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Preparing For Public Speaking Perfection

It does not take a genius to be aware that, when it comes to the delivery of perfect presentations, the amount of time you spend preparing and practicing has a dramatic impact on your end results.  You should never be tempted to substitute substance for style.  Yet, whilst content is king, delivery that is either too laboured or too fluffy results in the most brilliant of messages being lost on audiences.

So, start with a study of content first.  Research your subject matter on the internet.  Read books and industry publications.  Take note if your subject matter is currently in the news, and consider if your presentations can be given directly relevant topical slants.  It is also good to talk, so speak with people who are authorities on your subject matter, and also people who are not.  Different angles give you a rounded overview that influences your own unique standpoint.

With key content under your belt, you have not yet won the war, but can momentarily rest on the laurels of having a major battle in the bag.  Your best organisational game face now needs to emerge in order for you to pre plan a script that flows logically and naturally.  Many experienced speakers build their presentations upon initial frameworks of 15% introduction, 70% main body and 15% summary, although there are no specifically dictated hard and fast rules.

Undertake practice runs of your presentations, to yourself, a colleague, a friend or your cat.  Tape record or video yourself when practicing your presentations.  Be open to taking constructive criticism on board and act as your own toughest critic, identifying and addressing your own strong and weak points when listening to and watching yourself back.

When your big day dawns, stay calm at all costs.  It is, admittedly, easier said than done.  Yet you can go some way to remaining grounded before the delivery of your presentations with plenty of deep breaths and a steady intake of water.  Dress comfortably but formally.  Smart suits are preferable for both male and female presenters, always accompanied by ties for men and minimal accessories and jewellery for women.

When taking to your stage, engage, engage, engage!  Adopt a natural and open manner, let your energy and enthusiasm shine through infectiously and never forget to smile.  Involving audiences at the receiving ends of your presentations from the get go is essential to creating satisfactory working partnerships between you and them.  You can build instant rapport by posing searching questions to capture their attention, a public speaking ploy regularly implemented by the pros. 

Do not speak in an uncharacteristic or unnatural way.  This will only give your presentations – and yourself – airs of insincerity.  Get in to a groove that is right for you, which should be neither too fast paced nor too slow moving.  By all means harness appropriate humour.  Self deprecation can be disarmingly endearing, so a laugh at your own expense is perfectly acceptable during presentations.  Yet do avoid laughing at the expense of audience members.

Stick with what you intrinsically understand and avoid what you do not.  Throwing in ‘big talk, for the sake of trying to sound clever is a no go area.  Those listening to your presentations may have genuine questions that you are foolishly unable to answer.  With job almost done, redress queries raised during your closing summary with care, patience and tact. 

Always bear in mind that the due diligence you invest in your preparation for public speaking holds they key to leaving favourable lasting impressions long after your final thank you has been delivered.   

Proficiently Preparing Eleventh Hour Presentations

You share the company of hundreds of thousands of other professionals around the planet if the thought of public speaking fills your mind with dread, and your stomach with butterflies.  Public speaking is often a daunting enough prospect in its own right.  What if you are coerced in to giving presentations at the very last minute? 

You know all about failing to prepare and preparing to fail.  You are correct in assuming that even the most competent and experienced presenters remain steadfastly true to the mantra of preparation.  In that respect, being expected to deliver presentations with only 24 hours notice, or even half an hours notice, spins sideways what you have been taught to trust.  Yet happen it can and happen it does.  Just like mastery of the art of public speaking in general, impromptu public speaking challenges are tackled head on with practice, plus a few common sense ground rules in your back pocket.

1)    Plan To The Power Of Three
You need to grasp your subject matter and logically organise it when preparing to deliver presentations happening upon you at the eleventh hour.  The notion of a beginning, a middle and an ending is nothing new you to you.  It is a primary basic that you were taught to apply to story writing during your school days.  The same applies to impromptu presentations.  Your clarity of thought is enhanced and your panic reduced by arranging what you need to say in to an orderly opening, a main body, and a closure.

2)    Start Well To Continue Well
Your opening gambit should pack a powerful punch.  Bear in mind that last minute presentations are not usually random, but are required to address specific issues somewhat urgently.  Direct questions usually make attention grabbing headlines.  Try getting off on a good footing by stating the task at hand -  for example, this is what we are working on, this is where we are currently at, and this is where we intend to be, so how do we go about getting there as efficiently and quickly as possible?  Bingo!  Isn’t that the very essence of what your audience is there to find out?

3)    Remain Committed
Regardless of the duration of your short notice presentations, hark back to the power of three in the main body by breaking it down according to your introductory statements.  Reiterate the current position.  Expose and clarify potential concerns and impediments.  Confirm the plan of action moving forward, addressing the points you have already raised.  This provides your audience with a situation, issues and solutions.

4)    Wrap It Up Potently
The closing statements of any presentations need to be as potent as the openers.  In fact, they become one and the same thing when you bring your closing section right back to start and reiterate your opening gambit.  This is your check back to ensure that all concerns have been addressed and that your audience understands the journey you have just taken them on.  Furthermore, closing questions, and calls to action, give both presenter and audience ample opportunity share their views, clarifying that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and are ready to move cohesively forward.   

Progressing Presentations From Good To Better To Best

Your first tentative steps in to the art of public speaking are often taken from school age as a youngster.  You may be required to fine hone these initial skills throughout the rest of your educational and professional life.  Like with the evolution of most skills, practice makes perfect, as you go through many stages of the learning curve, from novice to expert.

Classroom presentations about books on the curriculum are very different to presentations you might be required to give when pitching yourself at a job interview to a panel of employees.  Likewise, interview presentations differ substantially from public speaking as an authority on your subject matter to audiences.  Yet your lifetime’s worth of presentations, as a student, an executive or an academic, is given the edge by the application of a few basic principles. 

Regardless of your age, your level of public speaking experience and your audiences, these tips form bases from which you can continuously improve from good to better to best:-

1)    Prepare To Succeed
Knowledge always equates to power, yet words are often hollow.  Audience members do not want to be bored by presenters reading out what can already be scanned on an overstuffed screen.  Minimising your materials, and maximising your knowledge of the subject at hand, are imperative to the proficient preparation quality presentations, thus enabling you to deliver them with authority and aplomb.

2)    Critique Practice Run Throughs
Video yourself doing dry run presentations, and critique yourself firmly but fairly.  Ask a trusted confidante to sit in on your rehearsals and be prepared to take their feedback on the chin.

3)    Look Them In The Eyes
Aim to gain rapport with your audience by looking directly at them - not at your laptop, your notes, or your feet.  However, avoid the unintentional temptation to make a particular audience member your focal point when public speaking.  It makes an innocent participant feel self conscious and uncomfortable.

4)    Speak With Then, Not Just At Them
Encourage audiences to interact with you during your presentations.  Allowing them to interject with doubts, questions and relevant comments is testament to the fact that they are engaged with you.  Your competent feedback further enhances their confidence in you and what you have to say.

5)    Clock The Atmosphere
Let your emotional intelligence guide you.  At certain points during your presentations, the mood of your audiences might get confrontational and heated, or down tempo and low on energy.  Drop in anecdotes or jokes at such junctures, to lighten any tension or regain waning engagement.

6)    Avoid Useless Fillers
Whether you have a tendency to “um” and “ah”, or use particular turns of phrase over frequently when you speak, weaning yourself off them will improve your public speaking.  They are often more irritating to audiences than you realise.

7)    Answer Questions Accurately
When preparing your presentations, put yourself in your audience’s shoes and anticipate the questions they might fire at you.  This is a great way of forearming and forewarning yourself.  Besides taking audience questions throughout the duration of your presentations, make sure you leave plenty of time at the end for closing questions.  The answers you provide should confirm and amplify the messages you deliver throughout the session.    

Learning To Overcome Public Speaking Palpitations

You might know or work with certain individuals who approach the delivery of presentations with unbelievable gusto – we all do.  Never fear that you are some sort lost cause if you, on the contrary, are totally daunted and flawed at the prospect.  In fact, they are in the minority and you are in the majority, as public speaking ranks highly as a universal worst case scenario, striking untold terror in to millions of people worldwide.

However, like or not – and let’s be honest, in most cases we are definitely talking about like it not – you are more than likely to be called upon to give a number of presentations throughout your personal and professional life.  Confident and proficient public speaking is realistically within your grasp when you learn to believe in yourself and aim to master your craft.  Just like any other skill, it comes naturally to a gifted few, yet requires fine honing for most mere mortals.

You can and you will beat the palpitations caused by looming presentations.  Those ‘in the know’ have done so by learning about what are known as the five Ps of public speaking and by incorporating the wisdom of these simple lessons in to their codes of conduct and plans of action.

1)    Passion
It is imperatively important that you are passionate about the subject matter of your presentations.  If you are not fired up about it, why on earth would anyone else be?  Think about the know-like-trust theory.  The more you know about the topic at hand, the more you will hopefully like it.  Consequently, the more you know and like it, the more you will not only trust it, but you will also trust yourself to share your views about it, cojently and enthusiastically, with your audiences.

2)    Persistence
“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again”.  Have a little mettle and do not get too down in the mouth if your first few presentations fall slightly short of the triumphs you had envisaged.  Keep your chin up and aim to deliver your presentations repeatedly if you can, noting the vast improvements you make each time.

3)    Positivity
Just before the delivery of your presentations, focus in on your ‘can do’ rather than your ‘can’t do’ mindset. Tell yourself that you can and you will knock your audience’s socks off with your dynamic presentations and deft delivery skills.  Glasses half full are infinitely more appealing than glasses half empty, so inspire yourself to go for it and spread some joy.

4)    Practice
Going overboard with the practicing of your presentations simply does not exist, as practice makes perfect.  Go through your presentations out loud to yourself, and also in front of trusted colleagues, family members or friends who will offer you firm yet fair feedback.  Then go back to the drawing board to redress any issues with your flow and wording.  If at all possible, it is also a great nerve soother to have a practice in the actual rooms in which your presentations will be delivered.  The environments will feel less hostile and more familiar to you.

5)    Preparation
Comprehensive preparation offsets a multitude of sins.  Once your subject matter has been agreed upon, your first port of call should be your own experience, backed up by copious research.  The coupling of what you know and what you have learnt will make preparing for your presentations much easier, free flowing and logical.  Your preparation also extends to a pre-understanding of your audiences.  Knowing about their age groups and levels of proficiency in the topics under the microscope gives you the competitive edge to pitch your content and style just so.

All Presentations Should Tell Good Stories

When you think about it, the end goal of most presentations is to convince, whether that means convincing your audience to agree with your point of view, or convincing them to take the action you want them to take.  Professional presenters with vast amounts of public speaking experience are usually great story tellers.  In order for your presentations to come across convincingly to your audiences, they require the focus, logic and sequence of any engaging story.

You might or might not be aware of falling victim to some or all of the common mistakes that initially trip up novice presenters.  Most of these learners’ mistakes relate directly back to the ethos of story telling in presentations – or lack of it.  When preparing for forthcoming presentations, or looking back retrospectively at old ones, you might give yourself a confidence boost by answering a few hypothetical questions honestly.

Are you prepared to offer appropriate answers to the broad range of questions that might be posed by your audience?
If not, might your inability to appropriately answer audience questions be due to a lack of flow in your presentation?
Are your slides truly sequentially ordered?
Are you sometimes guilty of randomly leaping from one aspect of your subject matter to another without any logical connection between the two?
Do you put yourself in danger of leaving gaping holes in your presentations by trying to sound too clever, for example, by presenting answers and conclusions that lack supporting evidence?
Do you try too hard to amplify your knowledge of your subject matter by including information that is indirectly related but not directly relevant to your presentations?

Searching questions indeed and you might be wondering how they relate to the harnessing of your story telling skills to enhance your public speaking effectiveness.  They do, as they are all about focus, logic and sequence:-

Focus – keep to the point.  Identify information that seem interesting and smart, but realistically bears little relevance to the core messages you aim to send.  Once you have identified these curveballs, eradicate them, even if you desperately want to include them because you think they sound good.

Logic – tempting as it is to provide answers and conclusions first, followed by rhyme and reason afterwards, it is illogical.  Notice how the stories contained in your presentations flow so much more smoothly when you simply reverse the order of certain slides.  Questions first, arguments and evidence in the middle, answers and solutions last but not least.

Sequence – stories lacking in sequential orderliness are confusing, often to the degree that they might initially capture attention, but ultimately fail to retain it.  It is impossible for you to over check that your presentations are sequentially correct.  When going to the time and trouble that preparation for successful presentations demands, it is a crying shame if your subject matter is right, but the sequence in which you present it is erratic and disjointed.

Your ability to recognise the mistakes you are prone to making, coupled with your willingness to improve your public speaking performances, equates to half your battle being won.  So sit tight with a copy of your presentation in front of you and see how you can make instantaneously dramatic differences.     

Waving A Permanent Farewell To Public Speaking Worries

Even the most competent and experienced of professional presenters admit that their nerves, at times, emerge to the forefront and threaten to get the better of them.  So, if presentations are new to you, or something that you are just tentatively starting to get used to, your public speaking fears are far from irrational.  Yet they are something that you need to learn to control.  Otherwise, you might find that your pre-presentation jitters gather insidious momentum and manifest themselves in unnecessary stress levels that can ultimately impede your performances.

Agreed that words can come easily and that the conquering of public speaking fears can be easier said then done.  Yet you can wave your worries permanent farewells by talking yourself in to a more positive mindset and adopting optimistic behavioral patterns.

1)    Convince Yourself That Presentations Are Nothing Stressful
Give yourself a talking to from the head rather than the heart.  It is estimated that an average human being speaks anywhere between 7,000 to 20,000 words per day, so talking is no more a new phenomenon to you that breathing and eating.  Putting it in to logical perspective, there is no reason why presentations should pose more problems that the conducting of everyday conversations.  The major differences, of course, are that presentations are organised, not spontaneous and delivered to audiences rather a few familiar faces.  The shifting of your mindset from stressed to unstressed cannot be expected to happen overnight.  You can, however, expect to ease yourself from one extreme to the other by concentrating on your messages, rather than getting fraught about how you are going to send them.  This will help to make your style increasingly more conversational and relaxed.

2)    Forget About Public Speaking Perfection
Try not to bog yourself down with preconceptions about what makes presentations perfect.  Is there actually such a thing as perfection, or is it simply in the eyes of the beholders?  You are understandably anxious about not wanting to make a fool of yourself in front on an audience.  Offer yourself consolation in the thought that their main focus is on what you have to say.  They are not there to judge and rate your public speaking aplomb.

3)    Focus On Your Purpose
Amidst the hand wringing and brow wiping that you might endure before delivering presentations, endeavour with all your might not to lose sight of your purpose.  Your ability to build and maintain audience rapport is undeniably important.  Yet your inability to banish the nerves that blight your public speaking engagements can result in the shifting of the onus from clear and concise subject matter to over thinking your delivery techniques.

4)    Believe You Are Good – And Become Good
During your novice experiences of giving presentations, you will pick up many ‘what to do’s’ and ‘what not to do’s’ as part of the natural learning curve.  If you have put all of your background work in before you deliver your presentations publicly, there is little reason for you to be unconfident.  Methodical organisation of your subject matter, and due diligence to practicing, goes hand in hand with the refining of your end delivery.  Your back of office labour is half of your battle won.  When front of stage, you will already be well on your way to winning the war and reaping the applause and rewards.