You’ll have heard the old saying about how swans look cool, calm and collected on the surface but if you see underwater footage, you can see them paddling like mad… so it is with presentations.
You might look completely relaxed but underneath you’re working so hard it hurts!
Why? Well recently I showed people on one of our public presentations courses a video of a couple of different presenters, one good and one bad. Amongst all the differences we talked about was a key one – the bad presenter was seen to be using notes. People could see that he needed to be prompted for his material. It undermined his credibility. After all, our brains say to us…
if you can’t remember your own material, that material can’t really be worth remembering.
As a result, it goes in one ear and out the other.
I’d go even further than that and say that it undermines how much your audience can even trust the material. Have a look at the mess of wires, pipes and cables I photographed at a local train station (in fact, the one within five minutes walk of my house!). Personally, I’d rather not have seen that lot – it made me wonder: the control system looks jerry-rigged, so I wonder if the breaks are, too.
So what can you do?
Don’t let them see your working out – this isn’t school, when you’ve go to show your teacher your working so that she knows you’ve got the sum right by using the proper system and not by a lucky guess!
Know your material – not just loosely, but inside out. So that you don’t need notes.
And if you do need notes, make them big enough (keywords only!) so that you can read them with only a quick and subtle glance down and try not to break your flow and contact with the audience as you look at your paperwork. If you use them put them somewhere you can see them without stopping to read them so much the better…
And before you ask, no, your slides do not count as somewhere you can put your notes. Reading them is the ultimate in showing your audience your working out! :)
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