Episode #172: Advice For Your First Major Presentation

At different stages in our careers we are asked to give a presentation. It may be a simple reporting on progress on a project or the state of play with the current results. The audience usually starts with our colleagues and bosses. Over time, as we rise through the ranks, the scope of the presentations we have to give increase in complexity and the audience size also increases. It might be at a whole firm kick off event, an offsite with senior management or a public presentation representing the firm or the industry. The leap from talking in front of colleagues to the company Board or to a public gathering is quite steep. The nervous tension is also profoundly different.

We can feel quite confident in front of colleagues but presenting to the members of the Board raises the stakes completely. Consequently we become a lot more tense and nervous. When we are in the spotlight it can often feel more like an interrogation lamp. Our pulse rate climbs alarmingly, we start perspiring more than normal, our palms become sticky, our throat is parched and our stomach feels a bit queasy.

This is the fight or flight adrenalin rush kicking in. The blood is directed to the larger muscle groups like the arms, shoulders and thighs, away from the internal organs, which is why our stomach feels a bit strange. The pulse rate quickens due to the chemical cocktail floating around our system, as we prepare for action. Logically, we are not about to sprint out of the venue or engage in hand to hand to combat with the members of the audience, but that doesn’t matter because our brain’s instructions to the body has overridden that logic and is prepared to just such occurrences.

Deep breathing to slow down the pulse rate or purposely striding around in some private space, away from prying eyes, helps to burn off some of that nervous energy. There is only so much you can do to calm down the chemical reaction. It also doesn’t necessarily matter how many times you may have presented either, because the nature of the event, the composition of the audience and the scale of the occasion can make us nervous. I read once that even such a regular performer as famous singer Frank Sinatra, was always nervous about getting that first note correct.

The other antidote to nervousness is good preparation. You would think this was the most obvious and logical thing in the world, but an amazingly high proportion of people spend all of their preparation time on the wrong things. The slide deck gets all the love and attention and rehearsals are totally neglected. This is lunacy but also reality.

A competent presentation needs a couple of elements. Understanding who is in your audience and what they want to hear is very basic but often overlooked. I attended a senior executive’s talk on personal brand building. It was odd, because it was basically aimed at people who work for similar major companies. The audience was 99% small and medium enterprise staff. The speaker had not considered her audience at all when she developed her talk.

A clear point of the talk boiled down into one sentence, brings clarity about how to structure the talk. What evidence can we gather to support this central point of our talk. How will we wrap the talk up both before and after the Q&A. What is a grabber opening which will draw the audience in to want to hear what we have to say.

We also have to be clear who is the boss on stage – the slide deck or us? So many presenters become slaves to their slides and that content becomes the main event not the presenter. I am about to coach a senior Japanese car company executive on a speech at an international car show to be held shortly. The PR company has prepared the slides and the draft English content for each slide. They asked me if the content was suitable. Well it is great, except that he will never be able to use it. There is no way he could memorise that amount of content in English for that length of speech and still put in a good delivery as a presenter.

My suggestion is for him to think what does each slide means to him, boil that down to one word and let’s put that word on the slide and he can elaborate on that word during his talk. No memorisation needed and he will speak in his authentic voice about what that image says.

Get the basics right, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse and once you start the nerves will calm down. You will be able to switch your focus from you and everything that is a problem, to your audience and trying to get them to buy your message. Keep doing that and presentations will lose their scariness.