For many, the thought of presenting in front of other people can be terrifying regardless of whether that’s on stage, in a conference room, over a video call or even at a function.
We all know the feeling, the tightness in the stomach 15 or so minutes ahead of ‘your go’, the sweaty palms and hot-getting-hotter forehead (let’s not even talk about the armpits), the dry mouth that seemingly can’t be quenched by liters upon liters of water.
Sorry if I’ve just caused you to relive uncomfortable past moments…
The reality is that your mind often takes you to the worst possible places from: ‘What if I say the wrong word,’ through to ‘Why am I standing here in my underwear with everyone laughing at me…’ (that might just be me.)
Fear has an amazing ability to create scenarios that are usually unlikely to be realized.
Mindset
So how do you manage this? Well, the first thing to do is to realize that presenting is an opportunity. It shouldn’t be something that you just want to get through or ‘survive’. If you feel like you just want to get through it, then you should probably ask yourself why you’re doing it and how much value it’s going to provide to you and your organization.
You should view presenting as an opportunity. Yes, it’s a challenge, but you have an opportunity to present your thoughts and messages in front of an audience. It’s up to you whether they are a captive audience or not. Once you go into it with that positive mindset, you’ve taken that first step to a successful outcome.
Messages
From there, it’s time to consider your material, what are you going to say? For this, I’d recommend referring to my blog post on the grid of nine and the rule of three. There is a temptation to say as much as you possibly can, but you need to think about your audience and how they retain information.
My advice is to prioritize no more than three messages and to back them up with further detail and proof points. You want to take the audience on a journey with the story you’re telling but make sure you don’t confuse them with too much information.
Preparation and Execution
The preparation stage is incredibly crucial but is often where ‘presenters’ take shortcuts. Taking the time to learn your material, analyzing the content and questioning why you’re saying it makes a huge difference between a successful and an average presentation.
We’ve all seen presenters who have so obviously decided to ‘wing it.’ They’re the ones who are talking into their chest because they’re uncertain what to say. As a result, they speak meekly and without confidence. They appear to mumble. They’re force-feeding the audience a barrage of often irrelevant words which only serves to turn them off. The audience then starts to look away, talk to the person next to them and then, you’ve lost them.
Learning what you want to say before you go on stage and (if you’re displaying slides), creating a presentation that provides triggers for the messages you’re sharing gives you the opportunity to present with confidence.
You go on stage knowing what you want to say so you free your mind up to focus on how you want to say it. This means you think about body language and how you can place emphasis on certain points you want to get across. It also enables you to use pauses effectively to allow the words to sink into the minds of the audience.
I’ll touch on the presentation creative briefly with a quick piece of advice, you want to make sure that the audience is listening to your words rather than reading them on a screen. What I mean by that is simply don’t write your entire presentation on your slides. Instead, use appealing imagery and graphics to captivate initially but then allow the audience to retain what you’re saying. From my perspective, the following elements are important for how humans retain information:
- What you say, make sure it’s relevant and easy to understand
- How you say it, use pauses, emphasis, confidence helps you to project your voice etc
- Repetition of words, repetition equals retention
- Your body language, engaging, open, confident
Summarizing for recall
Finally, don’t discount the power of the summary. People often forget about summarizing the presentation at the end but it’s important to use that to repeat the key messages again. Remember, it’s the last thing that the audience hears. If you can share those messages at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the presentation then that use of repetition should help the audience to retain information. Overall, don’t fear presenting, use it strategically. Hopefully some of these tips will help you to do that and to be successful.
I hope this was insightful. I’ll be sharing more tips and techniques on the blog so please check it out. Also, please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you need any communications, PR or content support.