Presentation Skills 1/3
– To be aware of how body language can improve message transmission;
– To understand how to design and deliver a message that sticks in the mind of your audience;
– To practice presentation skills.
When having to make a presentation, you should be dedicated to researching the topic, collecting input from experts, organising ideas, collaborating with colleagues, and sketching the structure of the story.
– Slow down your busy mind to see your problem and goals more clearly.
– Find time alone to see the big picture.
– Avoid starting the day before presentation is due.
Design experts recommend that presenters spend the majority of their time thinking, scripting, and sketching.
– For greater focus, try turning off the computer and going analog.
– Use paper and pens or a whiteboard first to record and sketch out your ideas.
– Answer key questions: What’s your main (core) point? Why does it matter to the audience? If your audience remembers only one thing, what should it be?
Cliff Atkinson, Beyond Bullet Points.
It’s a process that encourages free association, creativity, randomness, and openness while helping you consider all the information that may (or may not) belong in your presentation. Later on in the process, you can sort, select, eliminate, add, and organise these raw materials into a form that flows logically and compellingly from Point A to Point B.
– Define what is the objective of the presentation and work towards it
– Identify who your audience is and what can be their interest(s).
– Generate as many ideas as possible about the topic you want to address.
– Collect ALL inputs you can find.
Clustering is a necessary technique for organising any complex material for presentation to an audience.
As you work on identifying clusters from the brainstorming output, you may find yourself identifying links and connections that didn’t occur to you before.
If some ideas seem to have no connection to any of the key ideas around your topic, now is the time to ask whether those ideas are truly relevant and necessary. Perhaps they don’t deserve to survive the transition to the finished presentation. And if you think of new ideas now that ought to be inserted, go ahead and add them.
It’s time to decide which key idea goes first, which goes in the middle, and which goes last. You need a clear path determining the best order for the elements of your presentation.
Your job is to become the navigator for your audience, to make the relationships among all the parts of your story clear for them.
One can follow Aristotle’s classic five-point plan to create a persuasive argument:
1. Deliver a story or statement that arouses the audience’s interest.
2. Pose a problem or question that has to be solved or answered.
3. Offer a solution to the problem you raised.
4. Describe specific benefits for adopting the course of action set forth in your solution.
5. State a call to action.
Brainstorm your topic away from the computer and group the most important bits.
Identify the underlying theme and be true to that theme (core message) throughout the creation of the presentation.
Create your outline, deciding how the ideas will be presented and connected to each other.
A presentation is never just about the facts.
Ask questions or find holes in people’s knowledge. Stimulate audience curiosity. Surprise them.
Then hold attention… Now the audience is aware that they have a gap in their knowledge, fill that gap with the answers to the puzzle (or guide them to the answers). Take people on a journey.
Speak of concrete images, not of vague notions. By being practical, help people understand and remember.
Proverbs are good at reducing abstract concepts to concrete, simple, but powerful and memorable language. For example, the expression “kill two birds with one stone” is more concrete than saying something like “let’s work toward maximising our productivity by increasing efficiency across many departments, etc.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnR1QM9vb5U
Your presentation has to make your audience believe in and agree with your message.
If you are famous in your field, you may have built-in credibility (but even that does not go as far as it used to).
During your presentation you can use convincing details, present situations everybody could face and overcome using your message, testable credentials.
If you have to use statistics, make them accessible and practical. Most of the time, they support the message but they’re not the message.
You can also access it later on in the additional material section.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx_1w881iEw
People are emotional beings. It is not enough to take people through a laundry list of talking points and information on your slides—you must make them feel something. Your message should make people care. You can use the power of association to build your message more clearly in your audience’s schema of the world.
By an appeal to individual self-interest or group identity you can make them adhere to your message and act according to it.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw6HzCSnl_4
We tell stories all day long. It’s how humans have always communicated. We tell stories with our words and even with our art and music. We express ourselves through the stories we share. We teach, we learn, and we grow through stories.
Stories get our attention and are easier to remember than lists of rules. People love Hollywood, Bollywood, How I met your mothers, and numerous other films and series. People are attracted to “story.”
Your presentation should make people act. Stories are an invitation to model a character’s behaviour; it tells people how to act. You can also make it motivational by providing to your audience the energy to act.
Expl: Simple: aaaa bbb cccccc (etc)
In you don’t have time, you can access it later in the additional material section.
Link to the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA