Public Speaking
Some great advice for public speaking presentations:
- Start the presentation with a set of questions that will be answered through the presentation. Start with an empowerment promise. Outline what the audience will know by the end of the talk.
- Find a way to connect with the audience right away.
- Don’t expose one bullet point of a list at a time. Your audience will ask to go back a slide or two, you end up half way in a build, or worse, with an empty slide. None of this is needed.
- Don’t just read the words on a page or sound like you’re delivering a memorized speech.
- The best talks are stories. The best stories involve repetition. Tell a personal story to make your ideas more sticky.
- Adjust your tempo of speaking to match the urgency of the story.
- Anticipate the audience’s skepticism and use it to your advantage.
- Use fewer words. There is a place for details and context, but the most important is the actual message you want to get across.
- Ensure your slide has a take-away.
- Have a summary. Aim to have 3 big points/takeaways at the end.
- Structure. Stories can be told in many different ways. One way that works well in most situations is to divide the story arc up in Situation, Complication and Solution. Leaving one of these three components out will seriously hamper your ability to convince your audience, just like it is hard to ascend a staircase with stairs missing.
- Number the slides.
- Don’t present any slide with a wall of text.
- Titles for the graphs should be the conclusion.
- If having issues keeping with the story (e.g. you need long notes), use many slides to help you cover all the points and offer a summary at the end.
- Write a great proposal.
- Make your proposal easy to scan.
- Explain what the audience will take away from your talk.