Tips for Being a Great Speaker

Here are some very useful tips for being a great speaker:

• Great speakers illustrate every important point with a story and that is how it is heard and remembered. If a message is conveyed in 5 seconds, some people will miss it, and others will not even remember it.
• PowerPoint slides are for audiences, not for the speaker. Reading slides is not acceptable. Either make paper notes or make two presentations, one for yourself and one for your audience and read from the one that you are not sharing. There should be one idea per slide and by looking at it, the audience should be able to understand the ideas.
• Record your speech, listen to it, and identify what needs improvement. Re-record till you are happy with your recording, while fixing one thing at a time.
• For important presentations, have a dry run of the presentation, and at the end, ask what you remember. If people can tell you the slides they remember from the presentation, that means the presentation worked well. If people only say it was great, very professional, etc, and can’t tell you what stood out for them, that means you need to work more on the presentation; it was not good.
• Use the cheat sheet, written in large font with half or short sentences.
• Narrow your messages down to the top five. People do not need to know everything you know. Research shows that people can only remember a maximum of five ideas at a time, so don’t think that since you are a newbie, you should mention all you know and dump all the data on the audience; otherwise, people will think you don’t know. Only choose five basic ideas to communicate.
• Get constant feedback, and also ask what you remember.
• Great speakers give stories; awful speakers do not share any stories. The story does not have to be dramatic or funny.
• If you make a mistake, correct it or ignore it based on the criticality of the mistake, but never apologize for the mistake or highlight it, otherwise that is the most important thing people would remember in the presentation.

Tips for making the slides:

• Before starting the presentation, answer the following question: What do you want the audience to do during or after the presentation?
• Then brainstorm the ideas that will motivate people to do what you want them to do and the maximum 5 messages you want to communicate.
• Think of examples or stories for each message. Number one thing people remember is stories, instead of numbers facts etc. Goal of the presentation is not to be concise but is to convey something that they remember.
• Also think of pictures for each message point that will make the idea clear and more memorable.
• Write down 20 questions you would ask your audience. The more you get them talking, the smarter they will think you are. e.g. What is the ideal situation? How it works right now? What you want to do?

Tips to look better in video:

• Move 15 degrees forward towards camera when talking
• Keep moving hands and head, don’t make the stiff
• If standing have one foot in the front instead of having both feet shoulder apart. If both feed are shoulder apart, you may appear moving side to side.
• Have camera a bit higher than your eye level
• Do not look up to the camera..better to look down instead of looking up as it feels like you are making up what you are saying.

Reference: TJ Walker