Not everybody and I mean most people no matter how articulate they are talking in a group, interacting in sales call, giving a monthly meeting can actually stand up and give an effective presentation to an audience without some trepidation. I have given countless public speaking workshops and the percentage of people coming to the class or workshop get nervous when they stand up to even introduce themselves. I guess that is why they are in the public speaking workshop. There are many folks that come in and say they only need “This Portion “ of the workshop , but they soon find out that is not the case. Yes a lot of people that come into the workshop are high level professionals , but that does not necessarily mean they are top proficient presenters.
So why do people that have so much confidence get choked up, tripped up, fall apart during their presentations in front of an audience? The key is simply just this – they are not familiar with presenting their material or do not feel that their material is strong enough, their problem is just this – they have not thought to put together a well honed , organized presentation. So the problem is not whether you are a confident person is a question of what kind of person you become when you give the presentation. I had the opportunity to work with an executive of a medical device company who was going to have to give a presentation to a group of potential investors for his product launch. As you can imagine he was going to have to be on point, thorough and very persuasive to get the investors to write a big check. He did not get where he was without confidence but his issue was that he was not confident with his presentation and after reading and tweaking a few things he felt very confident and comfortable to deliver the presentation successfully because he now understood it. . So what did I suggest to better make this presentation easier for him to deliver? For one thing the title of the presentation needs to be a solution that the audience came to hear about , you need to grab their attention immediately! For example instead of “Get Better Results from Your Employees” your title should be “ How many Managers Got Better Results From their Employees by implementing Three Key Strategies” Now we have a solution right of the bat that the speaker feels confident with! The next step, and this sounds simple but many folks struggle with this. You need to come up with three key points to reinforce your title. The three key points would be worked out almost the same way as the title only they are going to support the title by an example , analogy or instance that the audience can understand of make the connection to. When I finished working out the presentation for the aforementioned CEO of the medical device company , he was so confident that he would nail his upcoming presentation for the potential investors and all that was imply done to give him confidence was to reengineer his thinking by reengineering his presentation.
