In “The first 8 seconds“, we learned that you, the speaker, only have eight seconds to capture your audience’s attention. Within that time, you want to make sure that what you say is relevant, worthy of the audience’s attention, and on par with what they expect to hear. But there’s one caveat: the focus should be on the content of your words, and not the number of words. After all, professional growth and business development aren’t built on fluff — they’re built on a hard working, no bull snot attitude.
The sample case
Although we can practice our presentations ahead of time to get rid of the nerves, unexpected events can crop up within our meeting that throw all of our preparation out the window.
I recently gave a presentation for some work I’d been developing over the past two months. Doing my research ahead of time, I knew the meeting was one hour long and that myself and another individual were expected to give presentations longer than 10 minutes. Great! Accounting for the start of the meeting (expected to be ~10 minutes), that leaves 50 minutes for the two presentations…25 minutes for my 11 slides (or 2:15 per slide) is a comfortable speaking margin.
When the meeting started, however, the organizer began by detailing the company’s roadmap, project by project. Covering each project in detail, the discussion ended up taking ~30 minutes, leaving 30 minutes for myself and the other speaker. Between the two of us, this left ~15 minutes per person. Subtracting 3 minutes for questions at the end, the total time per presentation reduces to ~12 minutes — in my case, I’d need to complete roughly one slide per minute.
Then comes the mental aspect.
On the one hand, you want to walk through your carefully crafted slides, hitting every detail you’ve included. On the other hand, if you do try to cover all the material you’ve prepared, there may not be enough time to get through your slide deck. Third, if you present first (which happened in my case), you’re burdened with the knowledge that there’s another speaker waiting on you to finish; if you take too long, they may not get the time they equally deserve to give their presentation. But if you rush to fit the time slot (which was my sin), you end up speaking too quickly.
How quickly you speak is measured in words per minute, or WPM. You can calculate your own WPM by counting how many words you spoke in your presentation and dividing it by the length of your presentation (in minutes). To give the WPM rate some context, here’s the average speech rate for different conversation styles:
Conversations: 120 – 150 wpm
Presentations: 100 – 150 wpm (for a comfortable pace)
Radio hosts: 150 – 160 wpm
Commentators: 250 – 400 wpm
But where do “the greats” fit in? People who speak at TED Talks tend to range between 154 wpm (Brene Brown, “The power of vulnerability”), and 200 wpm (Tony Robbins, Why we do what we do). Others like Simon Sinek, Susan Cain, and Sir Ken Robinson hover right in the middle, near 170 wpm.
So what does this tell us about ourselves? Absolutely nothing. When we give our presentations, we need to make a conscious effort to not rush. Speaking too quickly may leave the audience without a grasp of our important points, while speaking too slowly may bore them. We need to speak at a pace that is comfortable but not dragging. We need to slow down to emphasize our words, utilizing pregnant pauses to let our points sink in. We can also speed up our speech to show excitement about a subject or to get through tedious material that we’ve already introduced.
We need to consciously throttle our speech to fit the environment while simultaneously driving home our message.
Conclusion:
Giving a presentation can be a nerve-wracking experience. When your 25 minute time slot is suddenly reduced to 12 minutes, you may be tempted to rush. That’s okay. Remember to take a deep breath.
Present clearly. Present concisely. Present Proper.