1.8 Test-drive your talk
Chances are that you’re being asked to present about something you’ve spent a lot of time on. You’ve probably talked about the subject many times with your colleagues in informal meetings, in planning sessions and especially at the coffee machine.
My suggestion: keep talking.
When you verbalise the issues you’re dealing with every day, you find your language to distil that work into short sentences and concepts. You develop a vocabulary of work, a ‘phrase-toolkit’ of how to explain what you do.
You can also test out whether people ‘get it’ or not because you’ll see it in their faces. Pay careful attention to reactions and if they don’t get it, ask them, “I’m not sure I’m explaining this too well, what’s not clear here?”
Refining your vocabulary, phrases and concepts based on what people understand in informal discussions is a perfect way to prepare for a presentation.
Don’t wait until there’s a presentation to be made. Test-drive your delivery in every situation you can find.
1.9 Use PowerPoint as a tool and consider other options
PowerPoint gets a bad press: the common phrase, ‘Death by PowerPoint’ is an example. I believe the problem lies not with the tool itself, but rather in what presenters do with it.