How to build a lasting impression in your next presentation
Practice makes perfect
Natasha [Skills for Study editor]:
Are you working on any of these skills and ways to kind of improve on or sustain your own presentation skills?
Ken Rea [Professor of Theatre]:
Yes. Yeah, it's it's important you. You keep developing your skills all the time. Like, if you were you wanted to be a an amazing sports person, you would almost certainly have your routine of practising your your physical skills every day.
If you wanted to be a great musician, you would almost certainly be playing your scales.
You know, for X number of hours every day.
And actors, also, you know, they work constantly on the body, the voice, to keep in tip top conditions so that when a job comes along, they're ready to go. For me, I do a few minutes of voice work every day and chi kung exercises just so there's a good workout for body and voice.
So if you really want to develop your skills as a presenter, give yourself some routine that you can do where you're moving your skills forward, even if it's just a few minutes a day.
Focus your energy
I'll show you one technique that can make a difference that, even you don't need to practise.
One of the things is when we feel lacking in confidence, we're a bit on the back foot. What tends to happen naturally is we kind of run out of breath and the end of the sentence and the rest of the sentence sort of goes down into that monotone.
And, we might recover for the next sentence, but that will we're not feeling, you now, really that confidence that we go into a monotone. And this might have happened even in a short sentence.
So can you hear how difficult it is to really stay with that and keep interested in what I'm saying?
So it's a technique that actors learn to keep the audience awake for three or four hours of Shakespeare. Or, and alive and engaged with that.
[What actors do] is they take the energy to the end of the sentence. So the last word has equal energy to the first word. So, what you do is you aim for that target. That last word of the sentence.
So, each sentence you start, you keep the energy going until you get to that point. And, that alone, can double your vocal impact, and it also makes you feel much more confident.
Can you see how easier it is to listen to that rather than sort of trailing off and that?
And a lot of people, by the way, do very well in the presentation and then they will finish off and say:
"Well, I'm that's that's about all I had to say. I don't know whether you've got any questions...thanks very much for having [me]."
And, that was the last impression we have of you! You know [the last impression] of your organisation, if it's in the corporate world.
So you [as the presenter] keep the energy going right to the last moment.
