10 Steps To The Best Presentation You Ever Delivered
So you are probably here because you have a presentation to deliver and you do not think you can pull it off. Whether is for work, school, or any other place, remember that you are basically explaining stuff to people just as you would a favorite movie or the stats of your favorite sports star. To give your best presentation ever, all you need is a few tips and adequate practice to develop your skills.
If you want to know how to deliver presentations like boss, carefully go through the following steps and have your audience eating out of your hand in no time.
Instructions
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1
Research thoroughly to familiarize yourself with the topic especially if you do not have that much information to begin with and even if you are familiar with the subject you could uncover new information that could wow your audience and improve your presentation skills.
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Next is to organize and summarize all this information you have at your disposal and focus your all your ideas into something concise that can be easily delivered.
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You could everything boil everything down to an essay you could cram and deliver like a speech. With the right tone and body language your audience will not be able to tell. But if your memory is terrible, summarize your main points on a few index cards (not more than five) you can quickly glace at to either refresh your memory or serve as jumping off point should you get stuck during the presentation. Do not read from these cards.
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Practice!. First do it on your own to avoid distractions. This is when you develop a rhythm (speed of voice, pauses, inflections and experiment with hand gestures to compliment your tone of voice. The whole idea here is to start building confidence in your material and visualizing a presentation scenario you can feel comfortable in.
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More practice!!. if possible get friends and family involved. Now you are going to try to stimulate an actual presentation scenario and get some constructive feedback. Main thing here is to work on engaging (not necessarily entertaining) your audience. Look at the foreheads of your test audience if you cannot maintain eye contact. Also make sure to shift your gaze every now and then to avoid focusing on one particular section of the audience for too long. Also experiment with hand gestures and facial expressions (nothing overly dramatic) to drive home your key points. Jokes and amusing rhetorical question are welcome if you can pull them off. Unless you are presenting on some macabre or painful topic, remember to always smile.
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Make sure you build confidence going into a presentation. See that you are comfortably well dressed and smell good, if you have that song that fires you up, crank the volume up. If you sweat a lot bring a towel to casually mop your brow.
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Before your launch into your material, maintain a good standing posture and slowly take a deep breath, release and pause before your greet your audience and introduce your topic. This builds suspense and allows for the room to quiet down so you do not struggle to carry your voice over the noise in the room.
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As you navigate your material, resist the urge to utter useless speech fillers like ‘’umm”. Just pause as you gather your thoughts and open your mouth with an actual sentence.
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If after all your practice you feel your hands trembling during a presentation, do not put your hands behind your back or in your pockets, this can be very irritating for your audience. Try dropping your arms and occasionally interlocking your fingers. Do not swing your arms. Walk around and remember to throw your gaze around the room.
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Finally, your conclusion is everything, your last chance to really nail your best presentation ever. Ending well is the difference between a good and great presentation. Whether you intend to summarize your presentation in an anecdote, throw out a challenge in the form of a question or a declaration or maybe use a pop culture reference just remember to end on a high note.
