Your presentation is about a lot more than the message you’re aiming to deliver. It’s about being an overall better presenter.
It doesn’t matter if you’re presenting to a team of sales leaders, giving a TED Talk to thousands, or hosting a family meeting—your presentation is an invaluable opportunity for you to demonstrate your capabilities and leadership skills.
That being said, when you’re preparing to present, it’s in your best interest to consider not only the message you want to convey, but how you want to convey it as well as how you’d like to portray yourself as a leader.
Making those considerations while you prepare doesn’t need to be intimidating or overwhelming (even if it feels that way at first). In fact, putting just a little additional focus on the following three factors will work wonders to enhance your presentation game tenfold and become a better presenter.
Find the Excitement in Your Material
When you’re practicing and rehearsing over and over, it’s easy to lose sight of why you’re excited to share your message in the first place. But it’s critical that you don’t. Every step of the way you want to remind yourself why you’re enthusiastic about what you’re sharing and find ways to continually reignite your excitement by redirecting your focus on what’s interesting and important about the topic.
That’s because your audience is looking to you to set the tone of the moment and of your material. If you walk out to present and you’re preoccupied with something that happened that day, your audience will feel preoccupied. If you make it clear that you’re very nervous, your audience will feel nervous for you. But if you step on stage emitting excitement and enthusiasm, guess what? Yep, your audience will feel excited and enthusiastic along with you.
Know Who You’re Talking to
Another area that’s easy to overlook when cultivating your presentation is who, exactly, you’re presenting to. But if you want to be the best presenter you can be, then you should give just as much time to assessing the characteristics, desires, and needs of your audience as you do to preparing what you’re going to say to them. According to Matt Abrahams, Stanford lecturer and expert on public speaking, by focusing on your audience’s perspective, you’re better able to deliver information your audience finds relevant which will, in turn, make them more likely to understand and retain it.
Think about the best conversations you’ve had—the ones that resonate with you for days afterward. Chances are, those conversations were so meaningful because there was a mutual understanding of one another’s positions and perspectives. Presentations work the same way. The better you know your audience, the more understood and, therefore, the more engaged they’ll feel.
Show Your Personality
Depending who you are, this is either the easiest thing to do or the most uncomfortable, but regardless of where you fall, it’s definitely among the most important. A willingness to show your personality through humor, through a vulnerable story, or through whatever else makes you you. This is your key to connecting with the audience.
As humans, we connect to authenticity more than anything else. If you’re pretending to be someone else or afraid to let what’s unique about your personality shine through, not only will your presentation suffer, but your audience will lose trust in what you’re saying. After all, if you can’t trust yourself to be yourself, why should they trust you? If you can answer this question, you will become a better presenter.
