Tips and Tricks on Making an Awesome Presentation
How often do you find yourself bored in a presentation? Or you simply saw the title of a subject you were always curious about, and it was exhaustive. I bet you that no one ever wants to make a boring speech, especially while trying to show months of work and study in just a few minutes. Here, I listed 3 tips to help you not see yawns in your audience anymore.
1 — Give them a story and not just a report
Reading numbers and results is frequently boring, show your audience why the result is relevant instead of how. For that reason, using complicated charts will not make you look smart, use the colors and fonts in your favor to highlight where their attention should be. Or even, play with the colors. People are lazy by nature, if a slide or a result takes too much effort to be understandable, they will stop paying attention to your speech.
Make sure your presentations are strongly fund based, a quick tip for that is the 3 minutes rule -build a small storyline of your presentation as if it would have happened in an elevator. This will help you to focus on the important parts.
2 — Less is more
The minimalistic philosophy behind the famous “Less is More” seems borderless in any field, from gastronomy to design, the overexposure of content may blind someone when trying to absorb the content — it would not be different in presentations.
Slides are to help illustrate your presentation and not to make you remember what to say, this is called the sliding effect. You can avoid it by not putting too much information in your slides — and if you believe that is ultimately necessary, make sure to expose it little by little to the audience.
And finally, spend time on how you can explain something quicker or easier to the audience, after you finish your first version spend time excluding no essential things instead of putting more content.
“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter” — Mark Twain.
3 — Expose yourself
As for other skills, make more of them if you want to make better presentations! As much as theoretical learning helps, one cannot be an expert without doing and watching other people do it. Ask for feedback and present it to other people first.
Don’t worry about them noticing that you are nervous, they probably will not notice. Set your posture openly and invitingly, always looking for the audience with 4 to 6 seconds of eye contact for each person.
Now you are ready for some presenting action!
