{"id":3127,"date":"2015-02-26T08:57:28","date_gmt":"2015-02-26T08:57:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3127"},"modified":"2015-02-26T08:57:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-26T08:57:28","slug":"naked-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/naked-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"Naked presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Amongst presenters and professional speakers there&#8217;s a jargon term for delivering without slides, props or other help: it&#8217;s called &#8220;doing it naked&#8221;. (Even good professionals get nervous and prefer some clothing.) And there&#8217;s some well-meaning but awful advice for nervous presenters &#8211; that they should imagine their audiences <a href=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-3128\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/1-300x240.png\" alt=\"1\" width=\"300\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/1-300x240.png 300w, http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/1.png 945w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>either naked or at least in their underwear. It&#8217;s based on the idea that if you do that you&#8217;re less afraid of your audience as you realise that they&#8217;re only human too.<\/p>\n<p>Like you, they put their jeans on one leg at a time. And like you they get nervous if they&#8217;re up on stage at the front. Just like you, the idea is, they&#8217;re fallible.<\/p>\n<p>The problem is, of course that doing all of that works (if it works at all, which it never did for me!) by undermining my <strong>respect<\/strong> for my audience. And if I don&#8217;t respect them, how can I hope to influence them?<\/p>\n<p>How would you like it if you thought they were imaging you in your underwear?<\/p>\n<p>A better way is to concentrate on your audience as collaborators. Yes, you heard me. They&#8217;re not there to judge, they&#8217;re there to work with you to be entertained and\/or educated. You have different roles but you&#8217;re both there for the same reason, the same event.<\/p>\n<p>An analogy that some of my clients find useful is this: imagine you&#8217;re dancing with your audience on Strictly Come Dancing. \u00a0Both you and the audience are there to do the same thing (the dance = passing on idea and facts in your presentation) but you&#8217;ve got different roles. You lead. You steer the dance just like you steer the presentation.<\/p>\n<p>That means you have to be clear about where you want to go and you have to give clear instructions to your audience: they can&#8217;t follow if you don&#8217;t lead!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Amongst presenters and professional speakers there&#8217;s a jargon term for delivering without slides, props or other help: it&#8217;s called &#8220;doing it naked&#8221;. (Even good professionals get nervous and prefer some clothing.) And there&#8217;s some well-meaning [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3128,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127","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=3127"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3129,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3127\/revisions\/3129"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}