A key stakeholder’s feedback is one thing, but convincing them to listen is another. Speaking in front of large crowds is a talent that only a few have mastered. It takes practice, practice, and more practice to feel at ease with everyone looking at you.
Do project managers need presenting skills? After all, it’s been stated that communication makes up 80% of project management. As your career progresses, you can’t avoid presentations. You can use the tips in this article to improve your presenting abilities. It’s time to get started.
Best practices for enhancing your presentation abilities
Your presenting skills will improve if you practice, hone, and enhance them consistently. Yet, having strong presenting abilities has effects outside of the workplace. You should use excellent presentation skills outside of meetings as well.
- Make an effort to talk in front of people.
When you try to convince, engage, or educate in front of an audience, you’ll undoubtedly slip a little. Almost everyone experiences anxiety when all eyes are on one thing.
The overwhelming sense of tension you feel is probably due to unfamiliarity with the circumstances, not a lack of preparation. The more comfortable you are on stage and command everyone’s attention, the less anxious you will feel.
Starting small is the most excellent strategy for putting this habit into practice. To deliver to your closest friends, family, or coworkers, prepare a talk. You will be the focus of everyone’s attention, not necessarily who is listening to you.
- In your presentation, use more graphics rather than words.
We’ve all been there at the conference table and trying our best to stay focused on the presentation. Besides text overload, usually presentations lack color, graphics, and creativity.
There are two reasons why these presentations are terrible:
- When you put text on the screen, your audience will turn away from you and start reading instead.
- Second, a bad presentation will be boring and unbearable to listen to. Your audience will lose interest quickly if you present below par.
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- Use your unique characteristics
Even if it’s a cliché, you should always be genuine in who you are, particularly while presenting. Generally, you can tell when someone is trying to reach their audience by noticing their behavior.
Knowing that almost everyone in the meeting is familiar with you, should give you comfort. Take advantage of this and play up your most vital personality qualities.
Due to these little tweaks, your audience will feel much more comfortable. You should offer some personability to the meeting besides your unique eccentricities. Look around the room, smile more, and be empathetic. It’ll make you more likable, and your audience will be more responsive to you.
- Take questions and comments during your presentation
Throughout your presentation, maintain flexibility. Use an audience response tool or ‘raise your hand’ to respond to audience questions. If it diverts you from your writing, don’t worry. Everyone else in the room will likely share a question or statement from one person.
You will be interested in the subject matter if you prove your knowledge of it. Get right into the important stuff after introducing yourself to the audience.
Take a moment to address any questions or concerns your audience may have. It shows your audience is doing their homework and listening to what you have to say. You’ll feel more confident and relaxed if you loosen up the presentation structure.
- Keep your audience’s eye contact.
This advice is quite simple and will help you connect with your audience. When you pay attention to other people, they tend to pay more attention to you and everything you say. When you’re anxious, you may glance everywhere except at your audience. See if you’re doing it, and make sure you’re looking at someone.
Smiles, firm eye contact, hand gestures, and stances are all signs of confidence. You’ll have trouble focusing when you’re anxious (bouncing, tapping, shaking, darting eyes, and more). They will also pick up on the fact that you are nervous and probably don’t know as much as you claim to.
Regardless of how tense you are, take a deep breath and act relaxed. You could even begin to accept it!
- Make it as brief as you can
Don’t squander necessary meeting time; everyone’s time is valuable (particularly at work). If you can finish speaking in less than half the time, you should. Make sure you’re just presenting the most crucial details. By adding all the extraneous filler, you are likely to bore your audience.
Your discussion should conclude with key lessons learned and the next steps. Whatever your meeting ends, this will ensure that your team knows what to do next. You may give them a one-pager or a summary slide presentation for future reference. With this tip, all your bases are covered when you leave the meeting.
To Sum Up
It takes experience and learning to develop excellent presenting abilities. To grow better and better at something, you must continually work on it. Use the tried-and-true presenting strategies outlined in this post to hone your delivery. Thus, you’ll be able to deliver presentations at important meetings with ease.
Knowledge, practice, and perseverance are required to create a PowerPoint presentation masterpiece. To avoid repeating the same mistakes, start with a template. You can count on SlideUpLift if you’re short on time. Our PowerPoint presentations will help you communicate your message more effectively.