Rexify Me: The Art of the Unforgettable Presentation

by Heather Cassell (San Francisco)

As a little girl, Carmen Taran, Ph.D. was already on her way to being an in demand global keynote speaker and teaching corporate executives how to communicate on multiple platforms. Taran’s first audience was 12 dolls, which were very hard to come by in communist Romania, where she grew up.

“I had these 12 participants daily,” said Taran, a former AT&T research and development manager. “They were very punctual and, unlike today’s groups, they didn’t talk back,” she laughed.

Taran is the co-founder of Rexi Media and author of Better Beginnings: How to Capture Your Audience in 30 Seconds, the first book out of the Rexify series released in October. She, along with her business partner, Danielle Daly, a former Adobe Systems Incorporated technology sales and business developer, recently sat down with The Glass Hammer in a coffee shop in San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

Founded in 2007, Rexi Media specializes in training Fortune 500 employees to give dramatically powerful presentations in person, virtually, and on-demand. Daly and Taran utilize a combination of technology, academic (psychology, sociology, and adult education) and business training (advertising and marketing), along with a global perspective to provide an “edge and emotion” not found in typical public speaking coaching.

“When you extract from all those domains…you have a larger inventory, but also a more unique inventory for your presentation skills,” Taran said.

More important is the fact that a large repertoire gives anyone presenting a better chance of capturing and retaining their audiences’ attention as well as creating a profound and memorable connection. This is important in today’s information overloaded world, where presenters can lose audiences within a millisecond. The most important moments in a presentation are the “first unforgiving 30 seconds,” according to Daly and Taran.

“Unless you make an impact and you announce [to] the audience that this is going to be an a-typical speech,” Taran said, “people already start multitasking.”

Better Beginnings helps speakers to improve the capture and retention of audiences through 10 key strategies:
1. Anticipation
2. Specificity
3. Inquiry
4. Incongruity
5. Novelty
6. Complexity
7. Ease of comprehension
8. Indulgence
9. Staging, and
10. Uncertainty

Unattractive presentation beginnings are “vague and narcissistic” or “dry and distant,” Taran said. Exceptional presentations begin with an edge, a personal emotional element that leads to an instant connection to an audience.

“Emotions are often at the intersection between two worlds,” Taran said. “The world of popular culture…and the world of science that offers empirical evidence.”

One of the ways to capture people’s attention is to evoke anticipation, Daly added, using analogies and visuals that not only back up key points, but “help clarify your message” and make it relatable to the audience.

To capture and hold attention, Taran suggests the introduction of incongruous information as it creates “positive tension” that can secure immediate attention by developing some type of conflict or introducing an idea that competes with an audience’s expectations. Another way to attract and hold an audience’s attention, she says, is to compare and contrast information verbally and/ or visually.

Details are key accessories to excellent presentations, but details should be used with care, according to Taran.

“There can be such a thing as TMI (too much information),” Taran said, especially when presenters indulge in personal information that isn’t “relevant to the content or inspirational to the audience”.

“Presentations are supposed to be an act of giving,” Taran said. “An audience is selfish. You have to be prepared to give.”

Good presenters give by knowing how to “adjust their style based on audience and environmental cues” and using details to accessorize their presentations to bring “vividness” to their speeches while maintaining the audience’s focus.

“The brain is mobilized by specific details,” Taran said. Details build an image in audience’s minds and it tends to lend to complexity, which creates anticipation, according to Taran. Details can also lead to transitions. Often underestimated in public speaking courses, according to Taran, good transitions are the mark of a “seasoned presenter” just as much as variety in style and approach.

Successful speakers also know the power of interacting with the audience. By allowing audiences to participate in a presentation rather than simply be spoken to or guided through a series of slides helps make a presentation unforgettable, according to Taran.

Another unforgettable presentation moment is at the end when audiences are left with something to think about, Daly added.

A presentation with good details, analogies, attunement to emotions and the environment doesn’t mean much without good organization of the material. A solid structure makes any presentation memorable. Winning presentations are organized either by location, alphabetical order, time, category, or hierarchy (LATCH), according to Taran.

“Structuring information helps your audience create relationships in their minds,” Taran said, “which in turn helps with retention.”

The importance and value of good presentation skills is its direct link to sales and revenue, according to Daly and Taran. In an increasingly competitive world, where standing out can be a benefit, being able to articulate value and displaying confidence as well as building relationships and networking is critical.

“This is the age of excellence,” said Taran. “Unless you exceed expectations you do not realize growth.” And, according to Daly and Taran, using their presentation methodology can drastically improve anyone’s presentation skills, even those of the most advanced public speakers. “We can still take them from an A+ to an A+++.”