3 Guaranteed Ways of Transforming your Presentation Fears: Capture & Engage your Audience Every Time

Transform your Presentation Fears: I did

I remember the sudden flush of fear I felt when I presented at my first networking meeting.  The fear vanished because I had prepared and practiced my presentation.  For many small business owners, crafting their first presentation gives them nightmares.  Your dream of sharing your expertise, talents, and experience with potential clients doesn’t have to turn into a nightmare.  Employ these tips for successfully capturing and engaging your audience.  Your preparation will pay off.

3 Straightforward Solutions to Break Through your Presentation Blocks

Block 1: Stale, Ordinary delivery style

Solutions: Share your Story & Converse

Infuse your Personality

Introduce yourself with personality.  Establish yourself as unique in your field by sharing your story.  Infusing your personality shines a light on your uniqueness.  When I give presentations on the dynamic public speaking and communication skills training that I offer, I explain my early days of public speaking.  My personalty automatically comes through because I’m recollecting my own experience.  Share your own experience and story of how you arrived where you are in your field.  Share the passion of why you do the work you do.  Your audience can not help but connect with  you when you are authentic.

Speak conversationally

Converse with the audience.  Avoid formal lecture-style speaking.  Speaking conversationally establishes rapport. Use action verbs to excite and emote.  Speaking conversationally draws your audience to YOU.  Smile, make eye contact, and speak at a comfortable rate.  Make eye contact with one person at a time.  Your audience will pick up on the energy of your connection with the one person at whom you are looking.  Move eye contact to people who show interest and engagement with you.  For example, I peel my eyes on the audience members.   When someone raises their eyebrows in response to a verbal prompt I make or nods their head when I ask a question, I make comment about that specific reaction.  “I see that you’re nodding your head as if you’re connecting with what I’m saying.”

Block 2: Failure to Grab Attention

Solutions:  Appeal to Emotion & Solve Problems

Emotionally engage your audience.  When introducing your topic, speak to the solutions to your audience’s problems.  How are you solving their problems? Give them the “so what”.  So they have a problem-how are you going to solve the problem? How is it going to impact their lives? You only have a few minutes to get their attention from the beginning. Focus on their needs. Communicate the results that they can expect when the problem is solved.  Grabbing attention captures audiences.  Solving problems engages audiences.

Example

For example, I created the title to this blog to get your attention. Which title more aggressively grabs your attention? “How to Present” or “3 Ways of Capturing and Engaging your Audience Every Time”?  The second title grabs your attention because it shows you how I’m going to help you solve a problem.

Block 3: Absent or Loose Structuring

Solution: Think ahead of your Audience

Your audience (just like you) wants information that’s practical and ready to digest and implement.  Thinking ahead of your audience means that you have taken the time to organize the information into categories for them.  State the topic and introduce the information.  Give a brief summary of what you’ll be addressing. Organize and describe the information within clear categories.  Careful structuring engages audiences.  Thinking from your audience’s perspective KEEPS audiences engaged.

Example

For this particular blog presentation, I categorized topics and sub topics into the following: “Transform your Presentation Fears” and “3 Straightforward Solutions to Break Through your Presentation Blocks”. I subcategorized into 3 separate “Blocks” and 3 separate “Solutions”, with further subdivisions such as “Infuse your Personality,” “Speak Conversationally,” “Emotionally Engage your Audience,” etcetera.

Share your Experiences, Comment, or Ask Questions

We hope this blog was valuable to you.  Click on the comments section at the end of this article, scroll to the bottom, and leave a comment and/or question.  Share your own personal experience with breaking through your own presentation blocks.  We’ll be happy to respond.  It is Master Your Accent’s mission to equip professionals with tools create personable, compelling presentations that move audiences to action.

Success in breaking through your presentation blocks!

Cher