#presentation miniseries

Welcome to the final installment in this miniseries! So far, we’ve talked about general techniques and how to combat nervousness. For this last bit, let’s talk about ways to use your body and your slides to create the most efficient and interesting presentation you can.

Body Language

Body language is our main way to communicate as humans. We constantly transmit feelings and moods to one another. That is why it is so crucial for you to appear open and enthusiastic about your topic – people are simply not going to care half as much, otherwise. Learning how to control and utilize your body language is a very important, often overlooked part of delivering an excellent presentation, and there are quite a few things you can work on.

The first thing you need to do is remember that during the vast majority of the time, you never look as nervous as you feel. Unless you have clear, visible signs of nervousness – sweating profusely, shaking hands, a shaking voice, an out-of-control gaze – then people would never know you’re breaking to pieces inside. I’ll go over some tools on how to use your body to combat these signs of extreme nervousness, but first, let us cover some ways to use your body during a presentation in general.

First, you need to get your arms and hands under control. Your arms are a very efficient tool to underline or add emphasis to what you’re saying, and if they’re hanging down like dead fish, or flailing wildly about, you are completely missing out on that aspect, which is really easy to use to your advantage! You must relax, but not so much that you look threatening or disinterested as we talked about in the previous post. If you’re doing your presentation standing up, find three standard positions your arms can return to. An example of this is one hand in your pocket, and the other bent at the elbow, resting at your side. That way, your arm is still in an active position from which you can easily use it to make an illustration with your hands, or gesture to your slides if needed. If you’re sitting down as you would at an interview, create 6 of these standard positions you can return to: three for chairs with armrests, and three for chairs without. As with everything else, you can practice this in front of a mirror until you find something you’re happy with!

Another thing you must do is something your mom has been telling you your entire life: Straighten up. This is another thing connected to basic human interpretation of body language, and the mood you’re transmitting to your audience. A sunken-together body looks tired, sad, and sick, while a straight back makes you look healthy, happy, and in control of the situation, and that’s exactly what you want to appear as. Straighten your back every damn time you catch yourself relaxing just a little too much, and thank yourself later.

When you’re doing a presentation, especially one that goes on for a while, then you want to walk around. Don’t try to run a marathon during your presentation – stand in one place for 5-10 minutes, or until you reach a natural break in your speech, and then move. Roughly, you can divide the are in front of your audience into five evenly spaced ‘bases’, and you need to move between them. Keep in mind here that no matter which base you’re standing on, you still need to look at your entire audience – your base doesn’t dictate the direction of your gaze! Turn your torso, not your feet, and keep talking while you walk to avoid creating an awkward break in your presentation. Returning briefly to eye contact, consider this: Are there more or fewer than 60 people in your audience? If there are fewer, you can hold each individual’s gaze for 3-5 seconds. If there are more, divide the audience into zones and let your gaze shift between them every 5-10 seconds.

I promised you I’d take a moment to share some things you can do to hide the physical signs of extreme anxiety or stage fright. Just first of all, please remember that 95% of the time, you do not actually look nervous even when you feel nervous. These tools are for when your voice is audibly shaking, or your hands visibly shaking, or you just can’t look people in the eye. If your body doesn’t do this, congratulations! You don’t actually need these tools at all and can focus on working on other aspects.

If your hands are shaking, hide them. Put them behind your back. Put them in your pockets. Remember the standard positions with your arms – just make sure your hands aren’t really visible in any of them, and your arms will still seem dynamic as you change between positions without your treacherous hands giving you away. Don’t worry that you’re sabotaging yourself because you’re not gesticulating – seeming more confident by hiding your hands will give people a much more favorable impression of you than you’d gain by pointing at a PowerPoint slide one time.

If your voice is shaking, I’m sorry, that’s a tough one to combat, but you can do it. You need to get your body used to you speaking in unnatural situations. This exercise can be a little daunting, but if you have to do presentations or go to interviews often, the results are potentially invaluable. Put on some headphones and listen to some music, and then go for a walk outside. To begin with, you can do this in a secluded area – a forest, or quiet neighborhood. And then talk to yourself. Practice your presentation, rehearse what you need to say, and don’t worry about hiccups or forgetting things – remember that mistakes and pauses are normal and make you seem human. If someone sees you on the street, they’ll probably think you’re a weirdo, but y’know what, screw them. You’re here to practice speaking in an unusual situation. Keep doing this exercise, and do it often, until you can walk through a crowded mall, rehearsing your presentation, without your voice shaking. It will take time, but you can do it.

If you can’t look people in the eyes, an option for you is, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, to look at a point right above people. This is absolutely a last resort, as this will distance you from your audience, so if you feel like you can handle eye contact today, then try.

Your Slides: Dos & Don’ts

Slides should be your tool, an illustration, but ideally not something you’d need to rely on for your presentation. You need to be able to perform without your slides entirely – imagine if the program decides to just not work and you stand in front of 100 people and realize that oh, shit – you’re in the very deep end right now. No, you need to avoid that situation altogether by treating slides as something extra, not a key component. That will help get you into the right mindset.

Do: Use pictures. Pictures will keep your audience occupied with visual input, while you keep them occupied with auditory input. You avoid stressing out their brains this way and will make your subject matter easier to understand. Find one good picture that will illustrate a key point neatly – but try to avoid obviously staged stock photos. They are cheesy and reek of untrustworthiness, which is the opposite of what you want.

Point at or indicate the screen when you change the slide or need your audience to pay extra attention to it. Literally, guide them with one of your hands. Use your body to clearly express to people that this right here is very important right now.

Don’t: Use text. No, seriously, try to avoid it at all costs. If your audience has to read as well as listen to you, they won’t be able to remember a single thing – because both you and your slide are trying to activate the same center in their brains. If you must use text – like a quote, for instance – don’t just let it sit. Read it aloud, explain its importance and relevance. Introduce the text and then continue your presentation from that. Remember to use a text size that everyone is able to read from a distance. Anything smaller than 18 pt is a mistake; and if you think that making your text a size smaller just so you can fit everything on one slide is a good idea, you are wrong. In that case, you already have far too much text, and it will be way too small for anyone to read without concentrating, further taking the focus away from the most important element of the presentation: you.

If you’re the kind of person who adds a lot of text to slides so that you’ll remember what you need to say, it’s a bad habit and you must practice getting rid of it. At most you can have cue cards with a few words on them; never full sentences. If you rely less on full, rehearsed statements, you will be in a much easier position to navigate around mistakes or incidents that are outside of your control (such as tech not working or people barging in late).

Maybe: Use graphs. Graphs are good and can be used effectively to illustrate a complicated topic or create a comparison, but think about why the graph is there. Is it there to show the difference between 2009 and 2010? To show the development from March to December? Highlight the important parts of your graph to direct people’s attention to it, and away from all the other clutter that you actually don’t need to support your presentation. If there are labels on the graph, make sure they are very clearly visible and readable, as per the point above.

Thus ends this miniseries on presentation skills! Read up on how to get a great start and how to deal with nervousness here. Thank you so much for reading and reblogging, and I hope you’ve found this useful!

Welcome to the second installment in this series! We’ve previously talked about presentation techniques and making a good first impression. Now let’s move on to what I’m sure is many people’s chief concern about presenting: dealing with nervousness.

The first and only thing you need to know is that nervousness is a completely, 100% natural response to being put on the spot. Literally everyone gets nervous, and if someone says they don’t, there are 3 reasons:

They’re lying, and/or think ‘nervousness’ only refers to shaking hands and armpit stains.

They’re a narcissist to some degree.

They’ve done presentations literally every day of their lives and have an incredible routine most of us will never, ever achieve.

Nervousness is a response that activates our fight-or-flight instinct, akin to what would happen in a life-or-death situation. It is all about fear of the unexpected. Think about this on a complete caveman-level. If you’ve once heard a bush rustle, and then immediately after, a grizzly bear charged out and ate your caveman friend alive in front of you, then, of course, you’re going to be wary of every bush rustling in the future. It is not logical, but it is natural. Your nervousness exists to force you to do something and change this uncomfortable situation – only, in a reality filled with interviews and screenings and presentations, you can’t always do that. What you can do is identify your reason for feeling nervous, and then apply some tools to minimize your feelings or just get them under control, because I’ll tell you right now that you can never make nervousness completely go away forever. Let’s take a look at the most common, broad reasons to feel nervous when you’re presenting.

I: You are worrying about others’ opinion of you.

Totally normal. Everyone does that. It’s part of being a social creature, hailing way back from when not being an accepted part of a group meant death. When you’re in front of an audience and feel like you’re under pressure or heavy scrutiny (because you are), then the natural course for your brain to take is that there is something wrong somewhere – and since it’s not with your audience, it must be yourself who is at fault! This is a lie. There is nothing wrong. It just feels that way because you are in an unnatural situation, and it’s good to remind yourself of that sometimes. All the time, really.

II: You are reading the body language of your audience wrong.

The next time you’re seeing a presentation – not giving one – take a look at people around you. What do they look like? I’ll bet you right now that almost none, if any at all, are smiling, or even looking interested. They probably look quite bored, or sour. That’s because they’re relaxing their facial muscles completely. They (and you!) are in a pack right now; safe from scrutiny or judgment. Why would you need to waste energy on fitting in? Go relax your face and body completely, and then stand in front of a mirror. You don’t look approachable at all. And as a presenter, this can very easily be interpreted as hostility, because when people relax completely, you cannot read them, and that is intimidating. In short, trying to gauge how well your presentation is going based on your audience’s body language is never going to work out for you. It is a terrible indicator of anything. Presenters who fall into the trap of being too unnerved by their audience’s body language often overcompensate in one of two ways: Either by making too many (horrible, un-situational) jokes or by giving up completely and turning into robots just reciting what they need to say without any emotion or movement. You cannot let your audience’s body language overwhelm you. Ignore it.

III: You are afraid of making mistakes.

Aren’t we all? Yes, absolutely. But mistakes, like nervousness, are entirely natural and unavoidable. Embrace them; get them over with. Acknowledge them without making them the new focus of the presentation. Mistakes are actually good – they make you seem more human, which instantly contributes to a good mood as was discussed in the first post; they make your presentation unique and ensures that your audience at least remembers something from that day, and can also help shake them out of a stupor if they’ve gotten bored or distracted. Repeat after me: Mistakes are good!

Tying this in with what I mentioned about the brain’s determination to find flaws somewhere, there is often the misconception that everything has to be 100% unproblematic and perfect. It’s an easy leap to take that if one person is yawning during your presentation, then everyone thinks that this is the most boring crap they’ve ever laid ears to. Only that’s not true at all – you have to keep in mind that nobody loves everyone and that perfection in the human eye doesn’t exist. You will never, ever, please 100% of your audience members; you will never, ever, ace every interview you go to. You will never be able to please 100% of the people you meet, so stop trying, and stop thinking that that’s what you have to do.

One Way to Deal

One way you can deal with feeling nervous is to visualize it. You need to separate your nervousness from your body and your self. Just like studying, drinking, or working, it’s not something you are, it’s something you do. So visualize your nervousness outside of your body. It can look like anything – a blob, a blueberry pie, so long as you know that it isn’t you. And then go give your nervousness a good old TEDtalk - out loud, very important it’s out loud. Tell it how happy you are that it looks after you and keeps you out of danger, but this is a completely harmless situation, and you’re actually excited and happy about this. Tell it positive things, and only positive things. Take 1-5 minutes to do this. Do it the night before you have to present. Hell, find a secluded bathroom an hour before you have to go up and perform this exercise. If you suffer from anxiety or stage fright, fear not; I will address some more tools to manage this in the third and last post.

Thank you so much for reading this far! Visit this tag to see the posts in this series in order Third and final post going up tomorrow!

Nobody likes presentations. Everyone must do them at some point in their lives. I recently had the pleasure of attending a seminar on delivering a great presentation and learned a lot of interesting things. This miniseries will be in three parts: One on getting a great start; one all about dealing with nervousness; one about using body language and slides to your advantage. Let’s get started!

Especially if your presentation is going to last a while, you’re very well off spending some time on the beginning. As people get seated and wait for things to begin, say hello to people in the front row. Make some small talk; ask for their names and tell them your own; shake their hands. 30 seconds of this is enough, and then you can get back to looking at your lecture hall and smiling and nodding at people as they enter, or making extra sure all your tech will be working as you want it to. All of this will contribute to making a great first impression, and a great first impression will keep your audience more interested in your presentation, because they will be interested in you. Make sure you look presentable – put on nice clothes that fit you well; you might do a little something about your hair to keep it away from your face so people can easily see it. In addition to this, you can read up on the Halo Effect and make sure to utilize this to your advantage.

When starting your presentation, make sure to introduce yourself and your topic with enthusiasm. Let your audience know that you are happy and interested in being here and sharing your information with them. Don’t try to be too funny or too clever; do not rehearse any jokes or lines to open with. It will make things seem too robotic, and your audience will lose interest fast. Know what you’re going to say, but never rehearse word for word. It’s boring and if something unexpected happens, you are far more likely to be knocked off course and create an awkward pause. We’ll get back to pauses later in this post, because they’re not all awkward!

Just like with any other social interaction, you want to create a good mood. Following the steps in the first paragraph already contributes to this, but if you’re in class and only have 5 minutes and already know everyone’s names and birthdays, introducing yourself is just going to be weird, so skip that, and instead go straight for the good-mood-creators of smiling and looking people in the eye as you speak. Not creepily; only hold people’s gazes for 3-5 seconds, and then look elsewhere. If you struggle with stage fright or anxiety, the easiest thing to do for you is to look at a point above people, and then still shifting your gaze from time to time – more on nervousness in the second part of this series. If you belong to the category of people who either do not smile at all, or who smile so much that it looks like you’re on the verge of laughing, practice your professional smile. The professional smile is fake, but looks real if you practice it enough. Basically, don’t try to smile; just try to make a straight line with your mouth. That looks weird on its own, right? Then add a slight squeeze of your eyes to that. Much better already! Practice it in a mirror until you think it looks natural, and then remember to do it during your presentation when there’s a period of silence, or an audience member is speaking. It’s also useful during job interviews or in other, similar situations! You will seem politely interested instead of hostile or overenthusiastic. Much more on body language in the third post of this series.

Pauses – I promised I’d get back to them. Pauses are good! Think about a conversation; any conversation you’ve had. How many times did you say “um”? Uncountable, right? Presentations are the same. There’s this misconception that everything should go perfectly smoothly, but that’s actually boring, and also, it will make people forget what you’re saying much, much faster. The brain needs pauses to process what you’re saying! Practice speaking slowly when you rehearse your presentation; practice taking a little breath after each sentence. Your flow will be much more natural and far easier to keep up with. If you’re terrified of forgetting what you need to say; fear not: That is also a thing I will touch upon in the third post of this miniseries.

Thank you for reading so far! Visit here to see the other posts in this series as they go up these next couple of days.