Delivering a public presentation

In the work place, no matter who you are, if you want to advance your career you need to give presentations to people. This is difficult sometimes to do especially if you are a geek giving a presentation in front of business people. They do not understand the way we like to present things. For you to give greatpresentations all you have to do is invest your time into preparation. When you are prepared you will feel more confident and ready.

To start out you need to make your goal clear to understand and what you are trying to solve. The main purposes for giving a presentation is: you want a decision-maker to make what you think is the best choice, You need people to know what is going on with a project, You need people to be aware of what is important in the industry, and you want to have technology be used effectively.

When you know what the goal of your presentation is going to be about, the next thing is to understand who your audience is. The audience only knows a little bit or nothing about the topic you could be presenting. It is your job to make the information resonates with the audience. The audience needs a good starting point. Once you get the ball rolling it is a good idea to give only the information need to get your goal across to the audience. People in general can only retain so much information at one time. If you can give them something, they can relate to it will stick with them more than all the details about the topic. One easy thing to remember when giving a presentation is try to make the audience feel something from it, because people will always remember how something made them feel more than anything else.

Many times, geeks fail to give a good presentation because of how we give the information. We like to think of things, but for many people stories are what drives the emotion forward. When stories are used people can identify themselves in the characters, sometimes they can recall past experiences that help them relive what they felt in the past with the story you tell. Stories are the biggest way you can make your presentation positively received than negatively. The reason being: you can present your topic to the audience and allow them to understand the what needs to, in general,, you can connect with the audience through good story-telling, and if done correctly the presentation will resonate with the audience, from all the emotions and relevance in the presentation.

At the end of your presentation you need to give the audience a call to action. If everything you did to prepare for the presentation went well and you were able to evoke emotion from the audience, this is the perfect time to give the audience something they can do to move the goal of the presentation into something real.

In conclusion, presentations are difficult to do and be accomplished properly. In order to give a great presentation, you need to accomplish three things. Come prepared, if you don’t know what the goal of the presentation is nothing will get done. Make the audience have an emotional connection with the topic so it sticks with them. And finally, in general, give the audience something they can do in order to achieve the goal of the presentation. The best and most rememberable presentations are ones that can tell a story in a way that give feeling to a situation.