3 ESSENTIAL steps to Storytelling and giving more engaging Presentations in English!

Your presentation skills are holding you back from showing your audience why they should trust you and encouraging them to take action.

You may think this is because:

• You don’t have enough time as it is too big a challenge.
• You haven’t found the right resources to help you master the language and presentation skills.
• You don’t have access to a native English speaker or presentations expert to improve.

While these are all understandable reasons, the truth is that you haven’t been learning the specific skills you need to improve at presentations; you have spent too long focusing on English as a language, rather than developing the skills you need to present yourself as an expert in your field.

Let me use an analogy to help you understand.

Let’s say that you have always enjoyed running and decide that you want to become a professional and try to compete in the Olympics. To prepare for this, you decide to run every day.

The truth is that just running every day, even trying to beat your personal best won’t help you to become an Olympic athlete and win the race.

You know that to become a professional athlete you will need to alter your diet, do particular training which is effective at improving and develop the advanced skills to get stand a chance of becoming professional... They even do exercises which aren't related to running to focus on core muscle groups!

This is the same if you want to deliver effective, engaging presentations which encourage your audience to take action!

Let me share with you three ways in which you can immediately improve your storytelling and presentation skills right now.

1.

• You need to learn how to structure your presentations better so your audience clearly understands the points you are making. Our brains need structure to begin understanding. Creating contrast within our presentations is essential!
• Your PowerPoint presentation should NOT do the presentation for you! Your PowerPoint should support what you are saying, but not say it for you! People do not trust presenters who have all the information on the screen and they stop paying attention to YOU because they are trying to READ what is being displayed on the screen!

???? There is a lot of information online which show you many different possible structures to use. Simply googling “most effective presentation structures” will give you a lot of free information about this.

2.

• Learning to craft your own story is vital to an engaging presentation. You are likely not connecting with your audience on an emotional level which is damaging your presentation – we need to create authority and trust with our audiences, which is what Storytelling allows us to do.
• The problem with Storytelling is that everyone now tries to do it as it has become such a popular concept. 95% of people, however, do it wrong!
• Storytelling is based on emotions, which help you to create an authentic, trustworthy connection with your audience. Without Storytelling, you are simply giving your audience easily-forgettable facts!

???? For more information about Storytelling, I would highly recommend watching Ted Talks and pay close attention to Stories - how do they engage the audience? What is the audiences' reaction? How has the speaker structured this story and how have they told it?

3.

• Becoming confident in yourself and using the appropriate body language (even when you don’t feel confident!) are essential skills to develop.
• Your audience is able to identify when you are nervous and unconfident when presenting. This translates to them as YOU not knowing enough about what you’re presenting. You cannot win their trust nor engage them with what you are saying.

???? Practising your presentation as many times as possible and learning to not rely on your notes is so, so important!

How do I know all of this? Many, many, MANY of hours of research and experience!! When individuals are taught what a good presentation LOOKS like, HOW it is built and HOW to tell your story, I see their confidence levels rise exponentially! With this added confidence that they know they are delivering a high-quality presentation in English, they find their audiences engaging and trusting them far more than before.

If you know that your presentation and storytelling skills need to improve and it is holding you back from progressing in your career or getting your audience to take action, then I hope the advice above helps you.

I would also recommend booking a free 30-minute strategy session with me so that I can assess your current needs and give you some advice on your immediate next steps to improving your presentation skills in English. If I feel that you would be a good fit for my program, and you are interested, I would let you know a little bit more about it then.

Get in touch if this is you!