The value of great presentation!
You have only minutes to influence the board, win the contract, beat the competition, motivate your staff, convince the boss – can you do it?
You can – if you invest, time, money and effort in Presentation Skills training. For the past 24 years my company, Effective Communications, has specialised in this training. We have helped thousands of people to become effective speakers. It is a skill that can be rapidly learnt.
So what does it take to put together an effective presentation? There are several key areas that must be considered.
The first area is the body. Your body is an instrument for holding the audience’s attention. So use it. Most of us use our bodies very badly – terrified in the knowledge that we are centre stage and all eyes are riveted on us. They are – so you might as well accept it and use your body as the instrument that it is: a wonderful tool for building rapport with the audience. So how do we use our bodies more effectively?
Have courage and come out from behind the barricades. Don’t stand behind a table or a podium. Don’t sit down. I know that you probably feel more comfortable doing this. But you are far more interesting to the audience when they can see all of you rather than just your chest upwards.
Don’t clasp you hands behind your back. This is a typical masculine posture – the ’Macho Man’. Very often this is accompanied by rocking on the feet – rather like Policeman Plod! This posture tends to look very unnatural and even pompous.
Don’t hold hands with yourself. This is a typical feminine stance. Either you look as though you are going to sing an aria from grand opera or you adopt the ’fig-leaf’ position. Women also have a tendency to lower the head, look coy and to splay out one leg. There is nothing strong or assertive about these postures.
Both men and women tend to stand on one hip then the other. It looks totally off balance and becomes repetitive – so much so that members of the audience become totally preoccupied with your swaying hips and don’t listen to what you are saying.
Another typical posture is to fold the arms. It might feel comfortable, but probably consciously or unconsciously you are putting up a barrier between you and your audience. Your audience need to feel that you want to be there so use large open gestures. They build warmth and rapport. (Think about how you sit in meetings? interviewing? negotiating?)
Another classic mistake is to put hands in pockets. Again speakers have taken the easy way out and it’s boring for the audience. You have undoubtedly noticed how many speakers then proceed to spend the whole of their presentations jangling their money or playing with their car keys and the audience is probably wondering exactly what the speaker is doing with their hands?
Now I know why speakers fall into these bad habits. It’s because we are agonised by these things at the end of our arms – we don’t know what to do with them! I encourage people in my courses to be as natural as they possibly can when they stand in front of an audience. Use yourself! People are usually very animated in normal conversation but stand them up infront of a group and they immediately look like pencils – nothing moves!
So use your body as the instrument that it is. Stand centred. Feel tall, strong, powerful, professional. Imagine that you have a golden thread from the top of your head and it’s pulling you up to the ceiling. Move purposefully – otherwise you’ll get rooted to the spot with fear and tension. It’s incredibly boring for your audience watching you get stuck in quick-set cement. Use your arms and hands to make effective, meangingful gestures. Gestures make you so much more interesting to look at.
Show enthusiasm with your whole body. If you are not enthusiastic about your topic just think how the audience is feeling. Do smile.If you smile at the audience they will smile back at you.Smiling is wonderful for building warmth and rapport and you will appear as a normal human being not cold, aloof and not wanting to be there. The British are very good at the stiff upper lip mentality.We think it is bad form to let any concern, anger, commitment, passion come through. It can make us very boring speakers.
The second area that need to be considered in making ourselves more effective speakers is the voice. Just as the body is an incredible instrument for getting our message across, so is the voice. Do you use yours? Most people I work with never consider their voices – never think of using them to maximum effect. How many times have you been bored rigid by a speaker’s monotonous dirge?
Use your voice: Vary the pitch and pace to hold the audience’s attention. Be dramatic. Don’t worry about your accent. Make sure that you slow down and enunciate clearly. Don’t speak too quickly and show everybody how nervous you are. Don’t use fillers: er, um, I mean, you know. Use pauses. Pauses are wonderful. They give you audience time to assimilate your words. They give you time to think about what is coming next. They also give you the opportunity to control yourself, to slow yourself down, to breathe deeply and to control nerves. Improve your voice by practising breathing deeply; read aloud to your children every day and really ’act out’ the characaters; practice speaking from the diaphragm not the throat.
Remember your body and voice together are dynamite! People will never fall asleep on you if you use these instruments effectively.
Another very important instrument to use in your presentations: your eyes. In our society eye-contact is essential. If we don’t look people in the whites of their eyes people can say disparaging things about us: shifty, dishonest, untrustworthy, timid, shy, sly, cold, aloof, calculating. In our society people expect good eye contact. Use your eyes to let your audience know that you are looking at them and you expect a response. So don’t look over the audience’s head, don’t look at the ceiling for inspiration, don’t study patterns in the carpet, don’t gaze out of the nearest window, don’t frantically flit from one face to another, don’t pick out one pleasant looking person on the front row and look at them only. You will only embarrass them and the rest of the audeince will feel left out and switch off.
Use your eyes as intruments to build warmth and rapport with your audience. Make a conscious effort to look at everyone in a small group. For larger groups give the impression that you are looking at them all. You won’t be able to but if you use your eye effectvely they will think that you are. Divide the group into 4 quarters and look at each quarter in turn. Hold people’s eyes momentarily.
Remember to sparkle. Eyes must be alive with the message. If your eyes are not sparkling with the enthusiasm of your message, nobody in the audience will light up. I constantly point out to delegates on the first day of a course that their eyes are glazed over with fear and tension – they can’t see anybody or anything. By the second day, once they have had the opportunity to practice the right techniques, eye contact rapidly improves.
Turning now to the mechanics of putting the presentation together. I still find it amazing the number of people who arrive on my courses clutching scripts for even the simplest of presentations. I believe that scripts are an audience turn-off. They cause so many problems. Quite frankly I don’t want to be read to from pieces of paper and they don’t give me faith in the presenter’s knowledge of their subject if they have to read every word to me.
One of their major problems is that scripts form a barrier between you and your audience. They don’t build rapport. Presenters have to put their scripts on a desk or podium. There is little effective eye-contact because of the fear of losing one’s place. I would suggest that when presenters read they are usually not thinking of the content – they are just reading. The audience watches the presenter turn over page after page and starts to count the pages rather than listen to the content.
I believe the only possible need to use a script is when you are speaking to hundreds at the company’s annual convention and your words are acting as cues to an amazing light and sound show going on simultaneously! As most of us will never be in this situation I recommend to all the people I work with only to use cue cards. I know that once delegates have had the opportunity to practice using cards that they will never use a script again. Cue cards have so many advantages.
First of all you have to use them effectively. I recommend that you only put key words on your cards – the words that are going to act as your memory joggers – to remind you of the words you had planned to say. Don’t write out the whole of your script on cue cards otherwise you will be back to square one – reading from a script. By using key words only you will have to think about what you had planned to say and then talk to your audience about it.
I believe this makes you sound like a normal human being – because we only have normal everyday conversational words in our head. You know what happens to us when we read from a script. We use a very verbose, complex written form of English. So that we tend to sound like technical robots rather than ourselves. As well as being forced to think and therefore talk in a natural style, cue cards also allow more effective eye-contact because the presenter thinks of what they want to say and then talks to the audience about it.
Cue cards allow us to use our bodies to advantage rather than clutching at pieces of paper. They fit neatly into one hand. They even give you something to do with your hands. Try not to cling on to them but use them in alternate hands. Do remember to number them and don’t write on the back – for obvious reasons!
The last major area that needs to be considered in order to make effective presentation is the structure/outline of the talk. There are 3 words that will keep you on track for any impromptu speech, any formal/informal talk, any letter, any report:
Introduction, Development and Conclusion. It is such a simple format and yet how many of us use it? I believe that if we use such a structure we will sound competent, confident and professional.
I always use 3 ingredients in my Introduction. The first one is an attention getter – a very carefully thought out opening sentence that is going to grab the audience’s attention. Apply the ’right first time’ concept. You cannot start again. It has to be good. Perhaps you could start with a question, an important statement of fact, a statistic, a quotation.
The second of my key ingredients for a successful introduction is that you must apply the talk to your audience’s needs – what’s in it for them. They won’t listen otherwise. The third ingredient is make sure you give the title of the talk. The audience will feel much more confident in you if you tell them why you have gathered them all together.
The Development of the presentation spells out to the audience the areas you intend to develop and then they wait for you to develop them. It’s like showing them a menu. A simple and effective example of this would be: Past, Present, Future. Don’t ramble from one obtuse idea to another – the audience will not be able to follow you. They will dream instead.
An effective conclusion in my opinion needs several ingredients. The first thing to remember is to reget the audience’s attention – let them know you are finishing. One of the best ways to do this is to say: ’In conclusion . . . ’ You can see the audience prick their ears up and get ready for the end. Then reappeal to their needs – remind them how by listening to you has helped them.
Don’t forget to then restate the topic of the presentation. Some of them might have forgotten what you are talking about by this stage! Remind them also of the areas you have developed in your development section. Make sure that you finish with a really strong closing statement: your recommentation, your proposal, a close of sale. Don’t say ’That’s about it’ and fall off the end of the stage!
There are obviously other areas that have to be considered in order to make your presentation as effective as you possibly can. In order to do them justice they actually need further articles of this length so just a few brief comments for you to consider.
One of people’s first questions to me on my courses is: ’But what about the Visual Aids?’ I personally feel that people use visual aids very badly. We use them as a crutch to hide behind. The best piece of advice is to use them only when your words are not enough and then to make sure that they are visual and not verbal. You will realise that you have spent many hours looking at boring words on a boring screen.
Another area of concern for people is Dress. Again this is an article in itself.The most useful piece of advice that I give to my delegates is: ’Wear what your audience expect to see – you are the representative of your company.’ We also know that if we look good then we feel better and it gives us the professional edge.
One final comment about controlling nerves. If you do not control your body then it will control you! This means that you have to know the parts of your body that cause you problems when you make presentations and take steps to control them. As you sit in your chairs while you are waiting to make your presentation – work on your bodies.
This might mean for you tensing and relaxing your shaking legs, working on the tension in your throat, telling your hands to relax and calming your heart rate through breathing deeply. The next thing I recommend is to visualise yourself in your mind as giving the presentation and everything is going absolutely according to plan. You are being incredibly successful.
You must then also use self-assertion techniques: ’I can give this presentation very effectively and I will give this presentation very effectively.’ Get rid of all negatives. They will destroy you. Only think positives. Positive thinking will get you everywhere.
In conclusion we have looked at the essential ingredients that must be considered in order to make an effective presentation. We have discussed the body. It is an instrument and must be used as such in order to hold the audience’s attention.
So is the voice. It is an invaluable tool to keep the audience with us. Use eye-contact to build warmth and rapport. Use cue cards, not a script, so that you can sound like a normal human being – not a robot. Finally remember an effective structure to the presentation – hold the audience’s hands and pull them through.
So the next time you have only minutes to influence the board, win the contract, beat the competition, motive your staff, convince the boss put these ideas into place and remember what the Peacock knows – the value of a good presentation.
Further information:
Do you know what any peacock knows? The value of a great presentation!
Public speaking is people’s number one phobia. This two day course will show you how to overcome the fears and to present yourself and your company powerfully and rofessionally.
