Powerful Presentations: Top Five Tips

It’s said there are two kinds of people when it comes to presenting – those who are nervous, and those who lie!

Presenting your work is always going to be a tough task, but we’ve got some tips for you to make it easier on you:

1.??????Always speak slower than you think you need to

The most important rule is to keep the pace you speak at slow – and just to be safe, always go a little slower than your instinct says to! Speaking slowly not only prevents your audience from tuning out from too much information and not enough time to digest it, it also makes you a better speaker because you don’t risk stumbling over your words.

2.??????Use slides, but not too much

Slides and visual aids are a very important part of presenting, and have the potential to both elevate and ruin your presentation. Keep your slides visually interesting with a harmonious colour palette, a few pictures (or graphs, if the information can be presented as such!) and don’t fill them with too much information – a good way to reduce the amount of words on a slide is to keep sentences to only their bare minimum to get the appropriate information across. For example, “we found there was an increase of 28% in market share over the year” can simply be “28% increase of market share over last year”.

Making your slides compliment your presentation will keep individuals from getting bored. And remember – never read directly from the slide!

3.??????Don’t just present – engage and invite

It can be really tempting to go all in on speaking to your audience about your information, but that will inevitably lead to people struggling to stay interested in your topic. Try to work some opportunities for your audience to engage with yourself and your topic including, but not limited to: asking people what they think before you give them the information itself, asking people their opinions when you deliver specific facts, quizzes, collaboration word clouds, and polls. People remember information better as well when they have an active connection to it, so engaging with your audience not only makes your presentation more interesting but also increases the chances of them remembering important facts!

4.??????Be aware of your structure

An effective presentation follows a good structure of what you’re telling the audience about the information reminding people what you’ve talked about and your conclusions. In particular, a strong conclusion will help anchor your presentation and will also bring all the information that you’ve given together by reminding people of the context. It’s said that people best remember the first and last nine seconds of a presentation they listen to, so make the most of it!

5.??????Be passionate!

You’re the one presenting, so make it yours! Open up with a nice attention-grabbing story, move around, speak with an enthusiastic tone –?presentation isn’t just delivering information, but also showing and telling your audience why they should care. If you can’t deliver your topic with enthusiasm, it will be a worse presentation than if you could.?

Written by Melisa Drorian