Presentation and Public Speaking News

In this extract from Business Presentation Revolution, published on July 14th 2021, I answer the important question: how do you prepare yourself before a big presentation? Before you take the stage, you need to be comfortable. Audiences don’t appreciate speakers who haven’t prepared properly, don’t know their presentation well enough, and are visibly worrying about what to say next. There are several simple actions you can take before your presentation to maximize your own comfort and help you to deliver a better talk. I call them the 3 S’s: serenity, space and support.

I’m not a motor mechanic. I don’t play with my car’s engine, hoping to make it run better, because I don’t understand how it works in detail. I leave that to experts who are professionally trained and experienced. The human brain is far more complex than an engine, and we know far less about how it works. Trying to present without learning a little about how the brain works is like throwing a spanner into a car and hoping it will fix the brakes.

TED has provided us all with a welcome relief from Death by PowerPoint. Shorter, more personal, more visual and more memorable, we now have thousands of talks to choose from providing us with a learning platform as awesome as Wikipedia. Business has benefited from it in miraculous ways. Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, once coined a great phrase: the ‘Ted-ification of business presentations’. Thanks in part to TED, but also to a certain extent to the original presentations of Steve Jobs, we all benefit from simpler, clearer, more original, more relevant and dare I say it more entertaining business presentations. However, with familiarity comes contempt and the new normal brings challenges. There are two key points we need to remember when presenting in business: boundaries and context. 

There is no such thing as a perfect presentation. You should of course prepare and rehearse it enough so you know it well, and so your messages come from the heart, not the head. If you can focus on delivering not just the syllables of your words, but the meaning behind them, then you are ready to present. Do not overdo the rehearsals, though. Your audience does not expect absolute perfection, and if you can create a strong connection with them, they will accept your imperfections, and see you as more human. Focus not on trying to speak perfectly, but on making a personal connection with your audience, one member at a time.

The success of PowerPoint in taking over corporate communication has led to one major problem: it is now the default way people present. If your boss asks you: “Have you prepared your presentation?” what she really means is: “Have you prepared your PowerPoint® slides?” This means that presenters automatically assume that they will use PowerPoint® slides, and do not even consider that there may be other possibilities. Ask yourself, for each point in your presentation: does my audience really need any visual aids? Don’t assume they do. I’ve worked on TEDx talks where a speaker has produced some very good slides, but when I’ve ended up convincing him that his audience doesn’t need them, and would do better without them. In my own TEDx talk, there are parts where I now think I’d have done better not to have slides on the screen. In most sales presentations, slides are just a barrier: it’s better to have a conversation.

• Public Speaking

Believe it or not, all American movies rely on the same formula; that formula is so sacred that scripts will get rejected if they stray from it. Whether it’s a psychological drama like American Beauty, a sci-fi movie like Star Wars or an action movie like Mission: Impossible, the same structure, plot points and character development techniques are used. I’ll just take one as an example: the hero, the main protagonist, is always an orphan, literally or figuratively, or experienced a personal drama; it is supposed to give the character more likeness. Luke Skywalker is an orphan. Jack Dawson, the hero from Titanic, leaves everything behind as a third-class passenger. Fin, the hero from Sharknado, is divorced.

Slides can be an extremely powerful way of making your messages clearer and more memorable – yet all too often they are an obstacle to communication. Humans can’t listen and read different things simultaneously: we can only process one linguistic input at a time. So if a slide features a lot of text and detail, it might make a useful reference document, but a terrible visual aid. On the other hand, if you keep your slides simple, with only a few words, they’ll be good visual aids but worthless as handouts.

In 2021 we can watch more examples than ever to know how to give a good presentation. We see examples of it in TED, top company Keynotes and our favorite lecturers and leaders. Yet still there are things that need to be changed. I have tried to collect them into what I call the 5 negatives followed by our very own revolution solutions! No foundations, people are still too last minute, whether its completing that 20,000-word dissertation at university written the night before or the finance report mixed together from excels and spreadsheets in the metro the same morning. I have seen plenty of TED talks where the speakers arrive to the event with an overlong and convoluted talk. Lack of decent planning leads to difficult situations and loss of credibility. It can also heighten anxiety. Not entirely surewhat this is all about? Neither will your audience be. Not putting them first will not yield the results you want, and if the objective isn’t clear in the first place then it’ll be doubly hard. Always take the time to know your audience needs and context.