There are some levels of presenter and so where do you fit in? The scaredy-cat like I used to be, avoiding all opportunities to present. The novice presenter trying to work it out by yourself through trial and error? The student of presenting who has worked out the connection between persuasive ability and career and business success. The semi-pro who holds down a full time job which does provide a number of chances a year to keep working on advancing your presentation skills? I don’t include the professional presenter because that has become their livelihood and is out of scope for 99.99% of people in business.
For those in denial, I know, I get it. I was so terrified of embarrassing myself I decided the best course of action was to escape all chances to present. As we advance in our careers though, the room to hide starts to disappear and we have to face the reality – if you can’t present you cannot advance in your career or business. Here is some clear advice – don’t struggle along. Become proactive and go and get the training. Find a class where there is a psychologically safe space where you can learn with positive encouragement. Our ego is already fragile about presenting and the last thing we need is someone criticising us. Look for trainers who follow the good/better school of feedback. That means they tell you what you are doing well and encourage you to keep doing that and explain how you can make it even better.
If your colleagues are not paid up members of this school of feedback and all you get from them is critique, just be polite and thank them and move on. They are clueless about developing people so just blank them out and keep up your training and study. As you advance you will actually become a problem for other presenters. Some of them will try to pull you back down to their level, because they are aware they are hopeless and prefer everyone to be the same, so that they don’t stand out. A cutting comment from a work colleague is seared into my mind, “Greg is all style and no substance” after my presentation to the whole company. Ouch! Fortunately, I knew why he made this stupid comment and just ignored it. If you bump into these people, just ignore them and keep working on your skills.
For those who have started on the path, the trick is to keep going. I remember reading one of Tony Robbins’s books where he realised most business speakers only get a few chances a year to talk in public and that he could get the equivalent of years of experience in a few months, if he got enough chances to speak in public. I followed that same idea myself and looked for every opportunity to speak and I still hold to that strategy. Event organisers are always looking for free industry speakers. I am sure Tony Robbins had to give a lot of unpaid talks before he become good enough to get paid. Anyway, we are not in it for the money, we are trying to get a professional capability and we need an audience to work with. As you build up a resume of speeches given, more chances will flow to you. It has been a long drought of opportunities thanks to Covid, but in 2023 we should start to see the reappearance of in person events and the chances to speak at them.
This will be good for the semi-pro who may have gotten a bit rusty having had no spots for the last three years to keep advancing their art. It would be a very good idea to go back to the basics to make sure we have not forgotten any of the professionalism we had previously developed. It might also be an idea to proactively reach out to organisations who are slowly emerging for the shadows and starting to host in-person events again and let them know you would be happy to give your talk. The audience size may be considerably smaller and some of them will probably be watching you online, which is not as good as having them all in the room, but better than nothing.
Review how you went and analyse what needs to change to make your presentation better. Simple things you did before may have evaporated and will need to be re-introduced into the mix. Eye contact will definitely be one of them for a lot of people. We don’t just look at our audience en masse. We single out people and use our eye contact to engage them during our talk. Too much is too much though, so around six seconds each is the formula we need.
I have only seen a couple of speakers live in the last few months and they were pretty rusty I thought. My guess is they just carried on from where they left off, except they are not at that previous level anymore and need to rebuild their skills. When we get back to basics, we plug any holes which have appeared or we make sure everything that should be happening is in fact working for us. This won’t happen by itself, so we need to work at it. The beauty is if we do this and everyone else just carries on as if there hasn’t been a three year break, then we will instantly stand out as an excellent presenter.
Our personal and professional brands are invaluable and we have to invest in them and presenting is the one time when all is revealed publicly. We have to make those chances winners and build our reputation and take it even higher.
