How to Avoid This Speaker Nightmare
Look at your audience when you start your next presentation. Most people should be engaged. But watch their eyes after you deliver your first sentence. Are they still engaged or starting to lose interest?
Even the “okay” presentations — the ones that are well put-together but don’t particularly stand out — end up being really bad. That’s usually it’s for one reason: They’re boring.
Boring presentations are reputation killers. They can turn a room full of attentive professionals into a room full of sleepy zombies, checking their phones and counting the slides.
How to Avoid This Speaker Nightmare: Tips
1. Start off with something provocative. Don’t start off a presentation with something general and clunky, like a conventional introduction to your topic. If you have a bold conclusion planned, why not start with a tease? For example, if your presentation builds to a conclusion that your company can change the way people talk to each other, start by introducing a vision of that change. People will be eager to know how you got there. You can also use surprising statistics or eye-opening facts in the same way.
2. Tell a story. Stories hook people. We find it far easier to listen and relate to a story than a list of facts or statements. Transform anything you can in your presentation into a story format. Use real-life and invented examples to prove your points. The more narratives you can weave into your presentation, the more people will want to pay attention.
3. Use emotional inflections in your voice. If you aren’t emotionally invested in whatever it is you’re presenting, you probably shouldn’t be the one presenting it. Show that emotion to the people listening to you. Get angry if the statistics call for it. Get excited about the solutions you propose. Get animated, and use emotional vocal inflections to put some real texture behind your words.
Contact me to fine tune both the content of your presentation and your delivery: bob@kaplitz.tv.
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