Recently, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback about our monthly newsletter and how it focuses on providing presenters with strategic advice on how to produce winning presentations, rather than on vague, unclear tactics. That’s because very few people ever learn the basics of presentations, and executives with the potential to produce brilliant presentations commit severe strategic errors. Three of the most common mistakes are:
- Misconceptions about the focus (it’s not the presenter – but your audience’s need to know),
- Giving too much information to the audience, instead of structuring it to guide decision-making
- Violating the presenter’s own gut feelings about what to present.
The most frequent reason executives “resist” calls for public speaking, is lack of self-confidence in the ability to deliver a message powerfully. It’s usually NOT because the person isn’t able to speak clearly in public; most executives are fine conversationalists, and a great presentation is no more than a focused-conversation. Public Speaking jitters arise because speakers try to conform to other’s standard of what material should be presented and how to present it – and they aren’t comfortable with those decisions.
This results in a lack of authenticity and self-doubts which erodes one’s comfort level. Worse, when a speaker starts focusing on his/her own internal cues of discomfort in front of a group, this creates a domino effect and downward spiral of self-doubts, leading to making strategic errors, such as focusing on the presentation slides rather than relating to the audience with a persuasive story.