Hi and this question is … Can you give some suggestions for faultless non face-to-face presentations?
My name’s Helen from The Presentation Maestro, and if you talk over a presentation or you narrate training materials this is for you.
The first thing to say is before you start speaking picture your audience – a group of people that you would like to be listening to this – and have a conversation with them – it sounds so much better.
The second thing is keep your chin at 90 degrees – if your chin dips your voice can sound a little a little more monotonous so keep it at 90 degrees, and smile. Smiling brings a warmth to the voice which you need when
you can’t see the face. So as you are narrating over slides – smile try and smile throughout.
The next tip is to slow down your speech and pause…. use pauses. That has two brilliant advantages the first one for you is that it gives you the thinking time of what you want to say next – and for your audience, it gives them the chance they don’t know this stuff, it gives them the chance to listen to digest and to get ready for the next thing.
The next tip this is about the equipment. Now if you are using say for example PowerPoint slides with transitions in them, have fewer things that you want to say per slide. That gives you the chance to move on to the next bit quite easily.
And if you are pre-recording, lucky you, that means that at the end of each side you can actually pause, check what you want to say on the next bit, start the camera rolling again and then pause on the next slide. It works so well. Much easier to pause at the end than in the middle of what you’re saying. And if you are pre-recording… check out there’s loads of editing software out there some really easy to use, so check that out….. and you can appear faultless even if you’re not.
And the final thing I’d like to say is about your notes. Now I personally don’t advocate writing a script and memorising it, but if that works for you absolutely fine do it. But whatever notes you use make sure that they are in a big font, with lots of space between the lines and use colours to indicate where you want to pause ,which words you want to emphasise, ….all kinds of little things…. where you want the next transition of the slide to be.
So, in summary. Some suggestions for you
Number one, picture your audience before you start talking.
Number two keep your chin up and smile.
Number three slow down your speaking and use pauses.
Number four adjust your equipment have fewer things that you want to say on each slide – and if you if you are pre-recording pause at the end of each side.
And number five use colours and space and even pictures in your notes.
I hope you found that useful and I’ll see you in the next one.
