Revising Presentation Skills

What is a presentation?

Presenting is like painting a picture, telling a story. It’s a Journey. There are ups and downs (both in situations and voice tones) and there’s always some intrigue, but there’s always some place where we want people to get to inspire action or learn something or to perceive the world differently.

How to Start?

Start with an end goal in mind.

Start with an end goal in mind so that all of the pieces move towards that end goal. When you start with the end in mind, the audience then understands a sense of progress.

Very often the presentations of ideas can be blind for audiences because they don’t know why you are telling us this stuff. It also may or may not be interesting to them. But if there’s some end goal in mind, it actually makes audience more patient in the slow bits of progression.

The Structure is really important.

How are you going to start? What’s that frame that will get you going? There’s no right or wrong way to do this. But, audience tend to engage when there’s some sort of story, some sort of metaphor or analogy that captures the idea that you are going to talk about.

Talk about something from your experience. Talk about something from others experience. Talk about something from someone who you have no relation to. But relate, relate, relate.

Talk about the feeling, the emotion of that metaphor so audience can easily relate. Start to make others imagine from the very start.

Pay attention and engage with the audience around you.

The best motivation to present an idea is to come with a spirit of giving. When people try to present mostly think about themselves, about how they are presenting themselves, they think about how they are selling to you, they want to sell you this product, they want you to sign up for their facebook page, or invest in their company and the way they present is about themselves. You know in your gut that they are selling. It’s actually off-putting.

But when someone shows up with a desire to give, to share an idea, a new perspective, a new knowledge, a new way of thinking, it shows in their enthusiasm. People are more receptive to that though there might be some reward for the presenter.

You get the most, when you do something for them without any desire for something in return.

That’s when the ideas of trust, engagement and cooperation starts to evolve.

All presenters, regardless of which Industry they are from, if they show their honest desire to give, immediately makes the presentation vastly more effective.

Very often people start talking about themselves. They start by offering their credentials. I do this, I do that, and I have these degrees, I run these businesses and that. In other words, they start presenting by pressing that, “I am qualified to tell you for what you are about to hear.”

But when you start with giving, do you start with talking about yourself?

It’s not helpful to start with facts and figures.

You start with building a story about why this is important and why you should listen to me to get to this end state.

Facts and figures are good stuff, but they will come later. Because facts and figures don’t create emotions. They don’t help capturing audience’s attention, lean in and say, “Wow! This will be interesting!”

Start with a story, a story that is emblematic with the result. You will get there. Start with this first step.

P.S. Thank you Simon Sinek for helping me with this. I owe you so much! :D