Presentation Skills Fear #4 – Do you or someone in your team worry about having really boring presentations?

There are skills that individuals and teams can use to help them deliver business presentations with more engagement and variety.

Using examples and metaphors whilst delivering your presentation clearly with the correct tone and voice variance is an excellent way to bring passion and emotion into your speech or presentation. We cover this in more detail in the book High-Performance Presentations. A useful idea is to record yourself or deliver your presentation to someone else so they can listen out for pitch, speed and emotion.

The most effective way of not delivering boring presentations is to allow your personality and passion to shine through. To do this you need to ensure you get any Public Speaking Monkeys under control so you can stand up and be confident in front of an audience. Sometimes it is the ‘you’re boring monkey’ that rears its head and makes you give a boring presentation. Because you’re so nervous and concerned about ‘risking’ something new, you just rush through it to get it out there quickly. The problem with that is it can send you on the downward Monkey Spiral and it’s only going to get worse if you keep doing it.

If you’re speaking to a wide variety of professions in the audience or at different levels then adapt your message to fit in with their knowledge and background. Not understanding and knowing your audience is a mistake that many often make. Even if you’ve delivered the same presentation before to a different audience you won’t get the same result.

It’s crucial to take the time to understand your audience and adapt your message to fit with them. Remember a potential customer in one industry might not want to know the same information in such detail as someone in a different industry – the presentation may be similar but the layout and level of detail may need to be adapted.

A useful tool is to use the Simply Amazing Structure outlined in the High-Performance Presentations book and in our one to one mentoring programmes- this helps you modify
every message to the audience and their personality styles.

Do you feel as though your team need to refresh their presentation skills? Maybe you want to see fast results and learn how to get rid of bad habits? Take a look at our communications courses to see which one may suit you or your team.

Read Presentation Fear#5!