You and Your Audience
Who is more important, you or your audience? In fact, many considerations go into a great presentation. Make certain your message has a clear purpose, and both your opening and concluding remarks powerfully bookend the points of your talk. Your message is of paramount importance, so listeners must easily comprehend its purpose, feel glad they listened, and find it personally valuable. Practice pairing the right words to the points you make, take advantage of sharing a personal story, and insist that your voice and tone are aligned with your intention. In the end, the presenter is merely the conduit or a messenger.
Giving Your Best Presentation
You have an upcoming company presentation. You’re concerned about how you’ll be perceived. A polished impact should describe your delivery. There are three approaches that, when layered together, might assist the delivery of your best speech ever!
Structure – you’ll need to devise a concise format. One that allows you to make the most relevant (to your audience) points about your message. Always grab their attention right up front and close strongly.
Content – The most apparent error most speakers make is insufficiently attending to their content, getting most of it right but falling short, lacking depth, or talking about something irrelevant to the audience. It might be more challenging, but a speech built on depth will trump one built on breadth every time.
When your presentation has an impact, it’s likely because it takes the audience on an adventure (about something they’re interested in). Drill down to intrigue, illuminate, and make points easy to comprehend rather than complex. If you lose your audience by stroking your own ego to show them how smart you are, who wins?
Delivery or Pacing – help your audience to digest, not merely hear your talk. Consider peppering your speech with pauses that punctuate. Do you want your audience to answer key questions post-presentation, such as “what was the speaker’s main message?” Please give them the answer ahead of time and utilize longer, dramatic pauses that provide people the opportunity to think about what you’re saying. Make your message transparent. “What was my takeaway?” Weave the answer into your speech several times.