Speaking Strategies: 5 Tips to Power Up Your Presentation

Quite often when you are listening to a speaker, teacher or seminar leader, you are thinking to yourself that this person is either a really good presenter or a boring one. For some reasons you are not totally sure of, you have put that person in your mind in one of these two classifications.

Of course, if you are ever to be asked to do a presentation in front of people either at work or at a social event like a wedding, you definitely want to do your best so that you are not in turn, labeled as a boring presenter. As a trained speaker, I can let you in on a few secrets and tricks that will help you make it over to the good presenters group if this is one of your goals for the New Year.

Too often poor presenters are looking straight ahead, straight down to the floor, at their notes, or at the screen if using PowerPoint slides for most of their presentations. This loss of eye contact makes it very hard for audiences to have any real connection with a speaker. As a presenter, you should make an effort to have eye contact with all members of the audience. This includes those sitting on the extreme left and right ends, as well as those in the back of the room. Make brief eye contact with different parts of your audience by turning your head towards their direction throughout your talk.

Boring speakers talk with a monotone drone in public. This puts audiences to sleep quickly, especially in darkened rooms. Instead, try to speak with a variety of tones in your voice and with different rhythms in the phrasing of your words. Make important words stand out and have pauses after key points to let audiences reflect on them for brief moments. Rushing through your talks without pauses will lose your audience.

Communication in front of people is not just about using your voice. Use appropriate hand gestures to further enhance certain phrases in your presentation. A combination of vocal and visual elements makes for a more effective talk. For example, if making a reference to something that is rising or going up, use your finger and point up towards the ceiling as you verbalize your point. As a general rule of thumb, the larger your audience, the bigger your gestures should be since small gestures may not be visible to people sitting in the back of large audiences.

Words like “um” or “ah” during a presentation or even in normal conversation, are known in the speaker world as crutch words. They are also sometimes known as “filler words” since they have no meaning and people tend to use them to fill in dead space in between phrases. Try to reduce your use of such words by speaking a bit slower. Although the odd filler word is not a major issue, excessive use of them during presentations can be quite irritating to the ears of the audience.

If you are speaking from a stage or front of a room where there is enough space and you are not stuck behind a podium microphone, make good use of the available room. Audiences react better to speakers who move around the stage rather than those who just stand in one spot during entire talks. However, pacing back and forth endlessly is not effective either. Instead, move with purpose towards a certain part of the audience to connect more with them during certain parts of your talk. You can also use movement to enhance parts of your presentation.

These skills are the physical techniques that will help you become a better presenter in front of any audience. It is highly recommended that you rehearse any presentations that you have to make in public well in advance. Also, rehearse your talks with these physical techniques as if you have an imaginary audience in front of you rather than just reciting them verbally at your desk.

The physical techniques mentioned here along with good writing forms the secrets of great presenters.

(Photo credit: Microphone on Stage via Shutterstock)

Clint Cora is a motivational speaker, author & Karate World Champion based near Toronto, Canada. Get his FREE 3-part Personal Development Video Series on how to expand your comfort zone and finally conquer even your most daunting goals in life.

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Making Your Presentation Worth the Cost

Let’s face it, no matter what your business is, or who you work for, the chances are that you’ve been on the receiving end of bad presentations. My working definition of a bad presentation here is one that costs more than it saves or makes for the organization involved. If it’s a business presentation, that’s obviously the company employing whoever the presentation involves – there’s always (almost always) someone who’s responsible.

Of course, it’s hard to work out how much a presentation will save or make for the organization in the long run: on the other hand, the costs are pretty easy to calculate. Firstly take the hourly rate of pay for everyone in the room and double it – because that’s what it costs the company. Now add the double-day-rate costs for each hour the presenter spent getting things ready. Finally, add the obvious costs for room rent, refreshments and any travel costs for everyone. It won’t be long before such presentations begin to cost thousands of dollars an hour. And that’s before you add in the costs of lowered productivity and damaged moralle.

And yet a cost-effective presentation isn’t difficult. You don’t have to be great – just good enough to justify your costs!

All a presenter has to do in a presentation is think of two things.

What do I need to tell my audience?How do I need to tell them it?

Whatever else you do, or don’t do in your presentation should be measured up against those two simple criteria. The Devil is in the details, of course, and sometimes it’s hard to know how to answer those two questions – to be honest, most presenters don’t even bother to ask them so if you do, you’ve a good chance of being a cost-effective presenter.

The more a presenter tells his or her audience, the less chance there is of them remembering any given thing they’re told. With that in mind, it’s not hard to get the idea that you should filter out everything – and I mean everything – that isn’t your absolute core message.

For every slide, for every paragraph, every image, ask yourself, one slide at a time, “Does this give my audience something they need to know?” If it does, fine. If it doesn’t, ditch it. Once you’ve done that filtering, give yourself a break that’s long enough to mean you come back to the material with a fresh mind-set – and do another filter.

Two hours doing something else is minimum. Two filters is usually enough because of the next point.

Only experts make presentations. By definition if you’re giving the presentation you know more about your presentation than anyone else. That almost always means you know more about the material, too, so don’t be put off by thinking other people know more than you do. That’s great. What it can mean, if you’re not careful, however, is that you begin to take things for granted that your audience needs to know.

They won’t know your jargon, they won’t know your workings and they won’t know any of your assumptions, that is unless you tell them.

Once you’ve done your filtering do your checking for assumptions. Just like you went through every slide and every paragraph and every image, go through them again and ask yourself what each is built on. If it’s not built on the previous paragraph or slide then at the very least it’s in the wrong place.

More likely, however, is the problem that you’ve taken something for granted, something that your audience probably won’t know about. You need to put that – whatever it is – into your presentation.

Not much, to be honest – there’s a whole load of tips and tricks for moving your presentations from ‘good enough’ to ‘good’ but from the point of view of your boss, ‘good enough’ is exactly that. And you can bet your bottom dollar that your boss measures ‘good enough’ as not costing more than it’s worth.

Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!

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