Have your advanced presentation skills propelled your career? Hmm……my guess is probably not. The ability to inspire, persuade and motivate through presentations is rare. The ability to bore an audience to death? Much more common.
But presentations are tricky things to avoid. Especially as you move up the corporate ladder. And they count right? The flipside of being a rising star is the increasing stakes of getting it wrong on a public stage. And as your profile rises, the worse it gets. Think Theresa May and THAT conference speech. Ouch.
Below are 3 techniques to make presentations feel less like something you must endure. And more like something you could even enjoy…..
- Stop treating presentations as performances
For most of us, it’s hard to feel comfortable about presenting, as they feel like a performance. A weird one. In an office. In front of people, you know. This (surprise surprise) inspires fear and loathing in most of us.
So try this. Stop presenting completely. Presentations are formal unnatural things anyway. Instead, think of your next presentation as ‘an opportunity to have a structured business conversation’. This can help prevent you speaking in a stiff, formal and unnatural way. And can seriously help with nerves.
When you think of presentations as conversations, you take the focus off yourself and place it with your message. Not rocket science I know. But the simple realisation that it is not all about you – is the most important step you can make in becoming a more credible and compelling presenter. But leaving your ego at the door is harder than it sounds. Before important presentations our natural setting is to worry about what people will think of us.
So try this – when you feel the nerves kick in, ask yourself “why am I feeling like this? Am I freaking out about embarrassing myself (again)? Am I worried they will think I’m not up to the job? That I don’t deserve to be here? If the answer is yes, remind yourself that a more healthy and helpful focus is on your message and whether it actually does its job. Get this right first, and the rest will follow.
- Plan your talk around your audience, not yourself
When you think about presenting as a two-way conversation, rather than a one-way performance, you change your focus from being egocentric (what do I want to talk about?) to audience-centric (how can I talk to this audience about this topic?). This is a great way to ensure your presentation is relevant. Try starting your presentation preparation with questions, such as:
- Who am I talking to?
- Why are they there?
- What do they already know?
- What is the most important thing I need to say?
- Why should they care?
- What will be on their minds?
Having an audience-centric approach to planning helps you find examples, stories and case studies that audiences care about. A story that gets your audience nodding will be 100 times more powerful than 20 slides of facts and figures.
- Respect your audience’s time
Steve Jobs would spend months preparing for every product presentation he gave. You don’t need months. But you do need to respect your audience’s time. If people have given up an hour of their working day – you owe it to them to make that hour count. Spend time crafting your message and practising how best to say it. Casting your eye over slides someone else has designed, the night before the presentation is not doing yourself (or them) any favours. Surprisingly procrastination and avoidance don’t help you feel more comfortable. Practice does. Talking through your ideas, out loud will help you sound and feel more natural. Check out our ditch the script post for more on this.
Make this the year you invest in your presentation skills, and advance your career.
Stop presenting. Start talking. www.persuade.co.nz