How To Present Like A Pro (Photo Credit: LDS Teach)

How To Present Like A Pro (Photo Credit: LDS Teach)

I participated in a day-long workshop titled “Present Like a Pro” with Suren Saini, organized by bAcademy and learning partner Talent Elevators. I would love to share my learnings and takeaways from this workshop. So let’s start…

About b-academy:

b-academy is a program run by the HR department of bKash Ltd. for its full time-employees only. It offers several technical, non-technical, hard skill, and soft skill learning workshops for bKash employees.

About Instructor:

Suren Saini - India’s Most Practiced Sales Trainer, Leadership Coach, TEDx Speaker, Actor, Model

What are the Challenges of Presentation?

  • Fear of Public Speaking: According to a study, the biggest fear in this world is public speaking. It is the biggest challenge for presenting something as well. To become a better presenter, first of all we need to overcome this.
  • Shyness: Another challenge is shyness. Naturally most of us have a shyness in front of people. Which creates a problem and holds us tight in the discomfort area.
  • Fear of Being Uncomfortable: Before presenting or public speaking, we think a lot about the situation and fear being uncomfortable.
  • Language Mismatch: Sometimes, or most of the time, there is a possibility of a language mismatch between the audience and speaker. In this scenario, it creates an extra challenge for the presenter.

Zone of Discomfort (ZoD)

Zone of discomfort, or ZoD, is the area where you face challenging and scary but interesting things. Unlike the comfort zone, it does not give you enough confidence but makes you strong. To be a pro presenter, you need to learn, handle, and keep yourself engaged in the ZoD as much as possible.

Components of A Pro Presentation

  • Preparation: Have enough preparation for the presentation.
  • Confidence: Gather enough confidence by preparation.
  • Strong Opening and Closing: Maintain a strong opening and closing in the presentation.
  • Effective Communication: Effectively communicate with the audience anyhow.
  • Engagement: Engaging the audience with the contents of the presentation or question answers.
  • Purposeful Storytelling: Purposeful storytelling also creates purposeful engagement with the audience.
  • Authenticity: The content of the presentation or story should be authentic enough.
  • Empathy: Always focus on the audience and be empathetic to them.
  • Thoughtful: Make the audience thoughtful by creating curiosity.
  • Time Management: Always keep an eye on the time. Because it is very important to finish in time.
  • Adaptability: Though enough preparation sometimes disturbs the audience, it can create challenging situations. Then they should be able to handle them and adapt to the situation.
  • Body Language: The presenter should maintain good, nice, and confident body language while presenting.

4 Steps of Pro Presentation

1. Preparation:

  • Understanding the audience: The most important and first thing of preparation is to research/understand your audience. Mostly focus on audience needs, desires, and problems.
  • Preparing Contents: Making PPT can be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Contents should focus on how it helps the audience. how it solves audience problems/pain points. Slides should be engaging enough (see below for designing an effective, engaging presentation).
  • Practice: After preparing the contents, now it’s time to practice it before delivering it in front of an audience. You can rehearse by simulating a real environment, measuring timing, and improving by recording yourself and getting feedback from others. Also, another important thing is practicing Q&A.

2. Delivery:

  • Confidence: Delivering the prepared and practiced contents confidently. Don’t fear, and imagine success always. Deliver the memories’ contents (see below for the tips of the memories’ contents).
  • Flow: Stay with your plan and keep/maintain the flow.
  • Engagement: While delivering content, keep creating engagement gradually.

3. Feedback:

Take audience feedback. Sometimes audiences ask questions by themselves, sometimes not. You should ask why-type questions and brief them on how to address the audience. And moving forward to a strong conclusion gradually with them.

4. Delivery Again Based on Feedback:

Rearrange yourself in a short time. Accommodate and adapt the feedback from step 3. Restart from the point that you finished last time. Remember, adaptability is a key component of a pro presentation.

9 Steps to Design Engaging Presentation

  1. Create hooks with the audience.
  2. Describe the objectives.
  3. Describe the roadmap/agenda to achieve the objectives.
  4. Describe the problems.
  5. Offers the solutions to those problems.
  6. Describe your products/plans.
  7. Draw a Summary.
  8. Describe Why Us?
  9. Call to Action.

6 Techniques to Memories Contents

  1. Understand the material.
  2. Use visual aids.
  3. Break it down.
  4. Repeat aloud.
  5. Write it down.
  6. Create Mnemonics.

The Ultimate 20 P’s (The Backbone of Presentation)

  1. Posture
  2. Power
  3. Poised
  4. Pause
  5. Positivity
  6. Pitch
  7. Pace
  8. Persona
  9. Pronunciation
  10. Pocket - A big no
  11. Passion
  12. Punctual
  13. Playful
  14. Patience
  15. Provoking
  16. Phrases & Words
  17. Paraphrasing
  18. Proper Listening
  19. Purposeful
  20. Paint a Picture

High Level Summary

  • Overcome fear of public speaking by practicing.
  • Prepare yourself well by analyzing your audience and taking actions accordingly.
  • Connect and engage with the audience by creating hooks.
  • Deliver a powerful message.
  • Start well and draw a strong conclusion.
  • Finally finish with “One More Thing,” which gives a very attractive piece of a message.