TL;DR
- Practice 2-3x per day starting ~1 week before your presentation
- Aim to spend less than 5% of your time looking at notes or slides
- Focus slides on pictures, graphs, and other things that are hard to communicate in words
- Eliminate filler words
- Use a natural, confident cadence
- Become confident enough with the material that you can pivot the presentation material to fit the interest of your audience
- Avoid defensiveness and don’t be afraid to admit you don’t know the answer during Q&A
One of the things I’m best at is public speaking and being able to give a good presentation, which is probably not what you’d expect from me because I’m a pretty shy, socially anxious person. I’ve spent much of my life trying to work through that anxiety.
My parents have a home video of a 5-year-old me in acting class (which I’m sure was very much not my idea). The teacher told us to take turns pretending to be birds and “fly” around our little seated circle of students. When it was my turn, I kept my chin firmly on my chest, staring at the floor, and circled in place, not ever standing up or leaving my spot. It would have been way less embarrassing to just “fly” around the circle like the other kids, but that’s social anxiety for you.
While I’m now much more outgoing, I still tend to sweat way too profusely when I’m in a stressful or new social situation—nothing like lots of sweat to make you feel even more awkward.
All of that is to say, if I can learn to give a good presentation, I’m pretty sure anyone can. The key is to prepare a lot beforehand and then let go of that preparation as you’re walking to the stage (or, in this day and age, sharing your screen via Zoom). That sounds like a total paradox, but I’ll explain.
Practice Makes For a Perfect Presentation
Presentations sound far more natural if you have prepared your speech beforehand. That sounds like another paradox, but it’s not just my own opinion, experts in public speaking note that as well. Preparing what you’ll say beforehand is important regardless of whether you have a Powerpoint or notes to reference. I haven’t scientifically validated this percentage, but by my non-scientific estimates, you should spend 5% or less of your time reading directly from your presentation or notes if you want to give an engaging presentation.
I recommend starting to practice what you’ll say a week before the actual presentation and then practice 2-3 times per day until the day of the presentation. The first couple of practice attempts will likely feel very rough as you’re figuring out what you want to say, but by day 3 or 4, things generally start to feel smoother. The last few days are about building confidence and committing your speech mostly to memory.
You can still glance at notes or slides, but practicing ahead of time should allow you to spend a minimal amount of time checking your presentation materials.
How to Sound Professional and Natural
Building confidence through practice is also immensely important because the more confident you feel, the more natural your presentation will start to sound.
As you are practicing, make sure you are not just memorizing the bullet points on your slide and reading them off. That strategy generally makes for a boring and unnatural-sounding presentation where your audience will be more focused on staring at the slides than listening to you. It also keeps you from really engaging with your material and, as you are practicing, figuring out if there is a clearer or more interesting way of describing something.
A good remedy for this is to keep the text on your slides sparse, limiting the text to a few words that help guide your audience to key points and help jog your memory if you lose your place. Your slides should generally be devoted to things you cannot easily communicate through speech—like graphs, tables, or pictures.
Throughout your practicing, you will also want to watch out for and try to eliminate any filler words (um, er, uh). You should note if you are raising the pitch of your voice at the end of your sentences (making everything you say sound like a question) or changing your tone in other ways that sound unnatural and/or undermine your authority as a speaker. Try to channel the confident tone you would use if you were talking to your friends about something you love. Again, this is where confidence comes in.
Letting Go of Your Practice and Finding the Fun In Your Presentation
As someone who is shy and can have issues with self-confidence, confidence doesn’t always come naturally to me. To help, I harken back to my high school acting days (when I actually did participate and didn’t just stare at the ground) and pretend that I am playing a character who is confident and about to give a speech. It sounds like a super cheesy strategy, but I find that it is surprisingly useful in changing my mood and outlook.
Another thing I often try, is to tell myself right before a presentation that I am having a conversation with students or colleagues about a topic I am really interested in. If my nerves are really amped up, I’ll tell myself I’m just excited for the presentation. Whatever you tell yourself, the trick is to get your brain to calm down and view the situation as fun.
That is what I meant above about preparing for a presentation beforehand, but then letting that training go as you start your speech. You want to know your material front and back and have confidence about what you’re going to say, that’s what the preparation is for. But once you start the speech, you want to have fun and let yourself feel natural. This not only helps your cadence, it also prevents you from getting flustered if someone asks a question in the middle of your presentation, if there are technical difficulties, or if you get a last minute bout of stage fright (which I frequently do).
Practicing a lot but then not holding that practice too dear also gives you freedom to elaborate on a topic more or breeze past a topic more quickly than you did when you practiced depending on the attention of your audience.
If you convince yourself that your presentation will be fun and interesting, that vibe comes across to the audience as well.
How to Answer Presentation Questions
Whether you are presenting to colleagues or students, questions are a natural part of presentations that you should expect. However, it is easy to get flustered and nervous during Q&A, particularly if any questions touch on things you haven’t thought about before.
The worst thing you can do when answering questions is get defensive. I have seen so many presenters who have given a good presentation, but then get supremely flustered at the first question they’re asked, which tends to undermine their authority and call into question how well they understood what they just presented.
If you know the answer to a question, that’s awesome! Thank the person for their question and answer it! Easy!
If you don’t know the answer to a question, that’s totally fine! Usually, the following answer is perfectly appropriate when a question is asked about work you have done: “Thank you for your question, that’s a really interesting and important point. I haven’t looked into that yet, but I’ll investigate that” and then write it down in a notebook so they see you are taking their point seriously. You might also say that you’ll let them know what you find if that is relevant.
If you are teaching a class or workshop and don’t know the answer to a question, the following response is almost always appropriate: “Great question! I don’t know the answer to that, but I’ll look into it after class/this workshop and let you all know what I find.” It hopefully goes without saying, but you should then actually look into the question and let people know what you find.
No one knows the answer to everything and your audience understands that too. They will appreciate your humbleness and honesty far more than very obvious attempts to cover up that you don’t know the answer to something (and cover-ups are super obvious 99% of the time).
Follow the Leader: Emulate Great Presenters
Finally, if you go to presentations, classes, or workshops, pay attention to the presenters. If they are really good, note what engaged you about their presentation and try using those strategies yourself later. If they are really bad or even just mediocre, pay attention to what didn’t work and try to avoid falling into those traps.
Public speaking can feel like something people are innately good or bad at. But like almost anything, it’s a skill that can be learned and it’s a skill that can really pay off personally and professionally. And there’s little more satisfying than having colleagues tell you how much they learned from and enjoyed your presentation. As a graduate student, I once had a scholar who was a freaking MacArthur Genius Grant winner tell me how much he enjoyed my conference presentation and you best believe I still get a thrill of satisfaction thinking about that years later, all because of the power of practice and a few easy mind tricks.
In Summary:
- If relevant, create slides with limited text and mostly visuals.
- Start practicing ~1 week before your presentation and practice 2-3 times per day, with the goal of spending a minimal amount of time looking at notes or slides
- Limit your use of filler words
- Work on keeping your cadence natural and confident, avoid making your sentences sound like questions
- Before the presentation, try to reframe any nerves as excitement and reframe the presentation as a fun opportunity
- Try to keep the presentation natural and responsive, modifying material slightly to respond to the audience’s attention
- Answer questions honestly and without defensiveness
- Pay attention to the pros
And remember, you don’t watch presentations ready to be critical of the speaker (or hopefully you don’t), you go to presentations ready to learn. And when you see someone fumbling during a speech, you probably don’t think, “What an idiot!” You probably think, “Oh no, I know how stressful presentations can be!” So if a presentation doesn’t go as well as you’d hoped, treat yourself with the same grace you would treat another person and remember that things will get easier with time and practice.
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