Communication business presentation skills

The time you spend searching for a good verb is time well spent. When a verb carries more meaning, you can dispense with many of the words used to bolster weak verbs. Weak verbs keep frequent company with two grammatical undesirables: passive voice and nominalizations
Practice your presentation skills Practice on a colleague or friend. Think about who your audience is and what you want them to get out of an effective presentation. Think about content and style. If you video yourself get someone else to evaluate your performance and highlight your best skills; you will find it very difficult to be objective about those skills yourself. Prepare, prepare, prepare. Reconnoiter Go into the presentation room before the event; practice any moves you may have to make, e.g. getting up from your chair to the podium. Errors in the first 20 seconds can be very disorientating. Avoid 'Blue peter syndrome' Try not to over prepare. Trust those skills you know you have. Don't rehearse the whole thing right through too often. Your time is better spent going over your opening beginning and your finish. Pick a few choice bits to learn by heart. Technical support Test the equipment before the presentation; get familiar with it before you start. PowerPoint and OHPs often seem as though they're out to get you, so make sure you have enough technical skills or backup so that you look like you're in charge. Visual aids The skill with visual aids is to use them to give a big picture quickly. Graphics, pictures, cartoons bar charts etc; you can then use words to elaborate. Slides with words on are of limited value. If you seem to have a lot you may find you are showing your audience your speaker notes!
Presentation style Be yourself Your most useful presentation skills are the skills you already have. Use any personal gestures or vocal inflections to your advantage. It's very hard to change the way you express yourself. More effective presentations are ones where you actual put the energy into the presentation (this is a message you will hear again). Similarly, do not try to be anyone else or copy another presenter's style. Wave Be more expressive rather than less. These days 'good communicators' are more and more frequently seen on TV and held up as models. When you are giving a presentation it is not TV. This is you communicating live. Gestures help understanding and convey your enthusiasm for the topic.
Be nervous A certain amount of nervousness is vital for a good presentation. You need the extra energy to communicate: What you feel when you stand up in front of people is the urge to either run away or fight. If you endeavour to stifle those feelings you will be inhibited, restricted, artificial and wooden. The added adrenaline will keep your faculties sharp and your presentation skills ready to engage with your audience. Breathe Extra adrenaline, however, can result in shallow upper chest breathing and tension. Taking a slow, deep breath, breathing fully out and then in again, will relax you. Strangely having something to pick up and put down tends to release your breathing. Get something else to do It may seem an odd idea, but our bodies seem to feel better when they have some sort of displacement activity to occupy them. It's the reason people hold pens and fiddle with things. A limited amount of this sort of activity will not be too obtrusive and can make you feel a lot more secure. Hold on to something When you start your presentation you are at your most insecure. Avoid all the well-meant advice about what you are and are not allowed to do. Until you feel settled do anything you can find to make yourself feel secure. This includes holding on to a lectern. Even just standing next to something solid will make you feel less wobbly. Go slow The breathing tip above will help you to slow down your presentation. Go more slowly than you think necessary to avoid gabbling. Your audience need the time to assimilate and interpret what you are saying. It's a fact that when adrenaline is flowing your sense of time is distorted and what seems OK to you may look like fast forward to your audience.
Working your audience Presentation as Conversation Make your presentation a conversation with your audience. They may not actually say anything, but make them feel consulted, questioned, challenged, argued with; then they will stay awake and attentive. One of your best presentation skills is the ability to stimulate your audience into wanting to get more of the information you have, not just to present that information at them. Interact Engage with your present audience, not the one you have prepared for. Look for reactions to your ideas and respond to their signals. If the light bulbs are not going on find another way to say it. Monitor their reactions; it's the only way you'll know how you're doing and what you should do next. If you don't interact you might as well send a video recording of your presentation. It's why you came. Show conviction Give an expressive presentation and an enthusiastic presentation and your audience will respond, which is what you want. At the very bottom line disagreement is preferable to being ignored. Use your excitement, pace yourself to give an exciting presentation, use something you know you feel strongly about to build up to an important point or as a springboard to another idea. Get some perspective The odds are that someone in the audience will not like your presentation, or may disagree with you. There will probably be someone else out there for whom you can do no wrong. As a rule of thumb, the majority of most audiences want to like you and what you have to say - they want you to be good. They didn't come hoping to be bored or irritated by your presentation.
Structuring effective presentations Use metaphors Metaphors and analogies are vital presentation skills to develop. 'It's like climbing a greasy pole', for example, conveys far more than just literal meaning. It conveys image and feeling and enables others to empathise through similar experiences of their own. And remember the light bulbs - if they're not lighting up try a different metaphor. Examples Effective presentations are full of examples. Giving an example always helps your listeners to see more clearly what you mean. It's quicker and more colorful. The point Stick to the point using three or four basic ideas. For any detail that you cannot present in 20 minutes, try another medium such as handouts or brochures.
Your Presentation Finale End as if your presentation has gone well. Do this even if you feel like you've presented badly. First, you're probably the worst judge of your presentation, and second, if you finish well you'll certainly fool some of the people into thinking it was all pretty good. And anyway a good finish to a presentation will get you some applause - and you deserve it! Developing as a presenter Trust yourself and your skills If you do not think you are up to a particular presentation either get help (do training courses and rehearsals), or get someone else to do it (there's no shame in recognizing your limits). However, most people have better presentation skills that they think they do. Recognize what skills you have. If you doubt your ability to think on your feet, for example, then defer questions till after the presentation. Similarly, do not use a joke as an ice breaker if you are not good at telling them. Success is the best presentation training Don't over reach yourself. Several short presentations that you feel went well will do you far more good than one big one that makes you sick with nerves and leaves you feeling inadequate. Feedback Encourage those around you to tell you the things you did well. Very few of us make progress by being told what was wrong with our presentation. When we're up in front of an audience we all have very fragile egos.
In any Presentation Passion is Mandatory This is easier than it sounds. If you have to present something you have no real feeling for, then you need to find something you do have some feeling for and relate it to the subject you are presenting. The fit doesn't even have to be a very good one. You can start of by speaking about last night's football game because it excites you, and then make a deliberate segue into talking about widget production. The effect of the excitement in your body lasts for quite a while and will flow over into widget production. If it suits you, you could even make bad puns and poor analogies part of your style. The reason I say passion is mandatory is simple. You can get everything else perfect, but if it doesn't have as sense of your commitment behind it, it will be dead. If it's dead, I can ignore it. The final unwritten law of presentation skills is by now somewhat self-evident. Everything we have been talking about is to do with keeping presentation alive and powerful. Keeping it in the moment so that no one can sleep through it. Keeping it so that no one quite knows what's coming next. Making it something that people can't switch off to. Making it interactive as opposed to a repetition of a rehearsed and fixed programme.
We can all get better Every presentation situation is different. If you are doing a presentation for a much smaller audience, presenting without any slides at all may be more effective. For more technical talks, using the whiteboard to explain your ideas and answer question may work better. Detailed tables and charts would be better understood as handouts. You have to decide based on what your desired goals of your talk are. But what is certain is this: doing ballroom style or keynote-style presentations with bullet-point filled slides with small graphics and tiny charts is an antiquated and ineffective ( though still common ) way to make a meaningful presentation. We can all get better.
&quot;All the world is a stage and we are just players on it&quot; said William Shakespeare. When you are on stage people will be observing you closely. You need to create the right impression. 1. Polish your shoes. If you are up on a stage - your shoes will be at their eye level. We hear a lot of articles about being half dressed. A lot of people dress up well and don't clean their shoes. Fatal. 2. Smart or casual? The modern trend for dressing down makes it very difficult to know what to wear. Our advice is simple - it generally it always pays to dress on the smart side. If all the audience is going to dress down - dress down yourself, but be on the smarter end. 3. Take a spare outfit. Take a spare tie or even a spare shirt (blouse) or even a spare suit (dress). If you are presenting after dinner you don't want to get caught out by a bit of gravy or sauce falling onto your tie. If it can go wrong it generally will. 4. Check on the color of the background. Lots of conferences dress the set up in a particular color. Find out what color the background id and wear a complementary color. If you are a woman you do not want to wear a red dress on a purple background. Men have less to worry about - mainly just the color of the tie. 5. Empty your pockets. You don't want coins clinking in your pockets while you walk around on stage. 6. Don't dress like Buford P Fuddwakker. If you do not know who Buford is then I suggest that you visit his web site www.fuddwhacker.com

Communication business presentation skills

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