As I always seem to, I'm skipping the morning events to calm my nerves and do my final preparations. Though a recent posting from Maddie on Speaking certainly calmed my nerves.
Here are some of things that I've found from my last couple of presentations:
- Get the audience involved - it not only gets you out from under the spotlight, but it also gets the audience involved.
- Don't memorize, just talk - I tried a script one time and the first 30 seconds was terrible. I totally threw out my script and just talked - the rest worked out fine.
- End short - I can only guess what individuals really want to hear about a given topic. If I cover what I think is important the whole time, then I probably will miss something they wanted covered.
- Get the audience answering - this worked great at my tech conference session - the idea is to harness the experience and knowledge in the room. I've found that I'm only a small piece of the pie
- Give them something they can walk away with - whether its a technique, new way of thinking or a homework assignment - don't end the session with complete closure. Because the session is really just the beginning of the participants journey.
Wish me luck and thanks for reading,
bob
