Speech presentation
Important presentation pointers
Jun 29th
Audience
1. Eye contact. You should not underestimate your ability to persuade your audience with your eye contact. Eyes communicate powerful cognitive messages.
2. Facial expressions. These communicate cognitive messages and emotions. Smile before you start speaking. Act naturally. Think about what you are saying and compliment it with facial expression to match or enhance the thought.
3. Dropped note cards. Proceed without them, but if you cannot, stop, pick them and then continue.
4. Unfriendly audience. Respond to hostile questions briefly, without becoming defensive. Use pausing and eye contact to handle hecklers. Request hecklers to either keep quiet or get out of the room.
5. Hand gestures. Hand gestures are important to emphasize words and emotions, illustrate verbal messages, or even replace verbal messages altogether.
6. . This is a very important element of your body language. Before starting the presentation, sit or stand straight, walk confidently to the podium.
7. Improvising to salvage situations. If problems occur during the presentation, ignore as much as possible. If you can solve the problem, quickly do it but if you cannot, then proceed on. If you have to break your verbal presentation, then remind the audience where you were and then proceed.
8. Post-presentation evaluation. Evaluate yourself within 24 hours after presentation. Note areas to improve on in your next presentation. Review any evaluations that you receive. Dwell on positive compliments more than the negative ones.
Ways to be a better presenter
Jun 18th
Public speaking is an important part of my work, and something that I get great joy and satisfaction from. I’m not a natural public speaker though, in-fact I still get little nervous almost every time I get up to give a talk or presentation, but I’ve learned certain tricks and methods that help me “get those butterflies to fly in formation”. So, at the prompting of the guys at Missing Link, I’m going to be sharing some of what I’ve learned about presenting in a series of blog posts on the topic.
In this post I’m going to share what I consider five fundamentally important tips for presenting more effectively. They’re all simple, not necessarily easy, but can vastly improve the quality and impact of a presentation if they’re applied. More…
