Think of a speaker who genuinely connected with you. Not the slickest person you have ever sat in front of, and not the one with the best slides, but the one you were still thinking about on the way home, probably without being able to explain to anybody why. I would be surprised if the word you reach for to describe them is loud, and I would be more surprised still if what stayed with you was anything they put on a screen.
Almost everything we are told about speaking well is advice about addition. Be more confident, have more presence, project more, own the room, work on your gravitas. It is the sort of advice that sounds like help while quietly leaving people further from themselves than when they started, because the instruction underneath it all is to become somebody bigger than you are. In my experience of sitting with people who are frightened of presenting, that is the last thing any of them needed to hear.
What actually moves a room is much quieter than that.
Here are ten things that truly make a difference. None of them requires you to change who you are, and several invite you to do less instead of more; a surprisingly challenging idea when you think about it.
1. Know what you want to change
A topic is what your presentation is about, while an intention is what you hope will be different in that room when you’re done speaking. It might seem like just a small difference, but it actually influences almost everything that comes after. Try saying your intention out loud as a sentence you’d feel comfortable repeating to someone outside your team. Before you start creating your content, ask yourself: by the end of your talk, what do you want your audience to think, feel, and do?
If you’re simply looking for them to understand where things stand or to get a handle on the numbers, I completely get it. Many presentations are requested for exactly those reasons, and no one has ever suggested they should be different. The challenge isn’t that it’s wrong to want them to understand, because that’s critical. The real issue is that understanding happens silently within someone else, out of your sight, so it can’t tell you what to keep, what to discard, or whether the hour you spent was worthwhile. Take a moment to consider what the understanding is for. If they knew all the numbers but nothing else changed, no decisions were made, no questions asked, and no new conversations came up the next week, would you feel satisfied that your time was well spent?
If you would, send the document and give everybody their hour back. If you wouldn’t, then whatever you have just pictured happening instead is your real intention, and it has been sitting behind the presentation all along. It is usually smaller and more particular than people expect, and there are as many versions of it as there are presentations, so whatever you land on will belong to your situation rather than to a list.
You might wish for them to stop dismissing one problematic figure as just a blip, advocate for you in a meeting you’re not part of, or stop checking in on you because they now trust you’ve got it under control. These are just a few examples among many, and your situation might be completely different.
2. You are speaking to sons, daughters, mothers and fathers
We describe audiences in the language of categories, partly because it is convenient and partly because that is how the invitation usually arrives. The board. The client. The sales team. The regional heads. What that language does, quietly, is turn thirty separate human beings into a single thing with one opinion and one mood, and once we do that we start preparing for the thing rather than the people, which is how presentations come to sound as though they were written for nobody in particular.
Nobody in that room is a category.
They are somebody’s daughter, somebody’s father, somebody’s brother, and they arrived carrying whatever they were carrying before they walked in, most of which has nothing to do with you and a good deal of which feels more pressing than your agenda. This matters far beyond where you point your eyes. It is very difficult to feel much of anything for a category, and so preparing for one quietly excuses us from the work that makes a presentation worth sitting through: the empathy to consider what this will be like to receive, the compassion to remember that some of them are having a hard week, the effort of understanding what they already know and what they are worried about, and the respect of not wasting an hour of a life on something you have not properly thought about.
Do it the other way round, and everything changes without any technique at all. Prepare for one real person who will be sitting there, and then, while you are speaking, give each thought to one person at a time rather than sweeping your eyes across the middle of the room. What that does is simple: instead of being one of thirty people being addressed, each person gets the experience of being spoken to. Being spoken to is a great deal harder to drift away from than being addressed.
3. Open with them, not you
The opening of a presentation is the most valuable ninety seconds you will ever be handed, and many presenters routinely spend it on themselves. Who I am, where I have come from, what we do, how long we have been doing it, what we are going to cover in the next forty minutes.
I want to be careful here, because there are rooms in which your credentials genuinely are the question, and if you are the consultant, the new starter or the outsider nobody has met, people will be quietly working out whether you are worth listening to before you have finished your first sentence. Pretending otherwise would not help you. What I have come to believe, though, is that the fastest way to answer that question has never been a list of qualifications. It is showing, early, that you understand their situation better than they were expecting you to. Their problem, or the opportunity they have not yet spotted, earns you more attention than your biography ever will, and it buys you the right to be believed when your experience does come up later.
Whatever you do, don’t open with sameness. Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure to be here. Let me tell you a little about us. Almost everybody in that room has heard those words so many times that they no longer mean anything at all.
4. Cut until it hurts, then cut once more
This is not an argument for having one point and throwing the rest away, which is advice I have never agreed with. There is a difference between having one message and having one point; the first is essential, the second is not. You may quite legitimately have several things to say, and whether there are four of them or forty was never the question. What matters is whether each one helps the people in front of you understand your message, care about it, or act on it. Everything else is noise, and noise does not sit harmlessly alongside your message. It buries it.
What makes this hard has very little to do with judgement and almost everything to do with pride, because you are rarely cutting rubbish. You are cutting good work, often the section that cost you a Sunday evening, and it takes a particular kind of courage to accept that the effort you put into it was never the point and was never visible to anybody else in any case. The reward is out of all proportion to the discomfort. Everything you take out gives whatever mattered more room to be heard, and I have yet to watch an audience leave a room wishing there had been more slides.
5. Slow down
Speed is sometimes just a habit. Some people talk quickly in every part of their lives, always have, and there is nothing underneath it to examine. But when somebody speaks noticeably faster in front of a room than they do over coffee, there is usually a feeling involved, and more often than not it is a wish for the whole thing to be over, which is why being told to slow down works for a minute or two before the current takes them again.
Either way, your pace is saying something about you. Rushing tends to sound like someone who isn’t entirely sure they have earned the time they were given, and it drags an audience along a fraction faster than anyone can take anything in. Slowing down does the opposite. It tells the room you are comfortable being there, it gives your own thoughts a moment to arrive before your mouth does, and it leaves each idea the space it needs to land in somebody else. You will feel absurdly slow, and you will not be anywhere near as slow as you feel. Begin with the first sentence, delivered at a genuinely unhurried pace, and the rest of the talk tends to follow it.
6. Treat silence as punctuation
Most presenters see a pause as a hole in the middle of their talk, and the instinct is to fill it at once with whatever is nearest at hand, usually a filler word or a sentence that repeats what you just said.
A pause is not a hole. It is where the thing you have just said finally lands. Say something that matters, then give the room three or four seconds in which to have a thought about it, because it is hard to think and listen at the same time, and if you never stop, the only thing available to them is keeping up. Silence does something for you as well; it is the one thing you have at any moment that will slow your breathing, steady your voice, and buy you a second to find your next thought. The reason so few people use it is that a pause feels far longer to the person holding it than to anybody watching, and in my experience the silence that feels excruciating from where you are standing is barely noticed from the third row.
7. Rehearse standing up and out loud
Reading your talk through in your head is not rehearsal. It trains your eyes, and your eyes are not the part of you that has to do this. The first time your material travels through your actual voice should not be the moment it matters.
So, stand up, say it out loud at full volume, go all the way through, and resist the urge to stop and fix things as you go. Within four minutes you will discover which sentences you cannot physically say, which transitions you do not actually have, and where you run out of breath, and there is no other way of finding out any of it. Recording yourself is worth doing if you can bear it, and many people can’t, which is why there is a better route. Ask somebody you trust who has watched you speak, and ask them properly rather than settling for a kind, vague compliment. What do I do repeatedly? What did you notice? How distracting was it? Then ask what you do well, because knowing what to protect matters every bit as much as knowing what to lose.
8. Do not wait to feel calm
I want to be careful with this one, because I spend a good deal of my time helping people to settle themselves, and calm is genuinely worth having. Breathing, grounding, centring yourself in the minutes before you speak: all of it works, and all of it is worth learning. What does not work is treating calm as the price of admission. When you decide you cannot go out there until the nerves have gone, you have given yourself a second job to fail at, and every flutter that refuses to leave becomes evidence that you were right to be frightened.
Nerves are energy without direction. The physical state you experience as dread is, in my experience, not far from the state of somebody who is thrilled to be there, and nobody in the room has any access to it anyway; what they see is what you do with it. Flat is a far greater risk than nervous, and while I have watched rooms forgive a shaking hand and a wobbling voice many times over, I have never seen one forgive indifference. What helps is not a technique remembered in the corridor two minutes beforehand, but something built into an ordinary week. Breathing is the obvious candidate, and there are many ways to do it, one of which I teach as five in, hold for two, eight out, though what suits one person will not suit the next and the value lies entirely in the practising. Look underneath the nerves occasionally, because for a great many people the frightening thing is not the presentation at all but a much older story about not being good enough to be the one standing up, a story we have usually told ourselves so many times that it has come to sound like a fact.
It is not a fact.
9. Make them feel something
You already know this one, and you know it from the other side of the room. Think back over the presentations you have sat through in your working life and ask yourself what has survived. It will not be the data. It will be how the thing made you feel, and whether the person at the front appeared to care about what they were saying.
This does not call for emotional theatre, and it certainly does not call for going out to find a tragic story to tell, which is where people tend to go the moment they hear the word feeling. It calls for you to be honest about why this matters to you, and then to let that show rather than sanding it off in the name of being professional. If you want a room to feel that something is urgent, you will have to sound like somebody who finds it urgent. If you want them to leave hopeful, they need to hear hope somewhere in your voice. Whatever feeling you choose for them, they will take their cue from you, and a presenter who decides to feel nothing on the walk to the front has made that decision on everybody’s behalf.
10. Decide what they carry out of the room
If everything else were forgotten, and most of it will be, what is the one sentence you would want somebody to repeat to a colleague who was not there?
Write it down before you build anything else, in plain words, as though you were saying it to a friend rather than to a committee. If you can’t get it into a sentence, the problem isn’t your slides or your delivery; it is that the thinking isn’t finished, and no amount of rehearsal or design will cover for that. If you can get it into a sentence, you have just made every other decision easier than it was a moment ago, because from that point on everything in the talk either serves that sentence or gets in its way.
Where these sit
These are not tricks or quick checklists to rush through on the morning of a presentation. Instead, they fit within The Presenter’s Operating System™, the structure I teach, which is really helpful because it guides you on where to focus when something isn’t working rather than leaving you guessing.
One, nine and ten are Intention and Message: deciding what you want to change, what you want people to feel, and the one thing worth carrying out of the door. Two and three are Resonance: understanding the people in front of you well enough to build for them rather than for yourself. Four is Clarity: removing whatever is burying your message. Five, six and seven are Voice. Eight is Headstuff, the foundation beneath all of it, and the reason so many capable people never quite sound like themselves in front of a room.
If several of these feel difficult at the same time, that is not a character flaw, and you are not unusual. They are difficult the way any honest change is, and they get easier the same way: by being done a few times badly in rooms where very little is riding on it.
Where to take this
Take one. Not ten. Choose whichever of these gave you a small flicker of recognition as you read it, and use it at your next meeting, which is a far better laboratory than a conference stage because nobody is expecting a performance and nothing much is at stake. Then do it again the week after, and the week after that, until it stops feeling like something you are doing deliberately.
If you would like some help with any of it, there are three ways we work with people:
- A public speaking course, if you would like to learn and practise this in a small group, with feedback on every presentation you give.
- One to one coaching, if you have something specific and important coming up, or if what is in your way is the eighth of these rather than the other nine.
- Presentation skills training for your team, if you would like a group of people who speak on behalf of the same organisation to stop sounding like a collection of strangers.
If this was useful to you, please send it to one person you have watched speak recently who deserves to hear it.
Image courtesy of Canva.com
