Welcome to the final installment in this miniseries! So far, we’ve talked about general techniques and how to combat nervousness. For this last bit, let’s talk about ways to use your body and your slides to create the most efficient and interesting presentation you can.
Body language is our main way to communicate as humans. We constantly transmit feelings and moods to one another. That is why it is so crucial for you to appear open and enthusiastic about your topic – people are simply not going to care half as much, otherwise. Learning how to control and utilize your body language is a very important, often overlooked part of delivering an excellent presentation, and there are quite a few things you can work on.
The first thing you need to do is remember that during the vast majority of the time, you never look as nervous as you feel. Unless you have clear, visible signs of nervousness – sweating profusely, shaking hands, a shaking voice, an out-of-control gaze – then people would never know you’re breaking to pieces inside. I’ll go over some tools on how to use your body to combat these signs of extreme nervousness, but first, let us cover some ways to use your body during a presentation in general.
First, you need to get your arms and hands under control. Your arms are a very efficient tool to underline or add emphasis to what you’re saying, and if they’re hanging down like dead fish, or flailing wildly about, you are completely missing out on that aspect, which is really easy to use to your advantage! You must relax, but not so much that you look threatening or disinterested as we talked about in the previous post. If you’re doing your presentation standing up, find three standard positions your arms can return to. An example of this is one hand in your pocket, and the other bent at the elbow, resting at your side. That way, your arm is still in an active position from which you can easily use it to make an illustration with your hands, or gesture to your slides if needed. If you’re sitting down as you would at an interview, create 6 of these standard positions you can return to: three for chairs with armrests, and three for chairs without. As with everything else, you can practice this in front of a mirror until you find something you’re happy with!
Another thing you must do is something your mom has been telling you your entire life: Straighten up. This is another thing connected to basic human interpretation of body language, and the mood you’re transmitting to your audience. A sunken-together body looks tired, sad, and sick, while a straight back makes you look healthy, happy, and in control of the situation, and that’s exactly what you want to appear as. Straighten your back every damn time you catch yourself relaxing just a little too much, and thank yourself later.
When you’re doing a presentation, especially one that goes on for a while, then you want to walk around. Don’t try to run a marathon during your presentation – stand in one place for 5-10 minutes, or until you reach a natural break in your speech, and then move. Roughly, you can divide the are in front of your audience into five evenly spaced ‘bases’, and you need to move between them. Keep in mind here that no matter which base you’re standing on, you still need to look at your entire audience – your base doesn’t dictate the direction of your gaze! Turn your torso, not your feet, and keep talking while you walk to avoid creating an awkward break in your presentation. Returning briefly to eye contact, consider this: Are there more or fewer than 60 people in your audience? If there are fewer, you can hold each individual’s gaze for 3-5 seconds. If there are more, divide the audience into zones and let your gaze shift between them every 5-10 seconds.
I promised you I’d take a moment to share some things you can do to hide the physical signs of extreme anxiety or stage fright. Just first of all, please remember that 95% of the time, you do not actually look nervous even when you feel nervous. These tools are for when your voice is audibly shaking, or your hands visibly shaking, or you just can’t look people in the eye. If your body doesn’t do this, congratulations! You don’t actually need these tools at all and can focus on working on other aspects.
If your hands are shaking, hide them. Put them behind your back. Put them in your pockets. Remember the standard positions with your arms – just make sure your hands aren’t really visible in any of them, and your arms will still seem dynamic as you change between positions without your treacherous hands giving you away. Don’t worry that you’re sabotaging yourself because you’re not gesticulating – seeming more confident by hiding your hands will give people a much more favorable impression of you than you’d gain by pointing at a PowerPoint slide one time.
If your voice is shaking, I’m sorry, that’s a tough one to combat, but you can do it. You need to get your body used to you speaking in unnatural situations. This exercise can be a little daunting, but if you have to do presentations or go to interviews often, the results are potentially invaluable. Put on some headphones and listen to some music, and then go for a walk outside. To begin with, you can do this in a secluded area – a forest, or quiet neighborhood. And then talk to yourself. Practice your presentation, rehearse what you need to say, and don’t worry about hiccups or forgetting things – remember that mistakes and pauses are normal and make you seem human. If someone sees you on the street, they’ll probably think you’re a weirdo, but y’know what, screw them. You’re here to practice speaking in an unusual situation. Keep doing this exercise, and do it often, until you can walk through a crowded mall, rehearsing your presentation, without your voice shaking. It will take time, but you can do it.
If you can’t look people in the eyes, an option for you is, as I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, to look at a point right above people. This is absolutely a last resort, as this will distance you from your audience, so if you feel like you can handle eye contact today, then try.
Your Slides: Dos & Don’ts
Slides should be your tool, an illustration, but ideally not something you’d need to rely on for your presentation. You need to be able to perform without your slides entirely – imagine if the program decides to just not work and you stand in front of 100 people and realize that oh, shit – you’re in the very deep end right now. No, you need to avoid that situation altogether by treating slides as something extra, not a key component. That will help get you into the right mindset.
Do: Use pictures. Pictures will keep your audience occupied with visual input, while you keep them occupied with auditory input. You avoid stressing out their brains this way and will make your subject matter easier to understand. Find one good picture that will illustrate a key point neatly – but try to avoid obviously staged stock photos. They are cheesy and reek of untrustworthiness, which is the opposite of what you want.
Point at or indicate the screen when you change the slide or need your audience to pay extra attention to it. Literally, guide them with one of your hands. Use your body to clearly express to people that this right here is very important right now.
Don’t: Use text. No, seriously, try to avoid it at all costs. If your audience has to read as well as listen to you, they won’t be able to remember a single thing – because both you and your slide are trying to activate the same center in their brains. If you must use text – like a quote, for instance – don’t just let it sit. Read it aloud, explain its importance and relevance. Introduce the text and then continue your presentation from that. Remember to use a text size that everyone is able to read from a distance. Anything smaller than 18 pt is a mistake; and if you think that making your text a size smaller just so you can fit everything on one slide is a good idea, you are wrong. In that case, you already have far too much text, and it will be way too small for anyone to read without concentrating, further taking the focus away from the most important element of the presentation: you.
If you’re the kind of person who adds a lot of text to slides so that you’ll remember what you need to say, it’s a bad habit and you must practice getting rid of it. At most you can have cue cards with a few words on them; never full sentences. If you rely less on full, rehearsed statements, you will be in a much easier position to navigate around mistakes or incidents that are outside of your control (such as tech not working or people barging in late).
Maybe: Use graphs. Graphs are good and can be used effectively to illustrate a complicated topic or create a comparison, but think about why the graph is there. Is it there to show the difference between 2009 and 2010? To show the development from March to December? Highlight the important parts of your graph to direct people’s attention to it, and away from all the other clutter that you actually don’t need to support your presentation. If there are labels on the graph, make sure they are very clearly visible and readable, as per the point above.
Thus ends this miniseries on presentation skills! Read up on how to get a great start and how to deal with nervousness here. Thank you so much for reading and reblogging, and I hope you’ve found this useful!
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