Every time you get a chance to present you get a chance to propel your career.
Likewise any time you get a chance to present you get a chance to destroy your career.
So you better get good at it quickly.
Presenting with confidence is a hard skill to learn. Even harder if you rarely get a chance to do it and are thrust into a boardroom at short notice.
So for today’s newsletter I wanted to share some of the tips and tricks I have learnt as a professional facilitator that have made presenting one of the more fun things I now do a lot of. Not one of the daunting things.
Tip 1: Practice (out loud)
And then practice some more.
Do not underestimate the improvement you make saying your presentation out loud over and over again. And I mean hearing your voice.
None of this whispering at your screen as you go through your powerpoint presentation.
Literally practice saying it with hand gestures, pauses, tone flex. When you present you speak and if you do not practice the speaking of it, when you deliver it you will fill it with ums and ahs and forget your key one liners.
When I started developing and delivering workshops my rule of thumb was ten run throughs minimum. So for a 1 day workshop that’s two weeks of run throughs. What words to say and how to say them so the message landed.
And today I still do the same. Practice, practice, practice until it’s memorised. It can sometimes feel like a repetitive scripted west end theatre show to me, but my audience has never he ard it, so it will be new to them.
Tip 2: Anticipating rebuttals
One fear of presenting is when someone disagrees with what you are saying or wants to rebut your point.
For whatever reason most of us prepare a presentation as a logical flow of information filled with data and facts.
And think its indisputable.
The best presenters stop and pause when building their presentation and think “what rebuttals might I get here”
Sales people do it all of the time. Its not buyer beware when there is so much data and information out there, its seller beware. And it’s also presenter beware.
Always anticipate what question you might get from each page. And what your response to it will be.
You may even have to build in an extra page to point out the obvious rebutal. That’s ok too.
And if you do get a curly rebutal or question you can not answer, then try tip 3
Tip 3: Deferral
Which brings us to our final presentation tip, deferral. This one is a favourite of mine for when you do get that curly question you can not answer.
It’s a bit cheeky but it works 95% of the time.
If someone asks you something you haven’t thought of simply say, “Great question, we are going to address this in about 5 pages/10 minutes/etc can we park it until then. And if I don’t answer it just ask me again at the end”.
The second part is important. Nobody ever says no if you add that in.
I was taught this when facilitating. As you often get tricky questions. And I thought wow that’s sneaky. What if I don’t answer it.
The first time I tried it I actually did answer their question in a later slide so it was fine.
The second time I didn’t and you know what happened. Nothing. They simply said sure and then never asked the question again. And I was off the hook.
The beauty of this technique is you more often than not get out of having to answer the question. Or at the very least you buy yourself some time to think of an answer for when they do ask it again.
Either way everyone’s a winner.