By Tom McCarthy
In business today, the ability to deliver a persuasive presentation is one of the most valuable skills you can have. Billions of dollars of opportunities are either realized or lost each day based upon the effectiveness of presentations. With this in mind companies are spending millions of dollars training their team members how to be more effective presenters.
The problem with many of the training courses available is that they are trying to increase the competency of presenters from the outside in, instead of the inside out. The core belief of most courses is that you have to get people to start doing things differently for them to be great presenters. This creates a situation where presenters struggle to change their habits and make very slow progress, while often reverting back to their old habits after the training.
In my 17 years of training thousands of people how to dramatically improve their results as a presenter I’ve found that the most significant and permanent improvements come from the inside out approach. What I mean by this is that virtually everyone I’ve coached has had times when they were presenting perfectly in the course of their everyday life. My job is to get them to realize the pattern of how they did it and then to get them to tap into that pattern on a consistent basis. In other words I’m working on getting them to do what they already know how to do, and then refining it.
What does an outstanding presentation look like? Ideally, an outstanding presentation is a “series of interesting conversations” with the members of your audience. Virtually everyone has had times in their life where they were communicating to someone else in an interesting and conversational way. Most of the time when this happens it is in a one on one conversation. My goal as a coach is to get them to do that same thing with a group of people. The reality is, even in a group of people, you should only be talking to one person at a time. One of the quotes I use in my classes is, “When you try to talk to everybody at the same time you end up talking to nobody. When you talk to one person at a time you end up talking to everyone.”
So the keys to being an outstanding presenter are simple.
- Feel connected to your audience (you can choose to feel this emotion whenever you want). This will help you to deliver your best presentations.
- Create a series of conversations with your audience. For most of your presentation you should be talking to one person at a time.
- Move with a purpose. Your movement should be guided naturally by who you are in a conversation with. Once you get to where you need to be to be in a conversation, stand there and deliver. Then, after choosing who you are going to talk to next, move to where you need to be to be in a connected conversation.
- Make what you have to say interesting. There are many ways to do this, but the easiest are by using your physiology (gestures, facial expressions, postures, movement) and your voice qualities (pace, volume, tonality). To make what you say interesting you must immerse yourself into the presentation and create variety in your physiology and voice qualities. Instead of delivering the message, become the message.
As I said earlier, everyone has done a perfect presentation before (usually in a one on one conversation) and by realizing the pattern they use they can be at their best every time from now on.
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