Five Ways of Presenting Great Content

Changing the way you think about presenting and fixing a few bad habits will allow you to connect with your audience in a way you haven’t before, writes Nancy Duarte, CEO, Duarte, Inc.

Presentations have come a long way in the last decade. Just over ten years ago, most content was boring, including slides, and stage presence was just nice-to-have, not a career maker-or-breaker.

Part of the problem were the software tools, which created hideous slides and had dense slide masters as a default. But most importantly, there were no strong examples of great presenters and great presentations across industries. This created a mindset that being an average presenter was all you needed to aspire to.

Then, suddenly excellent presenting burst onto the global stage when the honorable Al Gore won an academy award for a movie about a slide showOpens a new window . Then, TED.com began broadcasting their presentations. Suddenly presenters and audiences started to understand the power of a great talk as geeky scientists and deep researchers were getting millions of views for their ideas. Who would have predicted that TED would win a Peabody award for broadcasting presentations?

Even though the bar has been raised significantly, there are still a few stubborn bad habits that many presenters have—and they are all rooted in the mistake of thinking about yourself, the presenter, before thinking about the audience.

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1. You Don’t Start From a Place of Empathy

Audiences want you to care about them. Even though you have an agenda and important information to convey, communicate it from a place of shared understanding. Understand what’s on the mind of your audience, what keeps them up at night, how they might resist, what mental or practical obstacles are in their way. Also, you can alienate an audience by not considering how to be inclusive. Ask yourself if you’re even the right spokesperson for the message. Use diverse imagery, make your talk ADA compliant and invite diverse speakers with you onto stage.

2. You Don’t Value Audiences’ Time

If you’re given a timeslot, stay within it! The only thing worse than a bad presentation is a bad presentation going on for too long. TED’s 18-minute format used to be so valued and novel but now, even an 18-minute talk that isn’t done well is too long! Even TED now incorporates nine, six, and three-minute talks into their conference. As attention spans continue to shrink, decide how much time an audience really needs to understand your idea. Plus, an audience will now vote with their feet. I was giving a talk at SXSW once and 15 minutes in, about fifty people walked into my session. I paused to ask what just happened and they said, “someone tweeted that you were interesting.” Yeah, they walked out of a session to come to mine.

3. You Don’t Use the Best Format

Ask yourself. Is a presentation even necessary? Will it be more effective to have them listen to a verbal stream or possibly read and reply to a tight, well thought-through written piece? Could I distribute a well-crafted one-pager or visual memo? Could I send a SlidedocOpens a new window as a read-ahead and facilitate a discussion instead? Presentations tend to be monologue and one-directional delivery of information. Would bi-directional dialogue make this idea stick more effectively? Sometimes you prepare an amazing presentation that you feel is riveting and while delivering it, your boss or peers will interrupt and derail it anyway. Maybe you should design your talk to be interruption-driven. Think about who is in your audience and how they prefer to consume information.  

4. You Don’t Know Your Material

If you don’t come across as an expert, people won’t believe you. What is it that makes one an expert? Doing your homework. If you come in with bias on a topic, an audience can see through it. As part of your preparation, play your own skeptic. Try to disprove your point of view every way you can just to make sure your perspective is defensible. Also, if you are presenting to a particularly skeptical audience, have an appendix ready in your deck. Feel free to jump to slides packed with data that supports your research. Before you speak, have someone play the role of an adversary to your idea and try to poke holes in it. They will come at you with perspectives and resistance you may not have considered.

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5. You Don’t Rehearse Until You’re Comfortable

The best delivery of a talk is one where the presenter comes across as comfortable and dynamic. But, being nervous is very normal. For some reason, our psyche tells us the audience may reject us or be a threat which triggers our fight of flight instincts. One way to combat that is to rehearse. Imagine in your mind delivering your presentation to the audience.  Have someone listen to your talk at least once. They can help you eliminate any jargon or language your audience may not understand. Rehearsing also gives you polish. There are new tools incorporating AI to help you eliminate filler words and help you with pacing like Orai and even the release of Microsoft coming out will give you real-time AI feedback while you rehearse.

Now that brilliant examples of great presentations are widely available, your audiences will be expecting more from you. Audiences have more discriminating taste in presenting and because they are more time-strapped than ever, they are more intentional about who they want to listen to and how much time they want to give. Make your talks awesome and it’ll make a difference in how your ideas move forward in your organization and industry!