Five Preparation Tips

The key to a great presentation is in the preparation, if you spend the time and energy on getting ready to deliver by the time you come to making your speech it will be the way you want it and need it to be.

Here are five simple ways to make sure you've laid the groundwork for a talk that leaves a lasting positive impression on your audience.

Practice Your Delivery

It's time to rope in some friends or colleagues and use them as guinea pigs. If you want to know how people will receive what you say there's no better way to find out than to talk to some people. When you do this get feedback, and more importantly act on that feedback.

You can also video yourself, but don't try and evaluate your performance by yourself. We tend to be too tough or too easy on ourselves, and videos can make us extremely self conscious. So ask someone else to go through it with you.

Focus on: Content and Style

Check the Venue

Spend some time in the place (if you can) where you will be delivering, look at the set up particularly where the audience will sit in relation to you. Look at how you will get to the space in which you present and keep an eye out for obstacles, there's nothing worse than tripping over a cable prior to a big speech.

Focus on: Access and Comfort

Don't Over Do It

If you over prepare you can end up with a formula but no magic. It can leave you stilted and robotic and people will perceive you as "going through the motions". Trust in yourself and rely on the principle that once you feel 90% ready, you're ready. The other 10% isn't big enough to worry about and is almost certainly tiny detail that no-one else notices.

Focus on: Maintaining the flow and keeping it natural

Check the Tech

Look at the projector; make sure you're familiar and comfortable with it. Practice with any controls and ideally learn to use them without looking. Make sure your PowerPoint keeps within style guidelines and isn't full of annoying animations and swoosh effects.

Focus on: Avoiding distractions on the day

Visual Aids

Keep words to a minimum and use your visuals to enhance and maintain your talk. You're the source of the speech not the slides. So graphics that illustrate and improve the content are great, thousands of type written notes - are not.