Are you nervous about presenting to a large (or small) crowd? Are you using PPT? PPT doesn’t stand for PowerPoint. It stands for Prepare, Practice and Throw!
Here are three simple steps to reduce nervousness before and during a presentation:
Prepare
Yes, of course, you will think. But do you know how to prepare well? Most people create some slides or, worse, get them handed to them and believe that having made them or reading them once is all that is needed. I have to tell you that is by far not enough preparation!
You need to do this: For each slide, you present (assuming you are using slides), write speaker notes in the speaker notes section. I recommend that for each slide, write the first thing you will say as a complete sentence and then add 2-3 key themes as bullet points that you will cover. Then add a transition sentence that leads to the next slide. This forces you to ensure you create a nice flow and that the slide sequence makes sense to you and, most importantly, your audience. It will look like this:
Good morning, it is a pleasure to be here today, and I look forward to sharing some insights into XYZ.
Point 1
Point 2
Point 3
Transition: This also means there is an impact on ABC. Let’s have a look at ABC.
What you say should be in the speaker notes, not the slides' text! The slides are there to support what you say and not vice versa.
Once you have done this, read through the entire presentation and speaker notes. Ensure everything is clear and you know how much time each slide takes to present. If you have 45 minutes to present and have created 45 slides, you got a problem! Solve it now.
Practice
Use a timer when you practice to see if what you want to say fits into the time slot that you have for your presentation. Practice out loud at least three times! Reading isn’t enough. You have to present to an imaginary audience. Lock yourself up in a meeting room or bedroom, or take a walk in the countryside and practice. This is skipped often (“I don’t have the time.”) but is essential to deliver an excellent presentation.
First time: helps you memorise much of the slides and speaker notes and increases familiarity. Print the slides with speaker notes and keep them handy for adding some hand-written comments and as a backup during your actual presentation on the day. I had to deal with a power cut during a presentation. Printed slides with notes are gold!
Second time: helps you make some minor edits, as when you present this to yourself, you may want to adjust content and flow. You may have to add or, more likely, remove some slides to hit timing. If you don’t feel comfortable deleting slides, move the ones you need to skip to the end into an appendix. This is useful if a question from the audience is addressed in a slide you decided to skip. You can bring it up quickly if needed.
Third time: this is when your presentation should be smooth. Do this one on the day before the actual event, right before going to bed.
Throw (the monkey over to the audience)
When you first enter the stage, you feel all eyes are on you. This certainly will add to you becoming even more nervous. It feels like a monkey is sitting on your shoulders. If this bothers you, greet the audience and then ask them a positive question; many will be happy to agree and comment on it. A D-type will always jump at the opportunity to say something! These are the benefits: it allows you to relax after walking onto the stage, and secondly, it increases rapport with the audience as you make them the centre of the presentation rather than keeping the focus on you only. Everybody relaxes, and you can move into presenting then. I recommend staying away from making a joke. Just ask something related to the topic as a great opener or something everybody can positively relate to.
You can do one more thing if you still feel super nervous despite doing all of the above: an NLP technique. I will cover this in a future newsletter.
Next week, I will cover an exciting artificial intelligence (AI) topic.