SiliconBeat

Heather Gold

Over the past few years, as I’ve moved into a more public role at the Mercury News as a business and technology columnist, I’ve found myself being called on to do more and more public speaking. At the same time, I’ve also been involved in organizing various digital journalism conferences and bar camp-type conferences.

One of the trickiest challenges that I’ve found in all of these settings is finding ways to engage the audience and drawing then into a conversation and turn them into participants. This is particularly important when the format is geared toward conversation, like a bar camp. But it matters just as much when I’m up there speaking solo, or moderating a panel.

As I’ve begun to study how others do this, one person I’ve been following is Heather Gold. She does so many different things, it’s hard to put her into one category. But a few of her roles: Presenter, stand-up comedian, consultant, former Apple employee, new media star (check out The Heather Gold Show here). But a common thread that runs through all of her work is the question of how to draw people into a conversation. For a good overview of her thoughts on this, check out the video at the end of the post from a Web 2.0 conference last year. And I also suggest checking out her TummelVision podcast, which Gold says is about “human connection in tech, biz and culture in an era in which the ‘audience’ is the medium.”

I’d been in touch with Gold, a former Bay Area resident who now lives in New York, about these questions, and earlier this year, she invited me to attend one of her UnPresenting workshops in San Francisco. The goal, in short, is to “learn how to read the room and transform your presentations into conversations.”

It was done in a flowing style, where the various participants were called on to stand up in front of the room and tell stories while at the same time trying to involve the rest of the group into the conversation. The goal is tell your story, be as authentic as possible, draw stories from the audience, and build on those to create a kind of momentum around the conversation. Let me tell you, as a relative speaking novice, it’s incredibly hard to pull off without feeling forced and stilted.

One important distinction here is that we were trying to get away from the idea that this was a performance where you take on a different personality. The goal is to be more authentic, more yourself, which can be terrifying. “We are all afraid of being judged,” Gold said at the start. “We’re afraid who we are isn’t okay.” So, the tendency is adopt a kind of showbiz personality on stage.

These days, as presenting has become even more critical in corporate and tech settings, there’s pressure to over-prepare and over-rehearse. Part of that trend includes the growing use of PowerPoint both to dazzle the audience but also as a performance crutch, to create a format to fall back on when you’re on stage. The problem, in Gold’s view, is that this creates distance between the presenter and the audience because there’s no sense of who the person on stage really is.

“You can so stuck in structure, there’s nothing of you in there,” Gold said. “I’m trying to get people to prepare less.”

There’s no easy way to boil down the various tips and critiques we got that day: Make lots of eye contact with the audience, even when you’re talking to 2,000 people. Tell lots of personal stories using “I” as much as possible to personalize things. Ask questions of the audience, but even more important, listen carefully to the responses and find a way to build on them to keep the conversation going. This can involve a fair bit of improvisation, which can make things seem a bit, well, terrifying if you’re used to having every moment carefully scripted.

If there was a single key takeaway for me, it was how important listening is in such a setting, something I don’t hear a lot of people mention when dishing out public speaking advice.

“The challenge is for you to go for that feeling of connectiveness,” Gold said. “Everyone wants to be listened to.”

It was time well spent, as I think we were all far more comfortable (certainly less terrified) of putting ourselves in front of a group without a complete map of where the whole thing would go and how we’d get there.

If you’re interested in learning more, Gold will be in the Bay Area next month for a mini-tour, including offering her UnPresenting worksh0p on August 8. More details are here.

You can also catch her here: