Stop Boring Your Audience

Public speaking and Presentations are usually done badly. They are often badly constructed, badly delivered and have no relevance to the audience.

Public speaking and presentations are generally approached unprofessionally and the results are usually terrible, occasionally passable and a very few do their job properly. How you start and how you end are important. I am not saying you can go for a joyride in-between - but make sure you get the entry and the exit right. If you bore them with the beginning of the presentation up, your audience will not mentally hear the rest of the presentation. In fact they may even physically walk out! They could well think that if the beginning was that boring...

Starting a presentation.

Unless you can start your presentation with power and energy, purpose and focus and some level of passion for your subject, why are you presenting in the first place? Leave the jokes out - especially about the area or the people, forget the platitudes about your trip to the venue and how "it's wonderful to be here" and get on with it.

1. Have you identified the purpose of your presentation? Do you want to persuade or inform? What is the action or state that you want to trigger or create?
2. Can you summarise your presentation in a word, a headline, or a sentence? Could your audience summarise your presentation in a sentence or maybe two?
3. Have you researched your audience and used that knowledge?
4. Do you have any passion for what you are presenting?
5. Get the audience's attention first. You get that by pausing rather than by speaking. Wait until you have eye contact before you start to speak.
6. If your opening statement is your headline, does it make your audience want to hear more? Does it arouse their curiosity?
7. Introduce yourself AFTER your presentation headline - not before. Your presentation is supposed to be talking about the audience, not about you.
8. Your presentation's headline or opening statement should summarise your purpose. But it should also be memorable? Alliteration helps make things memorable. Do you remember the 7 P's - "Proper prior preparation prevents p*** poor performance"?  Or even "Proper prior preparation plus pauses and passion prevent powerless purposeless presentations."
9. Have you started with a question? Have you used a surprising factoid or statistic? Have you used an analogy or a case study?