How to Present to a Live Audience

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On the simplest level
you need to have a beginning, a middle and an end to any presentation.
And what they normally say is that you need to start off
by saying what you're going to say, saying it and then saying what you've said.
So the repetition helps people to understand what your presentation is all about.
But I think that doesn't really explain
what makes a good presentation, something which is really going to convince people.
And that involves, I think, some more special ingredients.
I think you need to have a really good story.
You need to have a really good piece of technical work.
But more than that, you need to have some passion.
You need to really be able to connect with the audience.
And make them believe in what you're talking about and that will end up in a really good presentation.
So most of the time
you have a very limited period of time to give your presentation.
So you're restricted on what you can present.
One of the things you have to be very careful about is what you show and what you don't show.
In general it's really good to try and keep the messages
simple and clear.
And one of the biggest mistakes I think that's often made
is trying to put far too much on a slide and
people when they first see them are completely bamboozled by this
complexity of information.
So if you're making a particular point try and stick to that point.
And so that each slide
Connects with the previous one and helps to tell your story in a clear and concise fashion.
I think probably the best advice is to try and keep each slide simple. Keep the message simple.
You know you're going to be talking at the same time.
So what you don't want to do is to fill the slide with the contrary that you're going to make.
Otherwise people will read the slide rather than listen to you
and you want them to listen to you and to your message.
But at the same time there are always going to be people who momentarily switch off during a presentation.
So there needs to be something on that slide which enables them to
bring them back online and understand what you're talking about.
I always think that to give a good presentation you need to be very well prepared.
And that really means that you should think about it quite carefully and
the pieces of the puzzle don't always fall together easily first time round.
Sometimes you have to
drop it and think about it and come back to it later.
And then the flow of the presentation makes more sense, later on.
If you can rehearse the presentation properly in front of an audience,
preferably a friendly audience, then that's a incredibly valuable thing to do.
Early on in my career I went on a presentation skills course, as I'm sure many people do,
and it was the first time that I'd appeared on camera.
And it's a very unsettling experience to see yourself what you actually look like on the stage.
But it's a very very valuable thing to do, because there are all sorts of
mannerisms that we have; we use our hands, we walk around the stage, we twitch our faces
and these things can actually be very distracting
and you don't know that you're doing them.
So I just said it's very important
you should try and see yourself on video first, at some point,
and preferably to rehearse your presentation so people can give you good quality feedback.
So the first thing I did was to make a joke
and the joke fell very flat.
It was a disaster.
It sank without a trace.
So I thought to myself
"Charles you've got to keep this together. You've got to keep going"
So I started telling a story about this friend of mine and
it's really interesting, because about halfway through telling the story I realized
that the people were all listening to me, were all watching me.
And that's the most extraordinary experience,
to suddenly realize, it's almost like that the sound of people listening to what you're saying.
So I think what I'd say is that
If you're giving a presentation and you can actually hear the sound of people listening to you.
Then you've definitely cracked your presentation.
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How to Present to a Live Audience - The Story

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