Episode #54: The Prep Really Makes Or Breaks A Presentation

Before jumping straight into the slides to build your presentation, identify your likely audience. How knowledgeable are the attendees on the subject matter? Are you facing a room full of experts or are they amateurs or a mixture of both? What are the age ranges and the gender mix?

Next, consider what is the purpose of the speech? Are you there to pass on relevant information, to inform your audience of some facts and figures? Are you there to entertain them, to make people laugh, to boost morale? Is persuasion your objective, to sell them on your vision, idea, product or proposition? Are you trying to motivate them to take action, to rally behind your flag?

How long do we have to speak? Many may think that a short speech is easier than a longer one. Depending on the objective, the degree of difficulty may be higher with the shorter speech. Trying to persuade others or to motivate others, usually requires solid evidence to bring the audience around to our way of thinking. In a shorter speech there is less opportunity to pour on the evidence.

What time of the day will we speak. After lunch and after dinner are two tough slots. Consuming meals and alcohol will sap the audience’s energy and attention. If it is an evening affair, where everyone is standing around and your speech is all that separates the masses from the food and drink, expect they will be distracted.

How will you dress for success?. Given we absorb a good deal of your message through body language, how you present yourself makes a big difference. In Japan it is better to be more formal in dress than casual.

If you are using a screen, stand to the “audience left” of the screen. We want the audience to look at our face and then look at the screen. We read left to right, so your face first, then the screen is the natural order.

Japan loves to have the speaker sit down at a table with a microphone stand, so you can drone on and on, like all the other speakers. It is better if you can stand, simply because you are more easily seen by your audience, especially those seated at the rear. You can use all of your body language to bolster the points you are making.

What will you do to control your nerves before you speak? If you have some space where you cannot be seen, then striding around burning off that nervousness will harmonise your energy control. Following this, deep, slow, breaths from your lower diaphragm will help reduce your pulse rate.

In the hours prior to you speech, try to drink water to get fluids into your system. Also make sure there is some room temperature water, without ice, prepared for you during the talk. Iced water constricts the throat, so we don’t want that when talking.

Select a title for the talk that creates curiosity. Isolate out the key points you want to make in the talk, between three and five points. Think of a strong opening that will grab everyone’s attention. People are easily distracted, so you have to break through with a grabber start.

Come up with two closes for your speech. One for the end of your talk and a second one for after the Q&A. We don’t want the randomness of the last question to define the final impression of our talk. We want to end on a strong message for our audience, which we control.