Key Presentations Skills

Hi, I'm Simon Bucknall and in 2008, I won the European Championship of Public Speaking. At the Art of Connection, we help ambitious professionals to connect with their audience and we do it by bringing world class communications expertise into the training room to enable our clients to persuade, influence and inspire others. What are the presentation skills that you can use to help add to the impact you achieve with your audience? Well, in this video, you'll get three simple techniques and they can really make a difference and help to ensure that the next time you're in front of an audience, you have that bit more impact with them.

The first is volume. The second is eye contact and the third is movement or your use of space. So, let's look first of all at volume.

Because many people make the mistake when they're standing speaking to an audience, they make the mistake of speaking too softly. Now, don't get me wrong. Speaking quietly, those softer delicate moments, can be very powerful if they're used with a good reason.

But if you speak softly throughout the presentation, you risk coming across as less confident and more nervous than you may actually be. In fact, if you want to increase the confidence that you achieved in the minds of your audience, simply speaking loudly is one of the best pieces of advice I can give you. The issue is that what sounds the right volume to you as the speaker is not the same as what sounds right to the audience.

You need to feel as though you are speaking unnaturally loudly in front of the audience. As soon as you know you're speaking too loudly, that's about the right pitch. Skill number two, your eye contact.

This is a real art. And the piece of advice I can give here is to invite you to dip in and out at random around your audience. Some trainers and speakers even cut in a map in their own mind into four quadrants or in half.

It depends on the layout of the room. But try to avoid the mistake of turning into what I call the lighthouse where a speaker's scanning the room constantly and ends up looking a bit weird. It becomes obvious to the audience that they're just doing eye contact for argument's sake.

If you dip in and out at random and allow yourself to make contact with individual people for just a few moments, it'll add to the impact because those people feel like you're talking to them. With bigger audiences, it's important to slow that down because as soon as you look down a particular line of sight, all the people in that line of sight will feel connected to you but it needs to be slower. Smaller groups, you can dip in and out more quickly.

Third and finally, is all about movement. The use of space can make a real difference to the impact of your presentation and in fact, it also adds to your presence because if you move around, you fill the space you become more live, more real, you become, as I like to call it, a 3D speaker instead of just 2D. And one thing that you can do is anchor different points to different parts of the stage.

So in this talk for example, I've tried to put point number one in this area, point number two in this area, and then point number three over here. So, how can you use the stage next time you're giving a presentation? Because the more that you fill it, the bigger the impact you will achieve. So, those are the three skills – volume, eye contact and movement. .