Embrace a certain amount of nervousness

A little bit of nervousness gets the adrenaline going and stops your presentation feeling like it is just routine and doesn’t matter much to you.

Preparation and practise help your presentation to be more spontaneous. Top Gear looked like 3 idiots bumbling round riffing off each other but it was tightly scripted and choreographed which allowed them to be loose. Having notes to glance down on is important so you don’t miss key points you want to make.

Passion

Let your passion show on the things that you are excited about. Passion and emotion move people.

Story telling

Story telling is Very powerful. Tell stories. Here are the four secrets to telling a good story: A great story is a fact, wrapped in an emotion, that compels someone to take action. It transforms them in some way. That’s what makes a great story.

If you have a story, don’t just tell a joke. A joke is a fact, or something seemingly factual, wrapped in an emotion. That is a joke. It doesn’t compel someone to take action. It doesn’t transform them in some way. It’s not a great story. So, what makes a great story?

When you tell a great story, relive the story. Don’t retell the story. Relive the story. Reliving the story is how to stop the same speech becoming boring to you and sounding boring to the audience.

PowerPoint Abuse

PowerPoint Presentations are really abused when there is too much text within them. If you are going to do a PowerPoint presentation, look at a book called Presentation Zen. It’s a fantastic book that talks about how your presentations really need to be photographs, not verbiage. So, if you are talking about a topic, you want to show a photo of the topic, not put a lot of text up on the screen. If you use text, make it minimal, bullet points only, large font and use the bullet point only as a prompt. Never read from the slides. The visuals in the audience will read through the text in the slide far faster than you can say it out loud.

Summary

Preparation, everyone. Prepare. Don’t just stand up and wing it. If you are doing a PowerPoint, have visuals. Don’t give a lot of text. Make sure to tell good stories- a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels people to take action, transforms them. Relive a story. Don’t retell it. Make it sticky. Use visual elements, verbal repetitions, emotions, vary the sound of  your voice. All of these things are really, really important. And don’t worry about being nervous. It’s okay.