Presenter and Presentation — common patterns and ideas for improvement

This post is for you — who has been presenting for sometime now, you do presentations because you have to do as part of your work. There is really no other reason than that. While this post gives you a few ideas, I would like you to think at the end about this… your interaction with the outside world is only as effective as you perceive its importance and efficacy. Very few people can read minds and they only way for you to share your thoughts and ideas is to express it — in an interesting and effective manner. Perhaps this post will help those few..

The Unseasoned Presenter

Common Patterns

Use of fillers like ‘ahh’, ‘mmm’, ‘so’, ‘like’ , ‘kind of’ in every statement or whenever he is thinking on the spot during the presentation — it could be mannerism or de-facto way of speaking.

But during a presentation it doesn’t sound good. I say this from being in many presentations.

Audience could interpret this as not being fully prepared and even if you have great content and story in your presentation, the end-result is sub-optimal.

Ideas for improvement

• Write your speaker notes in a conversational format — as if you would speak a dialogue in a movie. There is a lot of difference in how we write in general to conversational format. When we write, it is usually not in a conversational format.
• Take extra effort here: Assume you had a teleprompter, or placards that help you with the dialogues — write the notes in that format. Once you write the first draft, speak and see how it sounds. Iterate until you are comfortable just reading it out of the paper and it sounds like a human speaking and not a text-to-speech convertor. Once you have it ready, do a dry run with a colleague or someone. You will get good feedback.
• Another exercise to do here that has been prescribed for ages now is to practice in front of a mirror — it definitely helps. You will see whether you are looking and sounding confident or otherwise. Don’t shy away. Will the ‘real’ you in the mirror like the way you speak? This is a powerful exercise to try and include.
• Now, for a few presentations, if you consciously spend time on this effort, you will see your confidence will grow and you will get better with ‘just the right amount of presentation’.
• Your confidence will grow, and fillers will be at their minimum, and your spoken vocabulary will expand.

Think about it this way — if there was no presentation(content), nothing for the audience to look at, but only hear you(visualise a dark room) speak. How will you keep them glued-in ? It's all in your words — that is the ideal picture for you to have in mind.

This leads to the next segment…

The Optimal or Sub-Optimal Presentation(Visual Content)

Irrespective of who you are, what you present should not be verbatim of what you put on your slide. In short, you should not (have to) read from the slide.

Slides or content needs to only be cues or pointers but rest should be communicated by the presenter in his/her own voice.

Which comes to my main pet peeve: What goes on into slide(s)?

Type 1 — Pictures, Graphics, Visuals — giving the presenter to build a story around it for the audience

Type 2 — Data, Tables, detailed text, notes wrapped in bullets and text boxes

What is the right type? What if you are from product development/engineering or what if you are from Sales/BD/Marketing or other management functions?

There is no ‘one’ right type, and from my experience its usually a mix and the intent should be to lean towards Type 1 but with an optimal infusion of Type 2.

• Bullet points shouldn’t wrap around. If you need to put text to explain something — keep it to 5–6 words, explain the rest. What you don’t want is audience reading from your slide rather than listening to you.
• Break the monotony of bullet points and text if possible with Flow Diagrams(there is enough smart art there in the presentation applications that will help convert your points into a visual representation)
• Avoid using too many colours. If your organisation or group has a template and colour palette, stick to it if possible
• Data speaks but make it interesting from not dumping tables from an excel but look at using charts that convey the data more visually.
• Picture speaks a thousand words — if you can use royalty-free pictures(that is allowed for internal use) or purchased pictures, use them effectively.

It’s all about visual cues supported by your storytelling — that is what will remain in your audience’s mind when they leave the meeting/show.

I don’t claim this is all there is to improve, but it is better to focus on a few things than rummage the entire internet for ideas but lose focus on the main problem — continuous improvement. If you have already conquered the above, then there are lot of other ideas out there to learn and improve.

What else has worked for you? What else would you like to know? Share in comments…

Note:

If this applies to you — Good! Incorporate/adopt as much as possible!

If this doesn’t apply to you — Good! You are awesome!

If you did not learn anything new — Good! There will be other things you might learn, keep coming back!