Being a presentation skills coach, delegates often draw me aside at the beginning of a training class or coaching session to confide a unique truth to me: “You know, Paul, I get very nervous when I have to speak in front of people.” It is difficult not to be sympathetic to this seemingly unique fear, which “only they experience”. The reality is that nearly 100% of presenters experience anxiety before going live. The intensity varies from person to person, as does the duration of the anxiety, but it is tempered by experience and confidence. If you’ve had a bad presenting experience in the past, you may have a particularly intense fear of public speaking.
Look at it this way: You will agree that it takes quite a few lessons and considerably more practice to learn to drive a car safely. It also takes time to fashion a good speaker. The very best all started somewhere, usually at the same place they did when they learned to drive. The only difference is that so many believe they can pull it off without being trained. That’s rather like getting behind the wheel of a car and tackling a 100km trip with no driving lessons. If you did something like that with public speaking you’d have be either deaf (so as not to hear the loud snoring) or very thick-skinned indeed.
Ironically, the worst culprits are often our executives, who stand up and bumble on at length, boring their hapless captives with waffle, misplaced humour, appalling irritators and busy, text-laden slide shows. And few would dare to tell the clueless chap that he’s just made a complete Wally of himself.
Surprisingly, this even happens to the person who tells such funny jokes around the table at the office year-end party. As soon as he is asked to get up and present in front of an audience everything changes. Everything. Why? Because standing up in front of a captive audience is an unnatural act for anyone who has not been groomed to do it. That is why we need to learn the practical ins and outs of presentation. No matter how good we are at speaking, we need to understand the theory and then practically learn the skills of presenting. If you speak well in normal conversation you have a huge advantage. However, more presentations are fluffed due to lack of training followed by a lack of experience than for any other reason.
Any successful act you’ve seen, whether on television, or in a show or presentation, was successful because it was well prepared and thoroughly rehearsed. The performers will have been thoroughly trained, mentored and coached. It’ll take just a couple of days to get you pointed firmly in the right direction.
Nervousness before a presentation has nothing to do with ability whatsoever. It has everything to do with our perceived ability to deliver, our training - or lack of it, our preparation and whether or not we’ve practised enough. And when we’ve built up some positive evidence of repeated successes, we can rely on experience too.
This means presentation skills training must be experiential. You should be filmed presenting. It should be played back and evaluated. You will identify both strengths and opportunity areas. You will know where to focus first to obtain the quickest results. As you improve, your confidence grows.
Learning to present brings with it increased assertiveness, a personal belief in yourself and an awareness of what you do and tend to do when verbally communicating with others. And who knows when you will be asked to stand and deliver?
Paul du Toit, Certified Speaking Professional and Author of “Even YOU Can Present with Confidence” (Congruence Publishing)
June 26, 2009
So much presentation success comes down to solid preparation and rehearsal. Your typical executive’s boring presentation is too often unrehearsed. And it shows. It was Woodrow Wilson who said: “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”