Do you connect with your audience?
Are you entirely happy with your presentation skills?
What about your colleagues; do they have the presentation skills needed to keep your attention, interest and curiosity?
The next time you get to sit through a presentation, make it your business to have a good look around the audience whilst the presenter is speaking.
If you’re really lucky, you will see a lot of attentive faces
You’ll be in no doubt that the audience is fully connected with what the speaker has to say. You may even be impressed with their presentation skills.
They are connected
Occasionally, you will see a room full of sunken faces subtly drifting down into their mobile phones.
It’s not a pleasant sight.
The former is the result of a mindful presenter who is fully and properly prepared.
The latter is the presenter who is on autopilot
The autopilot presenter may well be an expert in her field and brilliant at her job but is unprepared.
Here are 4 powerful ways to develop the presentation skills needed to connect with your audience.
1) Pack a punch with your visuals
If you are using slides they should complement and amplify your message; not perplex or bore your audience.
Each slide should be simple and powerful enough to help your audience resonate with what you are saying. It shouldn’t tell them what you’re saying, that’s your job. Each slide should be crafted mindfully to lead them to think and feel the way you want them to think and feel.
It’s not about what will work for or help you; that’s a mistake which far too many presenters make.
Each slide has to be designed exclusively for the benefit of your audience.
It’s about what it will do for them.
If you’re in any doubt at all about the value and impact of your visuals, share them in advance with a few people you trust. Ask them for their honest opinion as to how the slides really make them feel.
– Keep them simple – Less is always more when using slides.
– Use them to support your point, not for your audience to read it.
– Think like a designer – design your slide like a bill board ; one idea, big type, empty space, highly visual.
2) Give them the gold – let them take everything else away in a hand out
Put the graphs and charts in a hand out and give them to your audience at the end of the presentation.
The mindful presenter does the work for her audience and extracts the key message from the chart or graph for them . They have the presentation skills to make it abundantly clear to their audience without them having to painstakingly search for it. At Mindful Presenter we call it giving our audience the gold. In a previous article called ‘ The a to z of mindful presenting: f – focus‘ I wrote:
‘Imagine you are panning for gold. You can be absolutely certain that most of what you will find is dirt, dust and gravel. If you filter long and hard enough you just may find a piece of gold. That’s our job as presenters, to filter the ‘noise’ until we find the gold
Be very clear yourself on exactly what it is you want your audience to learn from your chart. Armed with that clarity and sense of purpose, find another creative way to express it.
Don’t make your audience work for it.
If you really feel you have to use a chart or a graph then keep it simple. Be sure your audience doesn’t have to work hard to read it to understand the point you are trying to make.
3) Think like a hairdresser
Do you remeber the last time you found yourself waiting to have your haircut or perhaps a tooth pulled at the dentist?
Did you pick up a magazine to read whilst you were waiting?
Do you remember how you read it?
Most of us will scan the pages in search of something that grabs our interest or attention. A headline, an image, a bold colour or something that resonates with us.
Your audience are likley to be just like the person waiting for their haircut or sitting in the dentist chair.
They are waiting for something that grabs their attention.
Make sure you prepare mindfully so they don’t have to flick through the magazine.
4) Ask yourself ‘so what?’
I’ve often sat through a presentation finding myself repeatedly asking the same question in my mind, ‘so what’?
Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience. You’re sitting there patiently waiting for the presenter to get to the point, or say something of meaning or of value to you and instead you find yourself asking ‘so what?’
– What does that have to do with me?
– Why should I care?
– What difference will it make?
– Why are you telling me this?
The mindful presenter makes certain that question never arises for her audience. They have the presentation skills to ensure that everything she says and every slide she shows is relevant and of significant value to her audience.
Crafting and delivering a presentation that will have a powerful impact on your audience requires a high level of emotional intelligence. Set out to connect with your audience emotionally as well as intellectually and your audience will be glad they came to listen to you speak.
If you’d like to develop your presentation skills much further:
Book a place on a powerful public speaking course.
Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
Get yourself some highly effective presentation skills training.
Image: Courtesy of pixabay.com
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