to shareholders and they need to do so with suitable respect and gravitas. But I sometimes find myself having to play the role of financial ignoramus and ask follow up questions such as: “those are good results aren’t they?”. “Oh yes”, they respond, now with a sense of glee, “they’re awesome”.  To which I say: “Well let’s see some of that excitement in your face and hear it in your voice then; and even somebody as stupid as me will get the message!”.

Gradually they get the point, but it’s only really when they watch their performance on video that the penny drops fully. So I was delighted to hear Chris Evans admit that he sometimes has a similar problem. He told his radio listeners that he was so pleased with a TV piece he had done for the One Show that, for the first time ever, he had watched himself back on the iPlayer. To his horror, he realised that he had failed to smile as he welcomed viewers to the programme. “Sometimes”, he explained “you have so much going on in your head that you forget to let your body show the world how you are feeling”.

If a presenter as experienced as Chris Evans can suffer from this affliction, then the rest of us who get up and speak on a more occasional basis must be highly susceptible. I’m not going to start banging on about that ancient research which suggests that only seven per cent of our communication comes from what we say, but we do need to think along the lines of, perhaps, a ‘pre-flight check’ whereby we ensure that all bodily communications devices are fully operational before taking flight with our presentation.

 

Extracted and adapted from Nick Fitzherbert’s book 

Presentation Magic, published by Marshall Cavendish

Steve Jobs and three of the ways in which he communicated like a master magician

Despite – or perhaps because of – the fact he is no longer with us, Steve Jobs remains a hero to many.  I certainly include myself among that number – I am writing this on an iMac as I listen to some iTunes form my iPod.  And my house has an array of other iGadgetary on which my whole family have become scarily reliant.  The main reason for hero status in my mind, however, was his presentation skills.  Jobs communicated like the very best magicians and he therefore remains the most brilliant example for me when I coach the business community in applying the Rules of Magic to their communication. 

Long before I was fully aware of Steve Jobs, James Randi, a wise old guru of the magic world, declared: “Magicians are the world’s greatest communicators; it’s just that everything they are telling you is wrong”.  I had been struck by the magic bug midway through a career in public relations, so Randi’s words caught my attention on two fronts.  The more I learned about magic, the more I concluded that many of its principles for directing attention, persuading and convincing were rather useful in real life and Randi seemed to be confirming my belief.  Once I gained membership to The Magic Circle I was able to extend and refine my research into the Rules of Magic, which now form the backbone of both my coaching for business people and my book Presentation Magic.

Subsequently I found that Steve Jobs was applying many of the Rules of Magic in his new product launches.  You can see this clearly in one of his finest presentations – his launch of the MacBook Air.

First, Rule 5: Concentrated attention requires a single point of focus.  Notice the way he handles the MacBook Air; indeed look at any picture of him displaying any Apple product and you will see that he holds them close to his face, straight and still for prolonged periods, complete with contrasting backgrounds to make them stand out. 

Then he takes Rule 5 a step further by creating a single point of focus mentally as well as physically.  His presentations are invariably long, detailed and technical, but he wraps up all the detail in one simple sentence.  In this case it was: The world’s thinnest notebook.  All the words, the graphics and the props were about thinness.  Making the thinness message so powerfully memorable had the effect of triggering many other memories: it’s the thinnest and yet it has a full-sized keyboard; it’s the thinnest and yet it’s as powerful as anything in its class; etc.

Jobs concludes his presentation by deploying one of magicians’ most subtle yet effective tools - the power of suggestion.  Rule 19 of the Rules of Magic states: People put more reliance on something they have worked out for themselves.  This is where, having focused long and hard on just how thin the new product is, he finally produces it – from inside an ordinary manila envelope.  The first thing this does for his audience is to engage their visual sense (Rule 12 – The senses offer five different ways into the brain).  Most importantly, though, it allows them to work out for themselves – just in case they remained in any doubt - that this new product really is thin!  He has already provided details of its measurement and its proportions compared to competitors, but all that could potentially be just clever chat.  Seeing it actually coming out of an envelope confirms in the mind of every audience member that this truly is thin.  Furthermore, it fixes a visual memory of that fact in their minds. 

 

Every magician works towards a ‘ta-dah’ moment that they want their audience to go away remembering.  The production of the MacBook Air from an envelope was Jobs’s big ta-dah moment. 

Extracted and adapted from Nick Fitzherbert's book 

'Presentation Magic'

Firsts and Lasts – how Mick Jagger, Michael Caine and the best magicians make themselves memorable

“As long as you make a good entrance and you go out with a big finish, it almost doesn’t matter what you do in between”.  So said Geoffrey Durham, the magician formerly known as The Great Soprendo, as he lectured members of The Magic Circle on the art of stage craft.  Durham’s quote chimed perfectly with my observation that ‘firsts and lasts are remembered’.  This had become Rule 13 in the Rules of Magic that formed the basis of both my training programmes in presentation skills and my book Presentation Magic.

Wayne Dobson was one of the first magicians to bring the Firsts & Lasts principle to my attention.  Having enjoyed huge success on TV and in Las Vegas in the 1980s he is now sadly confined to a wheelchair as a result of Multiple Sclerosis, but he remains active in the magic world as an inventor and lecturer.  It was at another talk one night at The Magic Circle that he shared a detailed description of what for many years has been his opening trick.  He told us how to do it, but more importantly he told us why it features as his opening trick. “I want to get the audience to like me”, he said, “and once they like me, I can do more or less what I want”. 

I soon realized that the principle also holds good with my other great love, which is music. Experienced rock bands know that as long as they come crashing on with a big number and go out with their greatest hit, they can get away with murder in between, committing such crimes as playing the whole of their new album.  And yet people still go away with good memories!

Away from show business, but coming from a movie star, I also uncovered the Firsts & Lasts principle in the catering trade.  “Do you know”, said Sir Michael Caine recently, “the secret of a successful restaurant?  Great bread and fantastic coffee – the first and last things that you experience”.

Feeling that I had unearthed a universal truth, I revealed my findings to Khalid Aziz, chairman of the Aziz Corporation, the executive communications specialists who let me loose coaching some very blue chip clients.  They make a point of coming at communications training from a variety of different angles, so they like it when I get clients doing magic tricks as well as business presentations – it helps to bring their personality to the fore and awakens them to the need for a ‘big finish’ in any kind of presentation.  Khalid brought me back to earth, however, saying: “that’s what psychologists call ‘Primacy and Recency’ and it’s used in areas such as calculating optimum break patterns for exam revision”.  Back at The Magic Circle, I let Geoffrey Durham know that there is an official name for what we had been calling ‘Firsts & Lasts’.  He confessed he had never heard of the term, and the principle had simply become instilled in him through a lifetime in show business. We both felt pleased, however, that the psychologists had endorsed what we had been espousing.

So, if you have a presentation to make, be sure to focus your preparation time on how you open and the way in which you plan to close - that is what your audience is going to remember.

Extracted & adapted from Nick Fitzherbert's book 

'Presentation Magic', published internationally 

by Marshall Cavendish