7 Things Your Audience Won’t Forgive

Audiences are far more generous than most presenters give them credit for. They will forgive the nerves, the shake in the voice and the hand that will not quite keep still, because most of them have stood where you are standing and the rest can imagine it perfectly well. They will forgive a slide that refuses to load, a thread briefly lost, a joke that does not land, and a subject that is dry by nature rather than by your doing.

What an audience will not forgive is being treated as though they are not really there.

Every one of the seven below is a version of that, which is why they sting in a way that stumbling over a word never does. A stumble tells the room you are human. These tell the room something less flattering, and it registers immediately, even with people who could not tell you afterwards what they objected to.

1. Lack of Preparation

“In all things success depends on previous preparation, and without such previous preparation there is sure to be failure.” That is Confucius, in the Doctrine of the Mean, and it has lasted two and a half thousand years because people keep proving it.

When somebody does find the time to prepare, it is almost always the material they spend it on, and that is not wrong so much as nowhere near enough. The preparation that changes how a presentation lands is preparation for the particular people who will be sitting in front of you, which means arriving with some reasonably honest answer to who they actually are, what they care about, what keeps them awake, how much they already know and what they need from the next twenty minutes.

Skip that, and the room fills quietly with three questions you will never hear anybody ask. So what? Why am I being told this? Does any of it matter to me? A presenter who has prepared only the material cannot answer any of the three, and an audience works that out a good deal faster than most presenters would like to believe.

2. Wasting Their Time

You have sat through the version of this where somebody tells you, at length, something you already knew, or something you could have found in nine seconds had anybody thought to ask whether you needed telling.

The particular misery of it is that you cannot leave. You worked out somewhere in the first four minutes that there was nothing here for you; thirty-six minutes still remain, and the only option available to a polite adult is to arrange your face and think about something else. Everybody reading this has done it, and some of them have done it to you.

The fix is one question, asked honestly while you are preparing, which is what this room already knows, and then the willingness to cut whatever the answer makes redundant.

3. Failing to Practice

A room can tell an unrehearsed presenter within about a minute, and what happens next is what people underestimate. The audience does not simply judge you. They start to worry for you, and worrying for somebody is tiring, so by the time you reach your actual point, they spend most of their attention on whether you are going to be all right rather than on what you are saying.

This has very little to do with polish and nothing whatever to do with perfection. It is about being comfortable enough with your own material that nobody else in the room has to carry you through it. Rehearse out loud, standing up, and the whole way through without stopping, because the version you have run through in your head is not the one that will come out of your mouth.

4. Letting Ego Take Over

The giveaway is almost never the obvious boast. It is the credentials slide that stays up for ninety seconds, the anecdote where the ending is how well it all went, the aside about the client everyone has heard of. Each one on its own is defensible, and a room can tell the difference between an example and an advertisement within about a sentence.

The test I apply to any story before using it is whether the hero is me. If it is, it is almost certainly there to make me look good rather than to make something clear, and a story told for that reason costs more than it earns.

5. Lack of Commitment

There is a particular flatness in the room when somebody presents material they do not believe in, and it is unmistakable once you know to listen for it. The deck somebody else built. The quarterly message handed down with instructions to deliver it warmly. The initiative the presenter privately thinks is a mistake.

None of it gets said out loud, and all of it is audible. You cannot ask a roomful of people to care about something more than you appear to, and if you do not care at all then the honest move is either to find the part of it you can stand behind or to say plainly that this is not your idea and here is what you think about it. Audiences forgive a great deal, and they are astonishingly forgiving of candour.

6. Being Boring

You know exactly what this sounds like, because you sat through it last week. The voice that stays on one note from the first slide to the last. The pace that never changes, so nothing is ever more important than anything else. Sentences that begin, wander, collect a sub-clause along the way, and eventually stop rather than end. A body that has found one position behind the laptop and has no intention of leaving it.

Here is what makes it maddening rather than merely dull. That same person was good company in the corridor twenty minutes earlier. They told you about a delayed flight or a builder or their brother-in-law; their voice moved, their hands moved, and you listened to every word of something that did not matter in the slightest.

So, nobody is actually monotone. They become monotone when a voice does that, because the person using it has stopped feeling anything about the words, usually because they have been over them eleven times and the life has gone out of them. The room is not listening to a dull person. It is listening to somebody reciting.

The mechanical repairs are real and worth having. Vary the pace, stop at the end of a sentence and let it land instead of running into the next one. Come out from behind the laptop. None of them will hold for twenty minutes on their own, though, so before you work on the voice, find the one thing in your material you would happily argue about over dinner and start there.

7. Reading Your Slides

If your slides are so packed with information that everyone has to read them, then what you’re delivering isn’t quite a presentation. It’s more like you’ve written a document and just stood beside it. If that’s the case, the most helpful thing you can do is email it to everyone, so they can enjoy their morning without the extra stress.

Standing with your back to the room reading your own slides out loud is worse still, because it hands the audience an unanswerable question. If the words are all up there, what exactly are you for? Slides work best when they carry a single idea the room can take in at a glance, which is a different craft altogether and one I have written about at length.

What An Audience Actually Forgives

Go back to where we started, because the pattern is the whole point. Not one of those seven is a failure of skill. You can be an unpolished speaker, a nervous one, a slow one or a plain one and still have a room entirely with you.

What a room will not forgive is the sense that you showed up without thinking of them. Everything on that list is a way of saying, without ever meaning to, that the people in front of you were not the point. Everything on that list is fixable the moment you decide they are.

If any of this was useful, please pass it on. Somebody you work with is presenting this week and has spent all their preparation time on the slides and none of it on the people who will be sitting there looking at them.

If you need help getting your audience on side:

– 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.