Do your knees knock and your legs turn to jelly in front of an audience? Public speaking and presenting can be daunting. On the other hand it can be highly enjoyable for your audience and greatly rewarding for you. This relies upon your thorough preparation and practising of your presentation. Then, you can achieve the goals you set for it.
It’s easy trip yourself up without any help from anyone else. Here’s what can happen – and how to avoid these presentation bungles!
5 ways to trip yourself up:
- Not bothering to find out about your audience before you prepare
- Not being clear about your objectives before you prepare
- Not having a clear structure
- Leaving it up until the last minute to write your speech or presentation
- Starting & ending apologetically: opening with “I’ll tell you a little about …” and closing with “That’s all I have to say for now”.
If you want to give an engaging speech, you’ll need to research your audience and what they expect while also being clear in your mind what you expect from them. In the words of Benjamin Franklin: “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail”. The success of presenting depends greatly on the thought you put into it beforehand if you are to deliver it with charisma and confidence.
5 tips & techniques to deliver an engaging presentation:
- Find out all you can about your audience before you put pen to paper. How much do they know about the subject, what’s their experience & level of knowledge; are they professionals in your field? This will help you pitch the level of your content, the language and jargon (or lack of it), and how you pace your delivery.
- Find out their reasons for attending and be clear what you want to achieve: what do you want your audience to feel, think, do or say as a result of what you say? Deciding this is crucial to planning your content.
- Have a very clear structure so you and your audience know where you’re going. Otherwise you and they can lose their way! Having an introduction, middle and conclusion may seem obvious, but not all speeches have such flow. In the middle you may wish to use other structures, such as describing a theory and how to put it into practice or outlining a problem and then the solutions.
- Ensure you prepare in very good time, at least several days in advance. Leaving it until the last minute increases nerves and allows for no leeway, practice or fine-tuning. Think too about what could happen if you were unwell in the days before – you may not feel up to preparing a presentation.
- The way you begin your delivery affects how receptive the audience will be, so avoid any apologies or self-deprecatory remarks. Start with a strong opening: “I’m going to…” and tell them what you’re going to talk about, or use a powerful rhetorical question or a celebrity quote. The way you end affects how the audience thinks and feels about what you’ve said and what they’ll say and do about it. Ideally you will close with a call to action.
If you prepare well and well in advance, you have time to practice and feel more confident about presenting.
If your objectives truly inform your content, the audience is far more likely to go away feeling, thinking, saying and doing what you want from them.
Remember – if you open and close with confidence, the audience is far more likely to feel confident about what you say.
To find out more, visit my website page about public speaking or sign up for my newsletter which gives tips and advice about public speaking, assertiveness and other personal development topics.
