I’m not talking about picking a fight here, I’m talking about making a presentation.<\/p>\n
I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read well intentioned advice to would-be presenters, online, saying that you should face the audience, not your screen. \u00c2\u00a0There’s an example here of really good advice about how to do that just , for example (which is what inspired me to write this post.) from Presentation Advizors. \u00c2\u00a0Other tipslists I’ve read recently have even gone so far as to suggest rigging the room with mirrors so you can see the screen behind you while looking at the audience, though I’m not sure I’d recommend that!<\/p>\n
Thing is, like other lists of tips, I’m not sure such advice, no matter how good it is, can work.<\/p>\n
The reason it can’t work, I suspect, is because many presenters don’t want<\/strong> it to work. \u00c2\u00a0Stay with me here, while I explain my thinking.<\/p>\n Firstly, lists of tips always say “practice” and most people don’t want to do that because it’s hard work. \u00c2\u00a0Often they say that they’re too busy (and some of them are right, but not many). Because making presentations is known to be difficult and\/or frightening they then feel they have an excuse to go out there and waste everyone’s time by making an under-rehearsed presentation. \u00c2\u00a0In other words, people ignore such lists because it’s in their own interest to do so, timewise. \u00c2\u00a0Even if they don’t do the practice tip, the other tips often take time an effort to get sorted out!<\/p>\n Secondly… and I’m thinking in particular about the idea of not facing the screen here… it’s because most people who “write presentations” (always a mistake in my mind – I say you should design<\/strong> them!) don’t want to be doing the presentation and are therefore – without thinking about it – designing their slides for themselves. That’s the crunch issue. \u00c2\u00a0Slides should be designed for the audience. \u00c2\u00a0If the presenter is designing them for him\/herself, perhaps as a prompt or a crutch, no wonder they face the slides<\/em> all the time!<\/p>\n It seems to me this is the critical issue, because without the shift in mindset, nothing can change. \u00c2\u00a0Not just won’<\/strong>t change, but can’t<\/strong> change.<\/p>\n Thirdly – I’m far from convinced that the kind of people who need<\/strong> to read these lists of hints and tips are the kind of people who actually do. \u00c2\u00a0My wife’s a teacher and her comment about Parents’ Evenings is that typically the parents who turn up are the parents of the well-behaved kids who aren’t a problem, don’t worry the teacher and who therefore don’t need to have their parents come along. \u00c2\u00a0The parents of the problem kids don’t turn up.<\/p>\n Maybe I’m just a grumpy old man… anyone with me?<\/p>\n Okay, I know this is just one side of things – and that a lot of people genuinely are scared of looking the audience in the eyes (and trainers like me can help with that) and I know that there are some people who look at the screen for the right reasons… but….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not talking about picking a fight here, I’m talking about making a presentation. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve read well intentioned advice to would-be presenters, online, saying that you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips","category-rant"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764","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=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}