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From the course by National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery

40 ratings

National Research Tomsk State University

Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery

40 ratings

Course 3 of 4 in the Specialization Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery

Mumbling, stumbling, worrying, trembling, sweating and fearing are the outcomes of the low delivery skills. In this course, we are not going to teach you how to replicate the best bits and traits of the acknowledged speakers. Dumb replication of someone’s successful behavior may help you only to an extent. That extent is the situation. When you are facing a different context, a different situation such “skills” might not work at all. Instead, we try to get to the core issues that stand behind the troubles with delivery and start honing your skills from there. Topics we are going to cover: 1) Preparation — how to deal with fear and anxiety 2) Voice, pace and gesture — how to speak, stand and move. 3) Getting live feedback — how to interact with the audience. 4) Taking Q&A and Improvisation So don’t meddle, start the course and make your delivery better.

From the lesson

Part 3: Contact

This week is about the contact with your audience. Connection with the audience is the most important part of the delivery. No connection — you are talking to abyss, your message is lost. But there is no single ultimate indicator whether you have the connection or not. It is more like a cloud of small nonverbal and verbal signs: faces, gestures, smartphones, questions and so on. So you need to look for, decode and response to the feedback.

Facial Expression10:20

Asking questions11:27

Questions we can ask7:32

Things not to do7:57

Computer does not start1:31

Working with slides5:38

Meet the Instructors

Alexei Kapterev
Lomonosov MSU BS

Apart from asking the audience questions,

apart from observing their non-verbals, there are other ways of getting feedback.

About ten years ago, I've seen those guys arrive.

Those are hardware remotes.

Some venues have them.

And those remotes, you need to distribute them among the audience members.

And then you need to provide them instructions about how to use them.

Sometimes they look like this.

But then you can ask the audience questions.

How would you rate your experience?

Press one for poor, two for fair, three for good, four for excellent.

And you get live feedback from the audience.

You have this graph displayed.

As soon as members of the audience press their buttons,

which is kind of cool, I must admit.

Now, polling systems, they work with huge audiences.

If you have hundreds of people, if you have very long sessions,

they really help to emanate longest sessions.

If you have questions with lots of options and

show of hands is not a viable thing to do.

If you need precision, if you really need to know exactly how many people think this

or that and that typically happens if you want to gather some data from the session.

And if you are unafraid of technical hiccups,

I recommend those kinds of things.

I understand that in the last couple of years there's been a shift from

hardware systems to software systems.

Everybody has their smartphone now and

that means that you don't need to distribute those remotes anymore.

You don't need to keep them charged,

all you need to do is to provide the audience with a link and

they will get into a website, put in the event code and they can vote.

They can answer questions.

And it looks more or less like this.

This is one of those services called Slido.

And it looks kind of cool.

I must give them that thing.

However, you really need to be aware of the technical requirements.

And these are requirements from their website.

First thing you need to do,

you have to obviously have to have a laptop to display the presentation itself,

but then you need another laptop or tablet to manage Slido as administrator.

Then you need a secondary screen or

projector to display the presentation view which is optional.

However, you also need another tablet for

event moderator to read the questions which is recommended.

And then you need a stable Internet connection on every device.

So if the all does not scare you, well join the club.

I think for large groups of people and for longer sessions.

It really, really works and provides some added value.

Here are couple more links,

you can check them out, they are all different options available on the market.

Go ahead, investigate them.

And finally,

there's another way of receiving life feedback from the which is sometimes used.

Which is called Twitter, Twitter Backchannel, they call it.

Now, the way it works, you publicize the event hashtag.

And then whoever is tweeting with that hashtag,

all those tweets are being collected to a huge Twitter feed which

is sometimes projected on the screen behind the speaker.

Now, please do not do this.

Please do not project live Twitter feeds behind yourself.

First thing not to do is not to project liveTwitter feed behind yourself.

Because well, thing number one, some people are just being rude and mean and

the audience sees that.

So what happens is that while you're talking,

people start talking back at the same time, so both you and

the audience is using the same verbal channel, which is

really dependent on that frontal lobe thing which is really, really limited.

Quite unlike non-verbal channel, which largely depends on your unconscious,

which has much bigger resources.

So two conversations, sometimes three, sometimes four,

going on at the same time and then people start to react to those tweets and

it all disintegrates into chaos.

So please do not put live Twitter feed behind yourself.

This is a very bad idea.

If you want to use Backchannel, instruct the audience.

Have a curator, you need a moderator of the event to select meaningful tweets.

And then please use that feedback during the Q&A, not during the talk itself.

It's very difficult to discern anything meaningful from the live Twitter feed.

So to conclude this whole part, please do maintain connection with the audience.

I think this is very important, this is your job as a speaker.

I know,

80% of delivery has to do with maintaining that connection to the audience.

Monitor their non-verbals, pay more attention to positive audience members.

Ask questions to keep them engaged.

And use hardware or software things to engage logical analysis.

And of course, do customize your presentation as you go.

Once again, this presentation is a unique event in space and time.

You're not just producing a pre-recorded speech,

you are co-creating this event with the audience, so go ahead and co-create.

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