Ever wondered how you can take your presentation skills to the next level by delivering with confidence and ease?
We've got Gigi Rosenberg here to give us all her top tips on how you can connect with the audience, keep them engaged, and leave them wanting more!
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What are your tips for making a presentation sound natural and not overly scripted?
- The way I have people do that is by making sure they don’t completely script everything they’re going to say.
- If it’s all written out in sentences, you’re just going to read it. Unless you’re an award-winning actor, there’s no way you’re going to read a script and sound completely natural.
- It’s best if you can speak in your natural tone of voice too so that it sounds much more conversational.
- What I get people to do is imagine they’re talking to a close friend on the phone and imagine that person on the other end of the line so that they have a very friendly and relaxed tone of voice.
What are the best practices for preparing for a presentation?
- I’m definitely a big bullet point fan, but I also think that they shouldn’t be over-rehearsed.
- You should know the direction you want to go in, the story you’re going to tell, the meta-version of what the big idea is, but not be so rehearsed that it comes out canned.
- I call it ‘medium rare’. Not over-rehearsed but rehearsed enough so that you know the story.
What are some good techniques for your opening line?
- I never thank people first, and I recommend people don’t do that. If you want to thank people you can do it a few minutes in.
- Never apologise, no matter what may have happened or how nervous you might be.
- The big thing really is to be as relaxed as possible and get the focus off yourself and onto the audience.
- Aside from that, I really recommend that you already know what your opening line will be before you start. Whether that’s a story you’re going to tell or a question, but you want to have the energy that you know which direction you’re taking.
How can we get the audience to really buy into what you’re saying?
- One of the things that audiences love is a mystery or something they need to solve.
- For example, one great teaching technique is rather than giving people every point to a strategy, you could ask the audience what they think the points might be. You want to get the people who are listening to start thinking.
- So, asking questions is a great way to get people involved. They don’t even have to give an answer to the question, just as long as it gets them thinking.
- You don’t want to just spoon-feed the audience information, you should make them work for it a little bit.
How can you recover if you feel like you’ve lost the audience?
- In those moments, you’re going to be tempted to speed up and get to the end as fast as possible.
- The more you speed up, the more you’re going to lose people. So, you need to do the opposite, just slow down.
- Don’t be afraid to even pause and address the fact that you think you might be losing them, not in a confrontational way, but it will shock the audience back into listening to you.
- Sometimes you do just have a quiet group though, or sometimes people are actually listening and focusing so much that they might come across quiet.
A book that you would recommend…
The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker
What is your top success habit?
Get up early and work on my business first, before I do any client work.
What are your favourite apps right now?
One app I really love is Things, it helps me note my ideas down and schedule them in.
Here’s the big one… who do you like more, Rob or Kennedy?
I love the name Kennedy, so it’s got to be Kennedy!
Finally, where can folks go to find out more about you?
You can go to gigirosenberg.com and find out all about who I am and what I do.
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