The Surprising Way Preparing for a Dinner Party Can Make You Better at Presentations

I am not much of a cook. Okay, I can make a great pumpkin pie, but my cooking skills beyond that dish are fairly limited. Despite my level of amateurism in the kitchen, however, my preparation for a dinner party starts at the same place as my friends with far superior culinary skills. I venture to guess your cooking prep starts here as well:

It starts with who will be sitting around the table.

Before you begin planning a menu, you want to know as much as you can about your diners. The number of people who say “I’ll eat anything!” is not very large these days. From Paleo and gluten-free diets to vegans and pesca-tarians, many of us have self-imposed or medically-imposed restrictions on what we will eat. Dinner invitations often now end with this question: “Any allergies or dietary restrictions we should know about?”

This question seems obvious to those planning a dinner party. No one wants to prep, and cook a beautiful pasta dish only to find out your guests must eat gluten-free foods. No one wants to spend hours basting and prepping a turkey to then learn you have vegetarians at the table. No one wants to be tossing peanuts in the wok for homemade Pad Thai and then discover your friend has a serious peanut allergy.

In short, information about your guest’s diets is useful because you want to prepare a meal that they can eat and will enjoy.

For most of us, it is fairly second-nature to think about the needs of our dinner guests. The fear of guests going hungry or the potential awkwardness of having to whip out a frozen pizza substitute are vivid enough to force this preparation. When it comes to preparing for a presentation, however, it is harder to remember the audience.

Your goal with a presentation often is similar to your goal for dinner guests. You want the audience to be able to understand, relate, and enjoy the presentation. You cannot accomplish this goal — let alone sell a product, get a donation, or achieve other potential calls to action — unless you understand the audience ahead of time. Yet, audiences for presentations are better at hiding their boredom, disinterest, or confusion than dinner guests with restricted diets. Thus, making this first step in presentation preparation less obvious.

To avoid a disconnect between your message and your audience, plan ahead. In the same way you would ask about dinner-guest preferences, ask the organizers of the event or meeting about who will be watching your presentation. You want to find out about their backgrounds. What is their level of experience with the content of your speech? What are their needs? What pain points are you solving for them? What do they want to get out of this presentation?

The answers to these questions can help you craft content that will be relevant, interesting, and engaging to the audience. If you approach your speech writing or PowerPoint slides from the perspective of what the audience will want to hear as opposed to what you want to share, your presentation will be more effective.

You may be wow-ed by all of the features of your new app, the benefits of your marketing skills, or the boldness of your company vision. You also may be very excited to make chicken wings with your grandfather’s famous sauce. But if you found out that the couple joining you to watch the big game were vegetarian, you would shelve your chicken-wing plan and look into zucchini fritters. Apply that same decisiveness to your presentations so your audience will have content they are eager to digest.

Just as your dinner guests will be raving about and Instgram-ing your well-planned meal, so too with the audience be Tweeting and talking about your well-tailored presentation.