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Personal Preparation
Know your material (beyond the presentation)
Remember back in school when you had to take a final exam? The way to get an “A” was to know as much as possible of your course material even though there was only time to test you on a small portion of it. Presentations are the same way. Your audience can ask you anything, not just the themes you selected to show in your presentation.
Practice the presentation
Run through the presentation with colleagues, friends, spouse, dog, and the mirror. Speaking the presentation never comes out the way you were thinking it. You must say it out loud in the tone of voice and volume that you will say it to your real audience. Keep doing it until you have a succinct way of creating an impact on your audience. It’s never comfortable practicing like this, but it will make a big difference.
Practice getting "roughed up"
When presenting in front of your practice audience, have your audience treat you as if they are tough clients. Tell them to interrupt you, challenge your assertions, tell you to skip to a certain page or subject, ask you to clarify points, and even use their Blackberrys in front of you while you are presenting. Real audiences will do all of these things.
Prepare mentally
Envision yourself running through the presentation successfully and answering questions. Professional athletes learned this trick from top sports psychologists and it works well for presentations too. Also, make sure you get good sleep the night before a presentation so you will be on your game when it matters.
Presentation Logistics
Prepare for technical disaster
Murphy’s law applies when using technology to present. The LCD projector might not work, your notebook computer might not be able to interface with it, and the presentation computer might be loaded with an old presentation version. You never know what will go wrong, and anyone who has given presentations on unfamiliar equipment has seen it all.
Whenever practical, bring paper copies to distribute to your audience, make sure there is a spare notebook computer available, and bring your presentation on your computer and on a thumb-drive for backup. Also, always arrive early to make sure everything is the way you want it.
Anticipate the questions
Sometimes there are subjects that you don’t want to address in your planned presentation, but you know that you might be questioned on them. In this case, bring “back pocket” slides. These are slides that provide information not included in your planned presentation. You keep them in your briefcase or in a separate folder on your computer and then if someone asks the right question you say “I’m glad you asked that question because…” and you pull out your back pocket slide to support the answer you are giving.
Leave Behind
Most of the time your audience will need to consider what you presented and share your information with other people before taking action. Be prepared to leave them with a copy of your presentation or other material that summarizes the key points of the presentation. If you are presenting to a large audience at a conference, post the presentation on your website for viewing and download.
Presenters who are consistently successful prepare and make contingency plans. By following basic preparation guidelines, you will be able to master any audience and achieve your presentation goals.
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