Apparently the most common phobia is arachnophobia; the fear of spiders.
Personally I disagree. A phobia is defined as a “persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation”. My contention would be that there is absolutely nothing “irrational” about fearing spiders. Indeed it is absolutely rational.
At number two, is public speaking. You have every reason to fear that too, especially if you are presenting your company to a room full of potential investors and how you present yourself and your company will go a long way to determining your success.
The bad news is that there is little you can do to eliminate the debilitating effects of standing up in front a room full of critically important people in the full knowledge that how you are about to perform over the next ten minutes will have more of an effect on your success than the entire 12 months of toil you have put into your actual project.
The good news is that not only did I over dramatise that last sentence but that there are things that you can do to mitigate such effects.
My three tips for presenting are;
Engage the audience
How many presentations have you sat through that commanded your attention for their entirety? Not many, I’d wager. One of the simplest ways of keeping the attention of an audience is to engage them and the simplest way to do this is with eye contact. You don’t have to look every single person in the eyes – you can scan slowly across a room giving the illusion of eye-contact but it’s often worth catching people’s eyes directly.
If one person happens to return your gaze and shows real engagement with you, go back to them but don’t concentrate on them to the exclusion of the rest of the audience - you don’t want your presentation to turn in to a two-way conversation.
It is of course easier to look at the audience if you have memorised your presentation but this is not always possible and as long as you are speaking more to your audience than you are your notes or cue cards, they will feel as much as part of it as you want them to.
Act yourself
This is my big tip and it’s not as simple as you might think. Generally, when people stand up in front of an audience – any audience – the knowledge that they are addressing a group of people will cause them to become more conservative with their expression. Their tone of voice will flatten out (become more monotone), hand gesticulations will be replaced with hands in pockets, scratching of heads or a single repeated behaviour (Peter Oborne is a fine example of the latter).
If you want to come across as your usual, chirpy self, try to act yourself. By that I mean, make a conscious attempt to ‘play’ what you think is a caricature of yourself. Emphasise what you think are your normal behaviours. Where you are normally expressive, be over-expressive. When you normally pause, pause for longer. Your voice intonations, melodies, body language and engagement when over-expressed on stage come across as natural and crucially, naturally you to other people. In essence, you are compensating for the naturally limiting effects of performing in public.
Practice
Venturing into the realm of the obvious, there is no substitute for practice, even if you are only practising from your notes and not memorising the presentation in it’s entirety. There are generally three ways you can deliver presentations;
1. From a script
Necessary if you have little time and your wording needs to be precise. Always be aware though that your audience is in front of you and not down on the page. Make sure you practice your emphasis and audience engagement and if necessary, annotate your script with pauses, inflections and gestures.
2. From notes/cue cards
My own personal favourite – have a series of cards with broad titles and three or six, short notes on each. Ideally you won’t need them but they serve to remind you were you are and where you are leading on to. The notes are really only there to guide your mind, to allow you the freedom to think and talk openly and naturally on each topic with a backup in case you need it. You still need to know your subject matter very well (which you should do anyway) but it ties you less to pieces of paper, freeing you up to fully engage with your audience.
3. From memory
When you know your presentation well enough you will be able to get up on stage and reel it off with nothing more than a controller in your hand. Even so, performances should never be identical – you should be relaying ideas and concepts through your enthusiasm and knowledge – the more you are are regurgitating a memorised script, the less natural it will appear to be. Ideally, a memorised presentation is the knowledge and comfort of a series of key points in your head, and less the word-perfect recitation of a script.
NB. NEVER MIX 1 AND 2! I always find that reading a script disengages the fluid nature of conveyance. The last time I did a presentation which was part script and part cues, the ensuing pause as I engaged the thinking part of my brain at the first cue was embarrassingly long.
Of course my advice is undoubtedly that of an amateur – the sort of person who has no choice but to present, rather than one who has trained to be at ease with such things. If you are in need of real help with your performance or are interested in the art of presenting, look no further than Annette Kramer; Business Performance Coaching and Marketing Expert par excellence.
Annette is also a prolific blogger who you can read here.
But I’ve saved my own, Absolute Best Presentation Advice for last:
Never pass up a chance to present anything. Ever. Every chance you get to stand up, master your fears and practice your performance prepares you that little bit more for the time when you have no choice but to present. Everyone’s natural instinct is to sit back and keep quiet with your hands by your side – let someone else do it…
…don’t.
Stand up, volunteer, make a fool of yourself, have people laugh at you, because when the time comes that you actually need to stand up in front of a room full of people with your the future of your life’s work in their hands, you will be very glad you did.
What’s more, I guarantee you’ll conquer that nagging fear of the rational.
