Saturday, August 1, 2020

Making a Good Presentation

Many people are troubled when they have to give a presentation in front of a large audience. It's important to know that it's normal to experience stage fright.

Some presentations feel like magic and grab our attention. While enormous credit goes to the skill of the presenters, there are a few things we can all do to make our presentations great.
Prepare for Your Presentation
Start by considering the information you will be providing and the makeup of your audience. Whatever your topic is, some things should be emphasized, like highly technical or vital information. Often, less relevant information might distract or disengage your audience. Take the opportunity to explore resources that you may want to include in your presentation, such as charts and images. The right content makes all the difference to your audience, especially when you pass on an idea that they may not have considered before.

Storytelling
Storytelling helps your audience to remember all of the vital points that you want to get across. Try to tell stories that most of them can connect with. By framing the information into the context of a story, your audience is more likely to retain it over time.

Be Truthful
Don't give your audience a reason to doubt you because you won’t be taken seriously. You could damage the whole presentation with just one wrong statement, and you will have lost your credibility with the audience. If the audience thinks that you are presenting false information during your presentation, they’ll simply take out their smartphones to quickly check what you tell them.

Interact with Your Audience
It’s not simple to keep everyone interested, especially if you give a long presentation. One of the best ways for you to increase the impact of your presentation and improve the audience's attention is through questions. Asking and answering questions helps to break up the presentation and improves audience concentration.

Questions help your audience become part of the presentation. Encourage brief discussions between you and the audience as you make your way through important points. This maintains audience attention during the more complex points, clarifies new or confusing information, and helps conclude your presentation by allowing you to revisit the covered topics.

Visualization Attracts Attention
If you decide to make a PowerPoint presentation, use a crisp common slide layout. Keep text brief and direct. Use the text to introduce each point, then you will talk to each point. Don't make your audience have to read each slide to pass on information. You do not want your PowerPoint slide deck to be your presentation. You want to use it to emphasize the information you are presenting.

Include images and videos, where able, to help emphasize various ideas in a clearer manner.

When You're on the Stage
Know your presentation, topic, and supporting material. Do not to use any notes so that you can make as much eye contact as possible. This way you will engage the audience make them feel important. Unless you are giving a very technical presentation, do not use too many big/fancy words because the audience may consider you arrogant. 

Have a Back-up Plan
Sometimes, not everything will go according to the plan. If you experience a technical problem, you need to find a different way to keep your audience interested and informed. Consider yourself a showman while you’re on the stage. You may have to improvise. Keep hard-copies of your slides to work from.

It may take some time to plan it, but practice makes perfect. All you need to do later is sit back and wait for results.

David Schuchman

4 comments:

  1. David - this is great - thanks for passing along these presentation technique tips - I know you use them effectively.

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  2. David, these are excellent tips for someone who needs to make presentations. Furthermore, there are some common threads here for people in transition when they need to communicate with others - not necessarily in large group format.
    I have seen you in action and you are a very credible presenter. Keep up the good work.

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