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Personal Business Coach
Inspired Development and Coaching |
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How to prepare knockout presentations
The ability to project yourself with authority, presence and confidence in front of a demanding audience is a key leadership skill. Those who take the time and effort to learn to do it outstandingly well significantly enhance their career prospects.
Equally, muddled, unstructured and poorly delivered presentations can be career limiting. The ability to present a clear and compelling message to various stakeholder groups with passion and authority is at the heart of effective leadership.
So how do you measure up at the moment? Do you relish the opportunity to present your message to even the most challenging audiences? Do you get a real buzz from being the focus of such critical attention? Do you always receive great feedback from your boss and key others on you presentation skills? Or, are you like most people in that you would rather have root canal surgery than stand up to give that all important presentation.
The good news is that delivering effective presentations, confidently and without tears, is a skill that can be learned. Some of these skills have been presented in previous articles. Of fundamental importance, however, is how you prepare and structure your material. A poorly structured and rambling presentation delivered with enthusiasm, authority and passion will still be seen as poorly structured and rambling. It is all to do with silk purses and sows ears.
Drop the corporate slideware
First rules first, do not write your presentation in PowerPoint. This will tend to give you a rather rambling and all too predictable structure. Indeed, unless you have to convey a lot information, and this is less often than you would think, it is best to get rid of the corporate slideware altogether. To make an impact it is better if you yourself are the visual aid and not the supporting act to death by PowerPoint.
Less is more
There is a great temptation to put everything you know and would like to say into a presentation, in the uncritical belief that the sheer weight of argument and data will both convince the audience and impress them with your knowledge, expertise and erudition. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. So the more knowledgeable you are about your subject the more you need to take care to be selective, prioritise and provide a clear structure. The less you put in, the more they will remember.
So whats the point
Always start with your objective. What are you trying to accomplish? What is your aim? Are you trying to persuade, or inspire, or inform, or motivate, or instruct, or entertain? This is important, as the structure and tone of your presentation must fully reflect this intention. If you are unsure about what your objective is, sort this out before putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.
Once you have your objective, you then need to start with a clear message. This is the essence of what you are trying to communicate encapsulated in 15 words or less and this phrase should be repeated several times throughout the presentation. The rest of your presentation must then build on and develop this theme.
The best way to develop a theme is to picture two people discussing your presentation after you have delivered it. One of the two unfortunately arrived late, and missed your presentation, and he asks: How was the speech?, Terrific replies the other. How is that? asks the latecomer. Well, what the speaker said was:
. At this point people usually come out with that one sentence that sums up your whole presentation. So you need to write down what you would like that sentence to be prior to writing the rest of your presentation.
The payback for this effort at the outset is that it then becomes a great deal more straightforward to write a clearly structured and compelling speech. All you need then are a few tips, a clear structure and a little know-how. All this will be fully explained in the next article in this series.
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