I’ve never met him, but I love this guy. That’s why I’m devoting a few posts to the ideas of Scott Schwertly, author of How to Be a Presentation God.
In a post titled “How to Build Credibility with Your Audience,” he offers six tips of for doing exactly that. I’m providing only three to encourage you to read his short post in its entirety.
Scott’s point is that most presenters don’t do much to earn an audience’s trust and deliver value that their investment of valuable time. To that I would add this corollary: Many presenters put their audiences to sleep in the process of delivering a message. If you’ve ready any of my posts on presentations in the past, you know that I’m not a fan of those 50-slide decks.
Anyway, here are the tips I especially liked:
- Offer something new or, as Scott puts it, “bring novel ideas to the table.”
- Be influential, which comes from being confident. And you can only be confident by practicing at least 7 times. (Really? Yes, really. And this also applies to small audiences of co-workers, I might add.)
- End with an explicit call to action—An important element in the structure of your presentation as well as content.
Presentations have been much on my mind. I’ve attended them, edited them and even written them. My hope is that those I’ve worked on lately actually keep people nodding their heads with agreement, not with a case of the snoozes.
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