Presentation Skills How to: Why the ‘how’ is so important.

Occasionally when attending conferences, I have noticed that not all motivational speakers get their audience doing activities and sometimes it’s only little ole me.

I know, when working with a large group of people, it isn’t always as easy to get them doing exercises and some presenters find it too daunting handing control over to 100 or 200 people in the audience for fear that they will never get them back again!

In conferences especially, it is essential that participants experience learning for themselves rather than just being “talked at” all day long.  It is all about usability and relevance; it’s about demonstrating the talk’s relevance to the audience in the here and now.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of speaking at 2 conferences, which has led me to share my thoughts with you on why the ‘how’ is so important.

The first event I spoke at was an Annual Conference on Insights Discovery Personality Profiling, to 80 people for 90 minutes and my goals for the talk were:

• To entertain engage and raise a curiosity in the audience
• Help each participant understand their preferred colour
• Help them to see what that means in terms of personal strengths and weaknesses.
• See how they can adapt their style to others and especially opposite colour energies!

The second Conference I presented at, was 200 women, for just 15 minutes and yet we still got a “how” exercise in!.

If you have done my training, you will know how much I like the 4MAT; generally, I have found the most underutilised section of the 4MAT is the “How” Section. This is where the delegate applies your learning to themselves and their teams.  They are visualizing or actually using the information.

Doing exercises and/or breakouts are excellent for the “How” section and are a great way of getting people engaged in the subject.  But in addition to a lack of experience or confidence, the other challenge with the “How” section is it can be time-consuming, especially with larger audiences. But if you like me, are convinced of the importance of the “How” and want to know how you can effectively manage breakout groups and exercises with larger audiences – without chaos ensuing, look out for Part 2 in this Blog series.

Simply Amazing Training offers professional presentation skills training courses for companies and individuals. Have a look at our Guide for our most popular training courses and presentation skills workshops or call us today for a chat to discuss; we recognise that all of our clients are different and have different needs when it comes to their in house company training courses.