How To Give A Brilliant Presentation

Nobody in your audience is expecting brilliance. They didn’t come hoping to be dazzled, and they won’t leave disappointed if they aren’t. What they want is for you to tell them something they need, in a way that reaches them, and then to let them get on with their day.

That is worth knowing before you start, because the word brilliant does a good deal of damage. It makes people think of performance and charisma and somebody they could never be. In practice, a brilliant presentation is almost always an ordinary one in which somebody has done a small number of straightforward things that hardly anybody bothers to do.

Here are the ones that matter.

Start Where They Are

Before anything else, and certainly before a single slide, work out what the people in front of you actually need and why they should care that you are the one telling them.

Stephen Covey called it beginning with the end in mind, and it applies to a presentation more literally than to most things. Decide what you want to be different in that room by the time you sit down, then build backwards from there. Every fact you are thinking of including either serves that goal, or it doesn’t, and the ones that don’t are why people start looking at their phones. There are four questions worth answering before you build anything at all, and answering them properly will cut more from your presentation than any amount of editing afterwards.

Decide How You Want Them To Feel

Most presentations need data to be taken seriously, and most presenters stop there, assuming the facts will do the rest of the work.

They will not. The people in front of you are professionals, and, inconveniently, human beings who will have decided how they feel about your idea long before they finish evaluating it. Work out in advance what you want them to feel, not only what you want them to know, and prepare for that as deliberately as you prepare the numbers. That is the difference between a room that agrees with you on the way out and a room that actually goes and does something about it on Monday morning.

Surprise Them In The First Minute

Most people walk into a presentation expecting very little, which is an opportunity, and the window for it is roughly the first sixty seconds.

Tell them something they did not know and would want to hear. Reveal a fact or number that stops them in their tracks. Ask a question they cannot answer straight away. Tell one short story. Make them smile. Any of those will do, and doing one early is worth more than anything you attempt at minute twelve, because attention is far easier to keep than to recover.

What won’t work is the thing most presenters do with that minute, which is to spend it introducing themselves, thanking the organiser and explaining what their department does, none of which a single person in the room has ever wanted to know.

Say It, Then Stop

If you are given thirty minutes, finish in twenty-five. Nobody has ever left a room resenting a speaker for handing them five minutes back.

Get to the point early, too. Many capable professionals build a presentation the way a comedian builds a joke, saving the punchline for the end, which works for comedians because the audience has agreed to wait for it. Yours has not agreed to anything. Say the important thing first and spend the rest of the time supporting it, because otherwise you’ll have a room that stopped listening several minutes before you got to the part you cared about.

Use Visuals Wisely

Used well, a visual holds attention, lands a point faster than your words could manage on their own, and makes you more memorable afterwards. Used the way most people use them, slides compete with you for the very audience you are trying to reach.

The short version is this: as few slides as you can manage, one idea on each of them, and nothing on the screen that you are about to say out loud anyway, because an audience cannot read your slide and listen to you at the same time and will choose the slide every time. The longer version is in how to avoid death by PowerPoint.

Then Deliver It Like You Mean It

You can have the right intention, the right content and the right visuals, and still lose the room in the last three feet.

– Stand tall, with your feet shoulder or hip-width apart.

– Let your hands move. They carry energy that your voice cannot supply on its own.

– Vary your pitch, your pace and your volume. A flat voice makes true things sound doubtful.

– Look at one person at a time rather than sweeping the room.

– Slow down and pause. The pause is the most underused tool you have.

– Look as interested as you want them to be. Nobody was ever persuaded by a face that had grown bored of its own subject.

– Tell stories.

– Use the space you have been given rather than standing rooted behind a lectern or a laptop

Most of what goes wrong at this stage comes down to bad public speaking habits rather than a lack of ability, which is good news, because you can address a habit the moment you name it.

None Of This Is Exceptional

That is the point.

The bar for a brilliant presentation is not talent, and it is not charisma. It is a small number of ordinary courtesies that almost nobody extends to the people sitting in front of them, which is precisely why doing them makes you look remarkable.

Do the work, and people who would struggle to tell you why will remember you as a brilliant presenter.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you know is presenting this month and has spent every hour of their preparation on what they are going to say, and not one minute on what they want the room to do about it.

If you would like some help with your presentation skills:

– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.

– Get yourself some excellent presentation skills training.