…..so says a student friend of mine who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s having to give presentations for the first time. To be fair to him, he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say this spontaneously, but in response to a question about what was the worst thing about speaking in public. Like almost everyone I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153being judged\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as a presenter.<\/p>\n
And yet, as a trainer of people who find they have to make presentations, I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say how many times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve said over and over, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153less about the presentation than you think\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. To quote colleagues who work in the field of search engine optimisation: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Content Is King\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. In other words, if you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have something useful to the audience to say, no amount of well delivered tosh is going to make your presentation useful.<\/p>\n
As an aside, that doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean, of course, that having little (or no) content is automatically<\/em> going to stop your audience thinking<\/strong> what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Clap Traps\u00e2\u20ac\u009d to see how you can string together random nonsense and have your audience on it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s feet if you deliver it well enough. (Or watch anything by Tony Robins! :) )<\/p>\n For me, though, presentations and public speaking are about giving something of value to your audience. The presentation itself is simple \u00e2\u20ac\u02dca means to an end\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. The \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is the imparting of Something. That Something could be information, a skill, an opinion or whatever but there has to be Something. Otherwise we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re in the realm of what Shakespeare would call \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcSound and fury, signifying naught\u00e2\u20ac\u2122.<\/p>\n Dozens of times I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve helped people out on public fora when they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve turned up, joined the forum and immediately asked a question like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to make a presentation on X in three days: help!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. When I ask them what they want to say in their presentation they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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.<\/p>\n It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a concept I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve termed Communication Impotence sometimes (see my ebook \u00e2\u20ac\u0153…like a brick wrapped in velvet…\u00e2\u20ac\u009d).<\/p>\n Remember – it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not always about how well you say it, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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! :)<\/p>\n Hopefully what follow is pretty obvious: when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re getting your presentation together, sort out what you want to say first<\/strong>.<\/p>\n There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s another advantage to the point I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to say…. you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not the focus of what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s attention. Your audience should be concentrating on what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re saying, not you. You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re the messenger, not the message (usually).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …..so says a student friend of mine who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s having to give presentations for the first time. To be fair to him, he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t say this spontaneously, but in response to a question about what was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-key-posts","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}