Presentation Skills – Keeping the Blackberries at Bay

Answer: He looks at his shoes when he talks to you! I may say that, coming from a family of engineers, but it’s exactly the point of the column this month in the art of successful presentation of the design and implementation. At the heart of all successful presentations is a presenter who maintains good eye contact with audience members at all times.

Microsoft estimates that over 300 million copies of PowerPoint installed throughout the world, something like 3 million presentations are given every day. They do not tell us is that roughly 2.9 million of them are completely ineffective in achieving a real transfer of knowledge, so the presentations are supposed to be about in the first place.

Knowledge transfer occurs, for the most part, when you are able to keep each member of the audience on the same page throughout the presentation. Unlike a written report, where the public has the luxury of acquiring knowledge embedded in their own pace, a presentation is actually an event where knowledge transfer is a case in a rather ethereal, the information appears on the display and It’sa fleeting moment in time, then disappears.

To understand the relationship between an on-screen presentation and a written report (or worse – the presentation printed as a hand out), I sign off the magazine ads.

Look at the eyes

To keep the audience together, you must first start with a presentation that allows you to stay engaged with the public, either in front of the screen or your notes. When you lose in the presentations today, inviting audience members to wander, and when the flower of Mora.

A key to successful participation involves learning proper eye contact, which needs to maintain contact with people from anywhere between 3-7 seconds, or until it has completed a thought. At which point, you pause and move on to someone else and do the same. Most of the presenters look at a person not more than 1 ½ seconds at a time, that if, and only when they are not looking at the ceiling or down at the floor. Or, extrovertida with the engineers, the shoes.

Modern presentation theory teaches a method to make conversation, because that is the way to maximize comfort and trust between you and the public. Practicing simple techniques of eye contact, you can share with a group of 500 without having to feel the anxiety when speaking of his work to friends around a table for lunch. Most people find that hard to believe until we have received some training, but when you get down, it’s pretty powerful stuff!

People like to talk about themselves, about what they do and what they know. Your presentations should be. Use the screen to follow a pre-set direction, use it to list all the items you want to be sure, but the presentation will be delivered to the heart. People care about the content, but what makes the interests of hearing how you feel about it. For all the excitement, you want to be conversational.

Reading is not fundamental

Presentation of his work as a designer, therefore, is to create visuals to go in this process rather than hinder it. Slides need to contain only the information necessary to start the conversation, and allow you to continue while people in the audience with his eyes. You are not there to read the slides – the audience could quite easily do for themselves, thank you. If you’re reading from the screen, is not public participation. If your eyes are anywhere but in contact with a listener, the audience is actually de-activated.

The other problem with trying to deliver a presentation that contains long strands of prose is that people who came to hear him speak words you can read about 40% faster than they can speak – 250 words per minute, compared to 150 of them for you WPM. It’s the equivalent of a minivan that waits until the last moment to go on the road in front of you, and then proceeded to drive 40% slower than the speed limit to be pleasantly superior.

When there is too much information on the screen, especially in the form of sentences, not just the reading audience of stealing their precious time but also leads to breaking the link between you and the public that comes only with constant eye contact. When a draft TMI, who are forced by design to turn their backs on the audience to read the screen.

As a professional approach to the conversation knows, nothing to bind the works rather than the audience that the proper use of eye contact, summed up with this rule:

If the eyes are not locked, your jaw should be.

With a vision so complex that forces you to read the screen, this component is so important for the proper presentation is lost, the focus is eroded, and the only contact with your audience is people looking at the other end of your wireless devices .

The solution then is to limit the volume of information in each exposure to which can be absorbed by you and the public in just a few seconds – 10 maximum. The proper procedure to achieve the transfer of information on the screen to the audience involves a simple 3-step, but it deserves an entire article to itself.