Top Ten Presenter Pitfalls
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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Hi there. My name is Leanne, and I help people communicate more effectively in both live presentation and video format. In my 15 years as a producer, I've supported hundreds of presenters from behind the scenes, and throughout my career I've been on stage quite a bit myself. I now leverage that combined experience to coach presenters. Whether you're a new manager giving your first presentation or a CEO who gets up in front of a group every day, it's important to remind yourself of some best practices each time you set out to create a new presentation. So here's my list of top 10 presenter pitfalls and how to avoid them using best practices. Pitfall number one Using Power Point to draft your presentation PowerPoint and Keynote are fantastic tools for creating beautiful visuals that support your presentation. Highlight takeaways and how's your prompts in the notes. But starting your first draft in this medium can create a default structure for your talk that doesn't serve you in the end. It can also lead to the stream of consciousness effects in which everything you're going to say appears on your slides. Best practice. Wait to create slides until you have a well organized structure. Start by taking yourself for a contemplative walk or a tech free brainstorming session to gather your thoughts about your most essential content. As your ideas coalesce, take notes and hold them into an outline. Pitfall number two. Not identifying key. Take Away. We've all listened to a meandering presentation at some point and thought, What are they getting? Attending a meeting requires a lot of audience concentration and patients, so we want to make it as easy as possible for people to understand our content. Best practice. Identify about three main take aways. They should be unique insights that are powerful coming from your experience and point of view. Set up your main points at the beginning. Support them through the presentation and recap them at the end. When you build your structure on a strong foundation, everyone walks away with something memorable and useful. Presentation. Pitfall Number three is forgetting your audience. Once they're in the room, the audience is often stuck with us for our talk, whether we engage them or not. But that doesn't mean we should ignore their needs and drone on about the price of tea. Just because we feel like it Best practice. Think about what your audience needs to get out of this presentation and then consider how you can help. What information can you relay that will help them do their jobs better or even inspire them to think differently? Is there a story or anecdote that you could use to help them connect with your message? Is your session at the end of a long morning of sitting still, In which case, maybe they need an interactive exercise to perk up and engage? Really? Put some thought into your audiences frame of mind when you're honing your content. Pitfall number four Rehearsing While sitting Down Alone I encounter a lot of presenters who think reversing means sitting in front of their laptop, reading their speech over and over again in their heads. They don't even say it out loud or put it on its feet until a day or two before the session. This really misses an opportunity. Something magical happens when you stand up in front of another person and present your ideas. It activates your entire body of knowledge literally that point, you've been hemming and hawing over how to say suddenly you know exactly how you need to communicate it because you're human storytelling instinct kicks in. Best practice. Rehearse your speech standing up in front of a colleague, if possible, someone who matches the profile of your audience members. When you do, pay attention to what happens, the information you get from this type of rehearsal is essential in creating a talk that resonates with your audience. Pitfall number five Relying too heavily on your script. Having a script is great, and today's technology has some really cool ways of helping you refer to that script through tele prompting and downstage monitors. But what happens if the power goes out for your notes? Fly off the elector. It's every presenters nightmare, but you should be prepared to handle it. Best practice. No, your content cold. How do you get there? Rehearsed first rehearsed until you can relay at least your essential takeaways without any prompting at all, you can improvise the stuff in between. Pitfall number six is overcrowded. Word. Heavy slides. If you're not giving your audience more than what's on a slide, why are you there in person? Presenting it all slides that look more like a term paper than a visual aid of the quickest way to send your audience to snooze ville. Why not just send a PdF over email and save us all the travel expenses? Best practice. Your slides should support your presentation, not be your presentation. Just use short phrases and bullet points that capture the essence of your main ideas so you can keep the audience captivated in your live delivery. Also, make sure all words appear large enough to be readable on screen. When your laptop is 10 feet away and whenever possible, use pictures to convey a concept instead of words. They're prettier. Pitfall number seven Excluding your production team. Perfecting slides on your own could be a frustrating and time consuming proposition. And yet many of you out there suffer in silence. Best practice. Ask a producer like me for health. You're backstage. Team wants your presentation to go off without a hitch, and the sooner you let us in on what you'd like to achieve in your session, the more expertise we can bring. I need a better layout. We've got you covered. Got a YouTube link you want to use, but you're not sure how to pull it off the Internet. Give us a little heads up and we'll have that video embedded playing in the highest possible quality. And even at the right audio. Now it's time for us to have a real heart to heart about. Pitfall number eight. Last minute changes you out there on version 27 of your slide deck, staying up until the wee hours, making those final adjustments before we pry the presentation from your cold, sleep deprived hands. It's not helping you. Those tiny tweaks don't make a big enough difference in your overall message to be worth the trouble. In fact, I've seen countless presenters change their slide so many times that they're actually thrown off by their own last minute changes. When they finally present best practice, Try to lock your content two weeks out so you can practice navigating your slides effortlessly and focus on connecting with the audience when you get on stage. Presentation. Pitfall number nine. Moving without purpose, otherwise known as swaying pacing or river dance. If you really get carried away, using the stage is a fantastic way to engage your audience but channeling nervous energy into swaying because someone once told you to move around more can actually distract from your message and even make your audience seasick. See what I'm doing here. Best practice. Use a move and plant strategy. Tie your movement to your main content areas. When you move, commit to it. Move six steps instead of two. Travel across the stage and then plant yourself there until it's time for another topic. This has the added benefit of visually signaling your audience to put back up when you're making a new point for this last and most common presenter pitfall. I'm just gonna give you a quick demonstration of its undesirable effects. Pitfall Number 10 is turning your head to look at the screen. I don't care how cute your ears are. No one wants to spend your presentation looking at the side of your head. A lot of presenters do this unknowingly, so really tune into this when you're rehearsing. Remember, the slides are for your audience, not for you to read from if you really need to see what your audience is seeing, the best practice is to utilize downstage monitors or a laptop on stage. This keeps you looking in the same direction as your audience and enables us to see your pretty face in larger setups. The production team can even program your monitors so that one shows you what the audience sees and other one shows. You your presenter notes. Okay, I think I've given you more than enough to think about while you plan your next big talk. Remember these 10 best practices and I know you'll do great.