Free Presentation and Public Speaking Hints & Tips

11 Proven Ways To Make Your Next Speech Or Presentation Truly Memorable

1.Know what you want

At the end of your presentation you want your listener(s) to do something, to understand something or to feel a certain way. Otherwise why are you talking to them? But if you do not know precisely what it is you want them to do, understand or feel, you will not succeed!
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Yet how many times does the sales person deliver a great pitch – and then fail to ask for the order? How often have you listened to a wedding speech that had all the guests laughing and enjoying it – and then seen it ruined by a maudlin or mawkish ending?
Start at the end!
A great way to prepare is to start at the end! Write down your final statement and then construct your speech or presentation with that end in mind. You will find this approach makes the whole job a lot simpler.

2. Keep it short!

Nothing irritates an audience more than a speaker who keeps talking after they have anything worthwhile left to say. Surprisingly, business presenters are among the worst offenders. The rule is to never leave your listeners wanting less!
To generalize, a speech should last about ten minutes at most and a business presentation that goes on for more than half an hour is probably going to be ineffective. Generalizations are, of course, just that and there will be many cases when these times will not apply. But if you adopt them as guidelines you will seldom fall into the trap of boring your audience or talking yourself out of the sale!
For business presentations, where you may have a lot of information to impart, consider putting the details into handouts and simply paraphrase the information in the presentation itself.

3. Use stories

The world’s greatest speakers have all been accomplished storytellers. Why? Because human beings love stories! As infants we all love to hear tales of great adventure and excitement -and we are no different as adults. Whether you are speaking at a formal business conference or delivering a humorous after dinner speech, sprinkle your delivery with apt and relevant stories and anecdotes to guarantee a warm reception.
Embellish! In business, of course, one must stick to the facts but even they can be related in an interesting fashion. For social speaking, poetic license rules! Turn generic stories into personal ones; feel free to exaggerate for effect; make yourself the hero or, even better, the victim. They’ll love you even more if it is you who slips on the banana skin!

4. Involve your listeners

If you have ever landed the ‘graveyard shift’, that awful period just after lunch when everyone is feeling sleepy, you will understand the need to think of something to keep their interest. But it isn’t only after lunch that this problem appears. Human beings are incredibly easily distracted. Thirty seconds after you open your mouth they will be thinking about the state of the traffic at going-home time, or that movie they want to see – in fact anything but what you are trying to tell them.
The solution? Give them a task. Get them to copy down a list or make a calculation. If appropriate, get them to stand up and move to another chair. Anything that will get them into action will do the trick. Perhaps the simplest way of all is to throw some questions at them – just be careful they don’t seize the opportunity to hijack the show!

5. Wave your arms about!

Or, rather, make big, meaningful gestures. When you are speaking, you are separated from the audience. You are ‘on stage’ even if there is no raised platform. Because of this ‘remove’, you need to be a little larger than life. You need to perform. Many of us worry that we may go ‘over the top’. Worry no more – the mere fact that this concerns you means that you won’t! When you feel that you are being outrageously over-dramatic, you will be just about reaching the right level.
Beware the penguin!
Trying to go ‘over the top’ will curb that unfortunate tendency many speakers have to tuck their elbows in to their sides and flap their wrists like a nervous penguin. So let yourself go – wave your arms! In fact, wave your whole body, you’ll feel a lot better – and so will your listeners.

6. Light and shade

By which we mean vocal variety. Along with big physical gestures we need big vocal gestures. When we are talking about good things, we need to sound happy or pleased. When we point out the pitfalls, our voice should reflect the gravity of the problem.

Bedtime stories

The performance is as much in the voice as in the gestures. We should use our voices as though we are telling a story to a favorite infant at bedtime, not reading a boring newspaper article to ourselves. In fact a good exercise that we often use on workshops is to read a fairy story with the appropriate vocal light and shade, followed by reading a deadly dull article and trying to inject the same level of enthusiasm. Try it yourself; you may be surprised to realize the difference it can make!

7. Lighten up – tell a joke!

Maybe not! Not unless you are good at it anyway. But why would you want to use humor? To relieve the tension, of course, yours and your audience’s. That’s right – they are tense too! We examine tension in some depth during our speaking workshops and one thing we have found is that even bad joke tellers (most of us) can tell a story with a humorous aspect. It doesn’t have to be a joke and it doesn’t have to be all that funny either. The simplest story to tell is one that involves you directly and has you as the ‘victim’. Mistaken identity, soaked by a passing car, it matters little as long as you are obviously enjoying telling the tale and there is enough amusement to give an excuse for a chuckle. You don’t need a belly laugh, all you want is for them to relax and warm to you. Begin collecting real-life tales today!

 

8. Rehearse, rehearse.

This tip is mainly for business presenters. Few people who have been asked to make a speech fail to rehearse (though they often do not rehearse enough). Many who are asked to make a business presentation simply gather up their material, waltz in to the presentation room and try to wing it. “Why not?” they reason, “I know all about XYZ. I’ll just tell ‘em what I know and it’ll be fine.” No, it won’t. Sadly, few of us are able to speak off the cuff with anything like the effect we would like. The saddest of us are those who do not realize it, who think they are doing alright and cannot understand why the sales or the applause are not flowing. There is no substitute for preparation and preparation means rehearsal after rehearsal after rehearsal.  (I wish it were different too!)

9. Pause

Einstein revealed to the world that time is relative. Never more so than when you are standing in front of an audience! A few seconds silence seems to the speaker like an age. Silence is frightening. Yet to the audience it is nothing. The speaker desperately needs to fill that gap. And all too often the filler is ‘er’, ‘um’, ‘you know’ or something similar. Soon, the listeners are counting the ‘ums’ instead of listening to the message.

 The power of the pause

Once you realize how powerful a pause can be, you’ll never need to fill the gap again. Pauses alert the audience that something important is about to happen. Use pauses before main points; use them to draw attention to punch lines. Above all, use them to let your words sink in! Audiences don’t mind pauses – it is only we speakers who fear them!

10. Slow down!

You are speaking too fast. How do I know? Because everyone speaks too fast! This is mainly due to nerves. Subconsciously we are thinking, “If I speak really quickly it will soon be over and I can sit down and become anonymous once more.” Which is fine but for the fact that most of us cannot speak quickly and remain coherent. So the listeners are left wondering what on earth we are talking about. And if they are trying to take notes – forget it!

Too slow is good

That is not true, of course. It is simply a way of reminding you that, if you think you are speaking too slowly, you are probably just about right. Remember we said ‘time is relative’? Well that applies just as much to speaking speed as it does to pauses. Slow down – you’ll feel better and so will the audience.

11. Don’t forget to breathe!

Very often our nerves get the better of us when we stand up to speak. One common symptom is fast, shallow breathing. This causes us either to stop for breath in mid-sentence or, worse, to slowly run out of breath as we frantically try to finish, our voice fading to a whisper as breath runs out. It takes a conscious effort to overcome this problem, something we cover in depth on our workshops. But there is a simple remedy that you can put into practice right away.
Quick fix
To check the tendency, put your hand on your abdomen just prior to the start of your talk. Breathe in deeply without allowing your shoulders to rise and feel the abdomen push your hand out. Doing this a couple of times before you begin will certainly ease the problem.