PERFECTING YOUR PRESENTATION SKILLS

Had a great session with Meg, from The Bulb People. They are an organisation that help people improve their skills when doing a presentation or speaking in public. This is an area in life that I've wanted to improve on more, as I find it quite challenging. This workshop was what I needed and she gave me some tips on how to overcome fear when presenting.

We started by all standing in a line and Meg told us to get in order of height without talking. This was quite easy as height is a visible trait, so we did that with no issues. She then told us to get in order of birthdays, month and date, without talking. This was harder as you had to use body language to direct others but we managed to get it in the right order. Then the last task she set us was to go in order of most confident to least confident. In terms of morality this one was that hardest for everyone as it made you compare yourself to other people, some people went straight to the end of least confident as that was how they perceived themselves. Meg did this last on on purpose to make us think how do we see confidence and told us that we shouldn't compare ourselves to other people because everyone is on a different level.

An example of this is someone could have a crippling fear that they can't leave their house, but a few years later they are able to leave their house by pushing themselves out of their comfort zone, it shows they are more confident than they were before. On the other hand someone could be confident enough to do a presentation in front of their class, but then pushes themselves to do a presentation in front of hundreds of people. These are two different extremes however they are both examples of how people improve their confidence in different ways and you don't always have to be loud to be confident.

Jazz Hands

Creating a Presentation

With the second part of the session we were put into two groups and we would each pick a theme we wanted to talk about and then present it to the other group. But before we started Meg gave us some good tips to follow when creating a presentation.

Inspire. Intrigue. Interest. Make your first sentence a shocking face, a famous quote, a big question or a great image.

Consider bookending and use that same fact, quote, question or image again at the end.

Use your head and your heart. Hard data encourages your audience to trust what you say, stories bring it to life and engage your audience.

Use the power of three, in your structure and within your sentences for emphasis.

Include universal language such as 'we' and 'us' to create a sense of camaraderie with your audience.

Ask rhetorical questions so your audience has a chance to consider their own viewpoint. Use repetition so your audience remembers your key points.

Try involving your audience with a quiz, vote or repetition to keep them a part of the action.

These were all such great points to consider when doing a presentation, some of the techniques I didn't even know were used in presenting and it was great to be able to have access to this knowledge.

So when I shared my presentation with my group, I was able to use some of these techniques such as asking the audience a question to start off with, I then told them a personal story, we used the power of three to bring across our point and used the head and heart technique, but giving facts and then expressing our feelings at certain parts of the presentation.

I was really inspired by this talk and learnt so much, I was so impressed with it I asked Meg afterwards if they do anymore sessions like this after the two weeks. She informed me that they are based in Manchester and wouldn't be able to, however there are some Leeds based people do talks in the the next few weeks that I could get in touch with.