We’re talking about boring presentations. If you’ve ever sat through one (or delivered one yourself), you know that it’s something you don’t want to experience a second time. In our last blog, we talked about tip #1 for how not to bore your audience with your presentation. We addressed how important it is to vary your content and include emotion. A presentation with all facts and statistics causes listeners to lose interest quickly. In case you missed that post, here are the suggestions we offered for how to address this first problem.
Today, we are moving on to the second reason presentations become boring: dispassionate delivery. We’ll look at how this affects your audience and offer some tips to help you become a more expressive speaker.
Problem: Dispassionate Delivery
The way you deliver your presentation is important. You can have great content and a stellar slide deck, but if you don’t deliver it with passion, the audience will lose interest pretty fast. This doesn’t mean you should go over the top. You don’t want to become a character. Aim for authenticity. Be who you are. Just be who you are when you are at your most expressive. Which means you have to figure out when that is. Ask your friends and family when you are most expressive. Is it when you are watching sports? Talking about a certain topic? Conversing with friends? Identify the most expressive version of yourself and then work to pull elements of that into your presentations. Here’s how.
Solution: Become More Expressive
You can’t just become more expressive overnight. It’s something you’ll have to work at. For example, if you want to live a healthier lifestyle, you’ll have to approach that battle on a couple of different fronts (nutrition, exercise, rest, etc.). The same is true for expressiveness. You need to address several different components, and we’ll go over each below. Before you dive in to the parts of expressiveness, though, we suggest you find a children’s book. (Jon Sciezka is one of our favorites when it comes to kids’ books). Reading content written for kids aloud is one of the best ways to practice expressiveness. You might feel silly at first, but keep at it. And concentrate on these things:
Voice:
Your voice has a lot to do with your expressiveness (or lack thereof). You want to aim for natural, but slightly elevated variety. For example, your pitch (the high/low placement of your voice on a musical scale), your volume (loud or soft), your tone (emotional tenor of your voice), and your rate (the speed at which you talk) should all vary slightly throughout your speech. Without this vocal variety, you’ll have monotone delivery which is a surefire way to bore your audience. When working on your vocal expression, always make sure your voice matches your content. Want to build excitement? Raise your pitch and pick up your speed a bit and see how the content feels different. And then check out these tips from vocal coaches about how to improve your vocal qualities.
Face:
Again, without becoming a character or an inauthentic version of yourself, use the muscles of your face to help you express different emotions. Most people just assume their face is expressive when they present. Very few of us actually know whether it really is. So you’ll want to record yourself practicing your presentation or reading that children’s book we suggested. Does your face move to help you communicate nonverbally? If you aren’t ready to record and watch yourself back (we get it, that takes some strength), you might try this. Watch popular TED talks with the sound off and pay attention to the facial expressions of the speaker. Can you get a feel for the tone of the content just by watching their faces? Studying how other speakers use their face can help you learn to be more expressive. You might start with this list of the most popular US searches for TED speakers compiled by VBQ.
Body:
Finally, you can learn to be more expressive with your body. Our eyes are attracted to movement, so when you move, it captures audience attention. As with your voice and face, you don’t want to overdo it. But if you are delivering your presentation standing in one spot, you are missing out on a simple way to make your presentation more engaging. How often do you move in your presentation and why are you moving? It’s something you’ll want to dig into. To learn more, check out presentation expert Andrew Dlugan’s tips for body movement when you speak.
Start by working on these things with the children’s book you picked. Be expressive. Make the content engaging. Tell the story using all the tools you have—voice, face, and body. Then apply those same lessons and skills to your presentation to ensure that you don’t bore your audience. If you aren’t boring, your presentation won’t be.
Ready to see how Ethos3 can help make your presentation design and delivery top notch? Reach out now.
