Nobody is happy coping with the idea of having to present in front of an audience, even more; the people most used to speak in public show clear signs of anxiety and stress in their body language, but they are doing it, and in most cases they are doing it very well. If there are mistakes in the way they are presenting they will be forgiven by the audience.
Presenting in public is an uncomfortable situation; it clearly takes us out of our comfort zone. and there are bad and good news: the bad news is that this is never going to change, we are never going to feel comfortable in such situations, and however there is some good news: we can improve our presentation skills and do a better job in passing our message by following three golden rules
Preparation
We tend to think that a good presentation has to have an elegant story being told by someone with an awesome voice and a very attractive and engaging body language, this is not always true. The best presentation is the one that achieves the goal of transmitting the message. Therefore defining the message is crucial and it has to be kept as top priority when designing the presentation, we have to remind that whoever communicates, changes; defining this change that we want to perform and structuring our presentation is key for success.
Rehearsal
We’ll never find our limits until we’ll actually try to reach them, once our presentation is ready, we defined that wonderful message and we know how to make it be understood by our audience, we must actually present it. The objective is to find what is not working well, where we find problems, check our voice tone and body language and correct what needs to be corrected.
Performing the rehearsal alone would be enough, but recording it or doing it in front of somebody else will be of a great help.
External aids
Now we know which message we want to pass, how to make it be understood and we have practiced until the limit, we feel we are ready, but there is still one step that needs to be done to make sure our presentation will be perfect and this is setting up some external aids, small things that will increase our level of self confidence.
We could have a couple of people around, find them before we get started with the actual presentation and establish eye contact with them.
We could prepare some notes that we’ll keep in our hands, this is highly recommendable for a couple of reasons; the preparation of the notes itself will help us in memorizing the key topics and it will increase our self confidence just by the fact of having something in our hands. If we fear that our audience could think that we are not enough prepared because of we have to hold notes, don’t worry, in fact the effect is the opposite and the audience tend to think that this is great because of you have spent some time to get ready for them. The size of the notes is important because of we won’t like to have big papers with us; it will be advisable to make it in hard paper and in a size that we can easily manage.
We could make sure that we have a couple of comments or jokes ready to use as an escape valve when necessary.
Following these three steps will dramatically improve our presentation skills; everybody is perfectly able to make a good presentation with a bit of preparation, rehearsal and usage of external aids.
