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Mar 2

9 Ways To Enhance Your Presentation Skills – Business 2 Community

In a recent article from INC.com, Jeff Haden offers 16 Ways to Dramatically Improve Your Presentation Skills From 16 Powerful TED Talks. Theres some great ideas in here and I wanted to take the opportunity to elaborate on some of these points and offer my two cents on the ways in which you can significantly improve your presentation skills. I will however, limit this advice to that which is relevant to a business/boardroom context.

Ive previously discussed the use of Aristotles rhetoric techniques, and harnessing genuine emotion- also known as Pathos. Pathos is about creating an emotional connection between you and the audience. The obvious, recent example is the US election and The Donald. Donald Trump was able to create such a strong emotionally fuelled bond with the American people that he secured a win over what many considered to be the better, more prepared, logical choice.

Trump is just a recent example, but emotion be it a shared empathy, your own passion, public anger, community pride, shared objectives, or a common goal, is one of the most significant arrows in your quiver when youre wanting to create and maintain engagement with your audience. The human connection is critical as it separates being spoken to from having a conversation with.

In a business context, the takeaway is generally focused towards action. Your audience needs to come away from the meeting room/the boardroom/the conference room either:

One effective way to convey your thoughts and inspire action is to choose an example or an analogy/metaphor that is relevant to most of the people in the audience. This makes that idea easily relatable, which gives the participants a more concrete understanding of the points youre trying to put across. Its the difference between knowing that single example, and understanding how to apply the concept to their business.

The boiling frog anecdote is a common example. If youve not heard it before, it describes how a frog can unwittingly get boiled alive due to it jumping into cold water that then becomes slowly heated up. If it had jumped directly into boiling hot water, then it would have instantly realised and jumped out immediately.

In a business sense, this analogy illustrates the lack of perception towards small changes. For example, say you wanted to decrease public transport pollution. A small change could be fitting start/stop systems to all buses, while a boiling water option would be more dramatic like making all buses electric.

All too often, I witness presenters that insist questions be left to the end. Thats crazy! If people are getting involved and asking questions, theyre clearly engaged and interested in what youre saying and you should converse with them in the moment.

While many can find it distracting, its important to realise that the most valuable presentations feel like a chat between friends. Including questions when they arrive adds value to that participants views and will no doubt endear them to you for the remainder of that presentation and future ones.

Waiting until the end of a business presentation can be fatiguing to some participants, and any in-the-moment fire they had has likely quelled. So while its important to stay on track with your message, dont avoid the people trying to get the most out of it.

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Lets be real everyone gets nervous, and thats not always a bad thing. Use your nerves to motivate you to present. Those nerves show youre emotionally invested in what youre doing and that investment pays off as your audience witnesses your passion.

Theres a near endless amount of resources with ideas on managing your nerves, but theres some critical points to focus on that dont rely on imaginary x-ray glasses.

Displaying charts, and making basic statements like sales are down this quarter isnt going to empower your engagement skills. Before making broad or general statements, make sure youve prepared the answer to the inevitable so what? question.

See, the thing is that those statements dont have any weight or value without reasons and solutions. Instead of just sales are down this quarter, follow it with the reasons why and what youre suggesting in order to fix it. This adds value, because it demonstrates that youve thought beyond the obvious and are providing information your colleagues didnt have before your presentation. In this example, youre also setting a goal and working with them to achieve it.

Weve all been in a presentation where the first words that leave the speakers mouth are:

This is a top notch way to derail your message and lose your audience all in one fell swoop. Implying youre underprepared, or dont do this often is like telling everyone that youre not worth listening to.

Recent historical events have proven that confidence in a presentation Trumps value of content. Thats not to say prepare nothing and gabble on about anything, but it is to say that if you feel like youre underprepared or lacking in some speaking talents, then try to promote a confident image as this will help your audience engage with you from the start and allow you to find your feet.

If all your presentation consists of is reading your slide presentation, ask yourself what the point of giving that presentation is, and whats the point of YOU being there! Your audience could just read your slides and be just as well off without having to be in a meeting.

While it may be important to have detailed slides that you can reference (actually, why not consider handouts too), the audience is your primary focus. Your slideshow is your auxiliary tool to display the information youre presenting on, be that graphs, spreadsheets or artwork. Use it to show what you cant put into words easily.

That way, you can stay on track and your audience doesnt have to stare at the same slide forever while you make your way through the 15 dot points youve jotted down!

Ever heard the statistic that only 20% of the information you hear gets retained? While this statistic is debatable, its safe to assume that not everything you say goes in one ear and nests safely in the comfort of remembrance. So instead of assuming that everyone is absorbing your information in full, use the power of repetition to enforce the critical points youre trying to get across.

Tying everything back to your main point is a brilliant and effective way to repeat information in a non-irritating manner. In other words, youll have frequent opportunities to hammer your points home and let it sink into the audience without boring them to tears!

Theres nothing worse than expecting something to end only to have it drag on for a seemingly indefinite amount of time. If you have an hour to complete your presentation, prepare for that time limit and keep to it, remembering to allow some contingency during the presentation for questions, if applicable.

Its not an extra credit situation, more does not equal better. The most prepared professional presenters will have structured their talk to fit within the time allocated.

Belinda is the founder and managing director of secondnature. With a determination to drive a paradigm shift in the delivery of presentation skills training, she is a strong advocate of a more personal and sustainable presentation skills training methodology. She believes in a training approach that harnesses peoples unique personality Viewfullprofile

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