When it comes to practicing our business presentations, how we prepare is important to helping us be more successful on the big day. Here are five tips to help focus our efforts that could help give us a greater return for the time we invest in practicing our work presentations.
Tip 1: Focus on Getting the Opening Right
Memorizing our presentations is usually not the best approach for most business situations. However, practicing our one- or two-minute opening again and again is important so we feel completely confident with it. A strong opening can help us set the stage for the rest of the content. We don’t need to memorize our openings with specific words, but we can practice it so often that we internalize the different elements or messages that we want to convey.
Tip 2: Better than Memorizing
Jim Kwik, who is a great speaker and learning expert, has a really interesting technique called the Loci Method that he teaches to help people memorize the flow of our presentations without memorizing the words. We attach different associations to the concepts or topics in our speech. He uses the same technique to help actors memorize long lines of dialogue. This is a great option for those of us who feel more confident with our presentations planned out in a specific order but it means we won’t get hung up on individual words.
Tip 3: Practice Out Loud
We need to practice saying our presentations and not just in our head. This is because it might sound different when we deliver it out loud and we want to get comfortable with how it sounds. This can also be a chance to see if there are any changes we want to make to it. For example, there may be a section that takes a while to explain that we may want to incorporate a visual storytelling element as well. Or, there may be a section that feels long to us when we say it out loud that we can shorten a bit.
Tip 4: Prepare for Technical Challenges
Another tip is to be prepared for technical challenges and have back up plans in place. Check out this article with more advice on potential disruptions and some ideas for how we could potentially help address them. Hopefully, we won’t need these plans. But, it can be helpful to react quickly and confidently in different situations.
Tip 5: Become Comfortable on Video
We can also start using video more often, whether it is through FaceTime, Skype, Facebook Live or whatever platforms we want to use. This can help us become comfortable making eye contact, speaking at a good volume, and more. This also helps us to move past that “cringe factor” that can sometimes happen when we watch ourselves on screen. When it becomes more normal, we become more natural.
Take Action
Which one of these ideas most resonates? Try one or more of these tips for an upcoming business presentation to help us feel prepared and ready to focus our attention on delivering the information we need to our audience.
