Presentation Skills Success – Seven Laws

What are the key principles that great presenters keep in mind?

Everyone Can Build on Their Presentation Skills Success

Watching gifted presenters can make you feel that good presentation skills are something you need to be born with. Fear not, because most presenters had to learn like everyone else. In fact, many professionals spend their entire careers perfecting the art of public speaking.

Presentation skills can easily be improved if you understand some simple principles. Here are seven laws of presentation skills success to keep in mind.

Take Ownership

A presentation is an agreement between the presenter and their audience, and both have predefined roles. Whereas the audience’s role is simply to provide their complete attention for the duration of the presentation, the role of presenter comes with a range of important responsibilities.

Most notably, you must convey your messages accurately and in a manner that engages and motivates the audience. You also need to take responsibility for their reactions to the presentation, whether they are agreeing, disagreeing, excited or asleep.

This may seem daunting, but taking ownership can actually empower you. More than simply motivating you to plan a great presentation, taking ownership gives you the confidence to deliver the content in your own unique manner, and adjust your approach depending on the audience’s reaction.

In effect, taking ownership can be gloriously refreshing as you consider the breadth of delivery possibilities. For example, you can identify and develop a particular style of delivery that plays to your personality strengths. It also encourages you to develop your presentation skills so you can optimise the way you engage and motivate.

Everything you do Communicates

Authentic presentation skills are based on the understanding that words are only a small part of the process of communication.

Your tone of voice and actions can convey significantly more meaning than the words themselves.

There are also many other considerations, such as how you use eye contact with your audience, and the way you wrap up your presentations and run question-and-answer sessions afterwards.

To ensure your body language supports your words, keep a clearly defined message in mind throughout the presentation. This increases the likelihood that every action you take reinforces your objectives and minimises the risk of inadvertently undermining them.

Incidentally, this principle is also the ideal way to craft the presentation itself. Think about the central message and use it as the spine that all other messages are built around. This ensures every message supports your central proposition.

Next, consider your story, because every presentation has one. A customer pitch is a story about why someone should choose your product or service. An annual report is a story about what your business accomplished over the last 12 months. Launching a new process or initiative is a story about overcoming an existing challenge or pioneering a better future. Storytelling is as old as human civilisation, and using its format and qualities will greatly enhance your audience connection.

Once you have your messages and story, you can craft them into an engaging PowerPoint deck. Using PowerPoint is a skill in itself, and there is a huge benefit in undertaking some training on the principles of design and layout. This is particularly valuable if your organisation doesn’t use a standard PowerPoint template that ensures presentations are high-impact yet consistent. Check out our top ten PowerPoint tips for some valuable advice.

Passion is Mandatory for Presentation Skills Success

In addition to a clearly defined message, you need to convey passion about your subject. If you feel strongly about something, it energises the way you speak about it, which can also energise the audience.

But what if you need to speak about a topic you have no passion for? The trick is to start off with something you are passionate about. Think of a story that frames what you want to say, such as watching your child at a sports day. You don’t even need to pick a relevant topic if you want to inject a bit of humour.

Using this technique will energise you and help you sail through topics that you are less enthusiastic about without the audience realising. This is also an excellent tip if you are uncomfortable or nervous about networking. It can put you at ease and help to establish a common ground with the other person before you discuss business matters.

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Audiences Sleep

Let’s pretend you are standing in front of the audience, about to start your presentation. You are now facing the fundamental challenge of all presenters. No matter how interested audiences are in a subject, they tend to fall asleep. But don’t blame them because it’s not their fault.

Presenters stand while audiences sit. Presenters speak while audiences listen. Add a slightly warm room with semi-comfortable chairs and you could easily find yourself in a dormitory. This is why your primary role as a presenter is to keep your audience awake.

Hopefully, your presentation carries the fundamental qualities of storytelling that forge an emotional connection with the audience. As you convey the heroes and challenges of your subject, the audience should be invested enough to stay awake all the way through to the finale.

Interaction is central to many advanced presentation skills. For example, you could turn your presentation into a dialogue with the audience, or keep them alert in other ways such as asking them to split into groups to discuss a specific point.

You can also ask rhetorical questions to get them thinking or challenge them from time to time on key issues. There are many other simple methods to keep them awake, such as varying the pace and volume of your delivery and using humour at appropriate moments.

When presenting, keep in mind that your audience is not watching a pre-recorded television programme. This is a live event, so pay close attention to your audience’s moment-to-moment reactions and, if they seem a bit quiet, wake them up by changing what you are doing.

Your Feelings May be Wrong

How do you judge your presentation skills? The simplest method is to be your own critic, but this is fraught with challenges because it is based on how you feel rather than the events that happened. Judging yourself requires objectivity, and this can take years of practice, even for professional performers. Fear of failure is something that haunts all presenters.

Instead, why not simply ask the people who were watching you? Your audience or colleagues will only be judging your physical performance rather than anything you were thinking or feeling at the time. Ask them if they understood the message. Did they feel swayed by your arguments? Did they feel compelled to take the action you were asking of them? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t really matter how you felt.

In many cases, you don’t even need to ask them because you will be watching their reactions. If they smile and nod, then you must be saying things they agree with. If they frown and shake their heads, they probably disagree. And if they don’t seem interested, then you aren’t engaging them.

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Mistakes are Only Mistakes if People Notice

From reading articles on business presentation skills, you might think there are hundreds more don’ts than dos. But the problem with don’ts is that trying to remember them all prevents you from focusing on the audience and your messages.

A more realistic approach is to understand that the human mind is sensitive to repetition and pattern, so your audience is unlikely to notice mistakes if you only do them once. Mistakes only become noticeable if they become a habit. For example, a repeated gesture may become so irritating that your audience will not be able to pay attention to anything else.

If you do make genuine mistakes that people notice, never worry about them. Just move on. Often, they simply make you look more human, and people will identify with you even more. In fact, why not inject a few mistakes deliberately and see if anyone notices? This can alleviate your concerns and free up your body language.

Leave Your Audience Wanting More

It is easy to think that the primary purpose of presentations is to deliver information, but they are not the best medium. In most cases, you will only be able to convey a small amount of information in the time available, so you almost always need the audience to seek out further details afterwards. But for that to happen, they need to feel motivated to do so.

The famous showbusiness phrase “always leave your audience wanting more” very much applies to business presentations. The presenter must deliver the proposition in such a compelling way that the audience wants to act on it. That means getting them to understand the value of learning more, and acting in the way you recommend.

Think of shopping for a new book. We often judge the content based on the summary on the back cover. Only the summaries that leave you wanting more will end up as books on your shelf.