These are habits you must break if you want to be a great presenter. Here is what you should know.
6. Faking Your Delivery
One thing you should know is that people see when you are faking something. That means that you will find that our audience will not respond well to things like jokes and stupidity. What that means as well is that you must be ready to ensure that you are able to not turn yourself into a clown.
If you are generally relatively quiet, you will have the opportunity to get the attention of many of your co-workers for the first time since they are not accustomed to hearing you talk. You want to always remain yourself when you are delivering a presentation.
How to Break This Bad Habit?
Audiences respond to real people, those that get up and act in front of a presentation are not going to be taken with the level of respect that is being sought. You should never rely on gimmicks to get the attention of your audience. You need to avoid faking and acting like you are not you.
One thing that is very helpful here is to write down 5 to 10 words that your family and your friends would describe to define your personality. You need to make sure that you are always embodying these characteristics when you are in front of an audience.
7. Creating Bullet Ridden and Ridiculous Slides
When you are creating a PowerPoint you must make sure that you have visual slides and that means that you do not want to have tons of text. There are many things that you need to think about and that means that you want to have images and not text. Using bullet points will just drive your audience crazy and the reason for that is because you need to be ready for the content that is being presented.
How to Break This Bad Habit?
If you have a lot to convey, you need to do it with graphics, images and more. You need to think about the principles of design when you are working on this and that means ensuring that you are ready to always have a plan in place. There is also a huge need to ensure that you have quality images and that you can share those instead of text.
You also want to think about glance media, this is media that you would see on a billboard. You should be able to convey your idea in about 3 seconds. This happens because if you have an audience looking at it, you need to make sure that they are engaged.
Without this it will be just another boring presentation that people forget. Make sure that you are seeking to create content that will meet everyone’s needs and think like a designer.
8. Don't Start with an Apology
Part of what you never want to do is to start off with an apology, the reason for this is that you will lose the attention and the respect of your audience right out of the gate. What that means as well is that you should never draw attention to your nervousness, and you want to make sure that you are confident in your words and your presentation.
How to Break This Bad Habit?
You want to always start with a positive. This is a negative and you need to think about that for your audience.
You never want to lose credibility here and that mean that you need to think about how you are going to be able to make a positive impression on the audience. Never spend your time apologizing to the audience.
9. Realize Good Speakers Do Say the Word “Um.”
There are some people who believe that a good speaker will never say um or in and this is not the case. There are many people who think that there must be perfectionism in every part of speech on a regular basis and this is just not the case. There are also many others who do not realize that it is irrational to expect such things and that it is important to make sure that you are focusing on the overall delivery and not nitpicking the sounds coming out of your mouth.
How to Break This Bad Habit?
The key to being able to really become a good speaker is all about focusing on the outcome and making sure that you are being your authentic self. That also means that you need to know that your delivery is yours and not flawless.
10. Never Wing It
Sometimes people think the solution to being nervous is just not to prepare. That will always result in your audience not being ready and not being happy with the outcomes that they are hearing. You need to be ready and always be thinking about the three elements that create a great presentation.
How to Break This Bad Habit?
It takes about 36 to 90 hours of time practicing pulling off a great presentation. You need to know that you cannot wing anything and do it well. You audience will expect you to have a great presentation.
If you are unprepared, you will have no credibility with your audience or your colleagues. If you take this advice into consideration, you will become a great speaker.
It is important to know what will work and what will not work for you. Great speakers do so naturally by combining their talent with their know-how and their voice to ensure that there is a great outcome for the audience.
