Professional Presentation Skills for People Who Are Pro’s at Something Else

I often read posts about event planners who are vexed by presenters who are perhaps experts in a topic or field, but are not very good at presenting.

I confess this always vexes me to hear, as I sit here with open dates on my calendar.  But of course while my programs deal with management, leadership, personal development, and communications, I can’t address specific industry topics outside my own.  Also, I suppose many events can’t afford to hire top of the line professional speakers, and sometimes the topic is more important than the presenter’s skill.  Or who knows? 

However, for those who seek to improve presentation skills, either their own or those of their presenters they are hiring, I thought I would give a little insight from a different perspective.  What follows are some fundamentals drawn from a life in the realm of professional performance.  And yes, I really did play in the Boston Pops for 18 years.  Does that make me better or smarter than you?  Nope, just lets me offer a different perspective, from working a job where this stuff was a very high priority every day.  My livelihood depended on dealing with it, and I had some great mentors.

1) Face the fear and self consciousness

There is no quick and easy method for dealing with fear, but let’s at least start by acknowledging it.  Amateurs try to avoid it, pro's accept it and find workarounds. 

If you are not used to getting up in front of a crowd, and even if you are, you may experience a feeling of heightened personal exposure and vulnerability.  It is at this moment that so many performance coaches step in and start the usual advice, which is to focus on yourself and polishing you, discussing everything from your hair to your hand movements to emphasizing that you pace the stage.  While that stuff may help a little, the selling of training like that is, in my opinion, just exploiting your fear.  It is not relevant to the primary goal, which is to connect to the audience.  Doing all these various little things “just right” will seldom improve actual audience connection, so keep such advice in its proper place, i.e., as a secondary style element.  Following a set of rules carefully may make you feel less uncomfortable, but it may suffocate your own spontaneity.   The more you are thinking about executing a coach's instructions, and the more you are thinking about being obedient to this or that system, well, you're connecting to that system and not to the audience . . . and it shows.  You're better off having a gravy stain on your tie and looking me in the eye than you are being perfectly dressed and ignoring me.

2) Ignore the lone hyper-critics

I have a book I sell on Amazon, and for 5 years I have gotten nothing but rave 5-star reviews.  Then the other day someone gave me 3 stars.  I was of course shocked, and had difficulty thinking about anything else for a moment.  (They called it a “great read”– for that I get three stars?  Jeez.) 

You may have had similar experiences.  You do your absolute best and you put it out on public display, and some goon decides it’s their righteous duty to point out (uninvited) every single possible deviation from the norm and/or mistake you made (in their opinion).  If you let yourself fall into the common trap of SELF consciousness as opposed to AUDIENCE consciousness, you will become a victim of this kind of abusive behavior.  You’ll start spending endless dollars on coaching to “remove your errors.”  If you start to assume that everyone in your audience is just like this one vocal jerk, you will “stiffen up,” and you’ll spend your whole life getting ready to get ready.

The number one thing that delineates professional performers from amateurs is accurate perception of the audience.  If you do that well, it does not matter what you do with your hands or whether you pace or stay behind the podium.  Audiences (and you) know all too well when someone is or is not listening to them and acknowledging and honoring their presence.   This is more important than content. 

("Listening" to an audience includes paying close attention to facial expressions, doing research and interviews beforehand, as well as fielding questions on the fly.) 

Dilettante critics are loud, but you mustn’t let them cloud your perception of everyone else.  99.9% of the audience does not want your perfection.  They are not judges.  Your audience is praying you won't be dull, they are eager to love you, and if you just come out and present your true self, the majority of them will quietly do just that.

3) Talk to one person at a time

A common mistake when dealing with a crowd is to see them as one large powerful group and not as a collection of individual, somewhat desperate people very much like yourself.  As you plan your presentation, think in terms of speaking to one person in the crowd at a time.  People in crowds are generally not all that aware of other people in the crowd– they are only aware of themselves as individuals.  They are totally focused on one person– you.  Offer the same courtesy.  See them as vulnerable too, not as being more powerful.   

4) Tell stories and use outlines

Your standard presentation training comes from years of school, where a “presentation” was usually a report, on a topic that interested no one, including yourself.  You were also being graded on all sorts of things separate from the topic’s relevance or entertainment value.  Time to graduate. 

You aren’t in grade school any more, and the audience is not your teacher.  Be clear ahead of time in your own mind just what points you wish to make and “riff” on the topics.  If you are indeed an expert on them, this should not be that hard for you to do.  (If you are not sure of your facts, then of course you will be very nervous about being exposed as a fraud when presenting.  Can’t help you there.)

There are few things less engaging than watching someone read out loud.  Again, this was fine in 5th grade but it’s not fine now.  Your spontaneous chatting will not be perfect, but perfection is an impossible goal, and it is not very interesting either, so give it up. 

If at all possible, tell stories.  This is very much an art, but . . . tell a story, then give a “moral” to the story– the moral is your content.  A moral without a story is not very much fun.  A story without a moral, well– at least we got to hear a story.  When you tell a story (especially in the 3rd person), the audience will immediately project themselves into the story.  They will see themselves as the protagonist.  The minds of your audience are far more capable of projecting an image than the best hotel AV system.  Believe it or not, your life experience, pedestrian though it may be, when truthfully and honestly presented, can be very interesting, as it is probably very much like my own. 

Feel free to ask questions. 

© Justin Locke