“It’s just about the standing up”

…..so says a student friend of mine who’s having to give presentations for the first time. To be fair to him, he didn’t say this spontaneously, but in response to a question about what was the worst thing about speaking in public. Like almost everyone I’ve ever spoken to, his concern was lay with what his audience would think of him: in other words, what was uppermost in his mind was “being judged” as a presenter.

And yet, as a trainer of people who find they have to make presentations, I can’t say how many times I’ve said over and over, it’s “less about the presentation than you think”. To quote colleagues who work in the field of search engine optimisation: “Content Is King”. In other words, if you don’t have something useful to the audience to say, no amount of well delivered tosh is going to make your presentation useful.

As an aside, that doesn’t mean, of course, that having little (or no) content is automatically going to stop your audience thinking what you’re saying is useful. You can always fool some of the people some of the time…. For proof of this, just do a google search on “Clap Traps” to see how you can string together random nonsense and have your audience on it’s feet if you deliver it well enough. (Or watch anything by Tony Robins! :) )

For me, though, presentations and public speaking are about giving something of value to your audience. The presentation itself is simple ‘a means to an end’. The ‘end’ is the imparting of Something. That Something could be information, a skill, an opinion or whatever but there has to be Something. Otherwise we’re in the realm of what Shakespeare would call ‘Sound and fury, signifying naught’.

Dozens of times I’ve helped people out on public fora when they’ve turned up, joined the forum and immediately asked a question like “I’ve got to make a presentation on X in three days: help!”. When I ask them what they want to say in their presentation they’re flummoxed – it simply never occurred to them to do the research first and to have something to say before they started worrying about how to say it.

It’s a concept I’ve termed Communication Impotence sometimes (see my ebook “…like a brick wrapped in velvet…”).

Remember – it’s not always about how well you say it, it’s about what you say: all the presentation has to be (quality wise) is good enough to get your content over, after all. Content is king – presentation quality is more like the Jack; sometimes wild! :)

Hopefully what follow is pretty obvious: when you’re getting your presentation together, sort out what you want to say first.

There’s another advantage to the point I’m making here too, in that it can often help with nerves – no one turns up to hear you speak, they simply turn up to hear what you’ve got to say…. you’re not the focus of what’s in people’s attention. Your audience should be concentrating on what you’re saying, not you. You’re the messenger, not the message (usually).