Presentation Skills How to:Presentation Exercises – Preparation

As a Motivational Speaker making the “How” section come to life takes a lot of preparation to get it right but that’s where the real change happens for your participants.  Often, it is where the light bulb moments happen…

So I would encourage you to do it every time, even if its only 1 minute! In the first blog of this 3 part series, we looked at “Why the “How” is so important” in your 4MAT structure of presentations.

Here are my top tips on preparing for the successful management of breakout activities and exercises with larger audiences:

• Consider how many exercises you can do in the time available and decide what main feeling you want them to realise. The whole exercise should be set up around the feeling you want them to have.  Eg confident, empowered etc.
• Consider your audience size and allow a little more time for organisation and instructions the more people you have. When giving instructions to a large group of people, it is best to do it in very small chunks.  Say to your participants “Find a buddy and face the front of the room for the next instruction”
• Consider what props you might need – does your audience need pen and paper or are you putting something on the table or underneath their seats.  Will they require access to flip charts, pens, stickers or even playing cards?   One good example is In my Insights Discovery personality profiling workshops – the audience get given playing cards of different colours and they go around the room, accumulating the playing cards that represent their own personalities well and giving away those that don’t (it’s great fun).
• Adapt to room layout.  It is worth remembering that by having round tables or a theatre style seating, you will get a very different space. Adapt your exercises if people cannot move around the room or get out of their seats. If the seating is in Theatre style you can still do exercises.  You can ask audience members to turn to the person next to them and discuss a particular thing such as ‘discuss your top 3 findings’ or ‘describe how you are going to implement this idea in your business.’
• Practice your exercise timings – it is very easy to let these breakouts or exercises run away from a time point of view.  Always take a timer and be aware of the implications.
• In working out your timings, remember you will need to allow time to do the exercise and where relevant to debrief the exercise.
• Always practice on a group of friends or unsuspecting colleagues (before the event) and ask them to follow your instructions (not second guess what they think they should be doing) – to see if they can follow your instructions or to identify if you need to explain more clearly.

Next month, I will share with you some great suggestions for the implementation phase of managing breakouts and exercises with larger groups.

Simply Amazing Training offers professional presentation skills training courses for companies and individuals.  Have a look at our Guide to our most popular training courses and presentation skills workshops or call me 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.

Team training with personality profiles

Simply Amazing Training also offers Insights Discovery (colours) Personality Profiling, this uses a simple, effective and usable model to understand an individual’s unique preferences and those of the team. If you want to give your team even more tools to be successful or fancy a change of pace for your conference or team meeting then get in touch. Dee delivers “colourful” interactive workshops on Insights Discovery which are tailored to your needs and leave participants feeling inspired.