It’s all about being professional… The more one prepares the better you present! One thing most people fear is speaking in front of a crowd. Creating an outline of all your talking points is more important that having a scripted presentation. If you speak from a script you’re going to come across as dry and rehearsed. People all too often put everything they want to say in slides. People for the most part are visual learners. Reading off a slide is the quickest way to put your audience to sleep. It is often said that Steve Jobs is one of the best presenters in Silicon Valley. Why because he is passionate. Why because he knows his product offering. He sets up the protagonist and then along comes Steve (Apple) to save the day! He may a sentence quoted from a magazine (his evidence) one a slide but there’s never more than one or two words for any given slide when he’s presenting product.

Why am I spending so much time on this… because one needs to come off as polished as opposed to contrived. We may not always be able to set up a protagonist BUT we can be intimately familiar with our product offering (whatever it is we are trying to say). We can be passionate! We can be polished. Have outline. Know your talking points… BUT don’t spend extreme amounts of effort getting your wording prefect! Learn from your mistakes… very often as part of my job responsibilities, I have to present technical material. Often I have to give the same presentation over and over. I learn what works from what doesn’t. I make adjustments… I may use the same lines over and over but you never get the same presentation twice. I try to present technical matters as simply as possible. In explaining bandwidth concerns, I often use plumbing as an analogy (the bigger the pipe, the more water can go through it). Put your ideas into words most people can relate to. Remember you’re not speaking to yourself… and those who are familiar with your ideas… you’re speaking to the an audience that can be made up of people from various different technical backgrounds. You have to assume they aren’t as familiar with the subject matter as you (otherwise you wouldn’t be there)! These are the people you need to convince. So convince them!