How do you feel about doing presentations?

Posted by Stuart Browne

During his annual performance review, a friend of mine was told that he needed to attend a presentation skills training course. Because he knows that I deliver training on personal impact and communication he asked for my advice.

His boss had given him a shopping list of things he needed to cover on any suitable course he found. I can only assume that the list was a composition of the topics that his boss has been taught on the various presentation skills courses he’d attended in the past:

  • Learn to use visual aids
  • Techniques to practice and rehearse
  • Find ways to be more entertaining
  • Learn to speak more clearly and project yourself
  • Work out a good presentation structure

After a brief discussion on each of these areas, I asked my friend a simple question….

‘How do you want people to feel when you are presenting to them?’

‘What do you mean?” he asked, slightly confused.

‘What emotions do you want them to have when you present to them?’

After a moment of reflection, his answer was ‘I want them to feel confident that I can do my job.’

Presentation Skills Emotions

Over the next few minutes, we agreed that:

  • He doesn’t necessarily need to use visual aids to do make people feel confident about his ability.
  • He shouldn’t need to rehearse telling people that he can do his job well. After all, it’s his job – he does it 5 days a week!
  • He definitely doesn’t need to be entertaining to make people feel confident. I’ve never seen a crowd of people confident when there are clowns around!
  • He was speaking clearly enough for me to understand him – so I wasn’t sure what the big deal was there.
  • Structure is only relevant if he feels that he needs it to impart a feeling of confidence. If he can make people feel confident by ‘shooting from the hip’ – great.

We then spent an hour talking about ways to change the emotional state of your audience to one that is useful to the point you want to make. After all, once people are in the right emotional state, they are much more receptive to the things you tell them.

What did we conclude?

Generic presentation skills training courses are probably OK for generic people. If you want to come across the same as everybody else, do the same basic training as everybody else.
Often, when people think they need ‘presentation skills’, what they actually need are new ways to relate to the people they interact with

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