Are you nervous before you go on? Most people are and the professionals will tell you that the day you lose that nervousness in the pit of your stomach, you’ll lose your edge too.
However, if you have got it into your head that your audience is expecting you to fail – you’d be wrong. Let’s turn this around – when you go to see and hear someone speak are you hoping they’ll be hopeless? No, of course you don’t. None of us want to see a bad presentation.
When you’re in the audience’s seat you want the speaker to entertain, to inform and to help you to come away thinking it was really worth making the effort to go along.
If you’ve done your bit – prepared your message, honed it to a sharp and insightful presentation, practised and polished and arrived in plenty of time to walk onto the platform on cue – they’ll do theirs and give you the applause you deserve at the end.
Just be warned that – no matter how good at speaking ‘ad lib’ you are, if you try to wing it you’ll be doing yourself and your audience a disservice. No matter how much you know about your subject, the danger of taking your audience on a mystery tour is high – they need you to have thought things through so the route is clear, they can see where they’re going and it all makes sense.
Remember, they want you to succeed – and if you’re a professional you’ll do exactly that!
Find out more about constructing presentations at www.insidenews.co.uk.
