The Importance of Analysing Your Own Presentation Performance
The presentation has come to a close and we are relieved it is all over. We pack our stuff up and get back to work. Back to the office now and the emails have been flooding in during our absence, there are meetings a plenty to join and tonnes of projects begging for our attention. The memory of having done the presentation quickly fades and we find we have lost the opportunity to build on our experience. We usually don’t get all that much frequency with our business presentations and so every shot we get is a great chance to grab lessons from it and improve. But we don’t.
We don’t because it wasn’t factored into the planning at the start. If it is an afterthought, it will get overcome by all the other pressing matters requiring our attention the moment we hit the door of the office. So as part of the planning process we should include a review of what we did, compared to what we planned to do. We need to gauge how it went and which parts we thought resonated more with the audience.
When is the best time to do that? Immediately the presentation is over. Don’t organize your schedule so that you have to go into client or internal meetings straight after the presentation. Head for a coffee shop, sit down, relax a bit and start making some notes. If you are a high energy presenter like me, you will be drained at the end of the presentation anyway and a brief rest is a good idea. I leave nothing on the table when I present, I try to put it all out there and give every ounce of energy and passion I possess. It is exhausting.
So go back to the presentation in your mind. Were you able to get there early, check out the venue and meet audience members as they filed in, getting to know about their interest, why they came, gauging their level of expertise on the subject? Did the MC quote from your carefully crafted introduction or did you have to fill in the missing bits yourself. How was the opening? Did it go as planned? How was your speaking speed – did you speed up or were you able to keep it at an even, easy to follow pace? Were you using voice modulation to keep the audience interested or was it all the same strength from beginning to end?
Were you consistently making six second eye contact with members of your audience, so you could connect with them, sell them on your key points and judge their reaction to what you were saying? Were you able to use your gestures to emphasise your argument? Were you able to keep the order of your key points after the opening? If you were using a slide deck, were you dominating the screen or was it dominating you.
Were you controlling the proceedings well, marshaling the various stages of the presentation. For example, did you go into your first close, receive the applause and then call for questions, nominating how many minutes there were for questions? Were you remembering to paraphrase the questions, so that everyone could hear them. Did you control the final impression by adding your second close, so that the last thing the audience heard was what you wanted them to hear? Did you come down off the podium and mix with your audience at the end to extend your personal brand?
Having done this checklist of how it was supposed to flow, then think about how it went. Were people nodding to your points, were the questions hostile or more on point wanting more detail? How many people stayed to talk with you? How many compliments did you receive which were genuine as opposed to flattery? How did you feel it went?
Now ask yourself, what did I do that was good? Then after listing these up start asking yourself, how could I make this better for next time. This will include general points which will be relevant for any topic and any occasion. Do not get into beating yourself up over what you perceived went wrong. Keep the momentum going forward, keep it focused on the positive.
If you were able to record your talk, then certainly play it back and have a close listen to it. If you were able to video it, even better. Seeing and hearing yourself is a great antidote to the paucity of presentations you may be able to give in a year. These records help to keep you focused on improvement.
Don’t bother asking what people thought. You will get a whole bunch of uninformed opinions from people who hardly ever give presentations. If you want to get expert opinion, then invite an expert to attend and have them give you professional level advice. The average punter will only give you critique and work on destroying your confidence.
This whole exercise will probably take about 40 minutes. Time enough to relax over a coffee or a tea and reflect on where you can improve. Make sure you write it down and keep it as a record, which you can consult before your next presentation. Keep doing this and you will definitely improve.
