You Have 10 Seconds. Go.

10 seconds - that’s all that it takes for the audience to judge your presentation.

We all have been there. It was a nice cozy noon. The lunchtime was near, and we were invited (i.e., asked) to attend a presentation. Five minutes into the presentation, immediately after the introduction slide, we were introduced to a wall of text, and another, and another, and a massive diagram with heaps of tiny texts and numbers, and then another wall of text, and another. And before we know it, we were in a difference plane of existence between “awaken” and “sleeping”. No amount of coffee could bring us back at that point. Finally, lunch time came. We were relieved, before we realized that we were the next ones to present.

What should we do? Certainly, we do not want to bring our audience into another plane of existence during our presentation. It doesn’t have to be this way. After all, we have also witnessed amazing talks that changed and inspired the world throughout the history. So, how can we up our game?

Recently, I attended a workshop on presentation skills for research students and researchers by Mrs. Sharon Ferrier, under the CARST program of The University of Adelaide. It was a fantastic workshop with many good points. In this post, I am going to sharing some interesting content that I learned from the workshop.

Preparing a Good Presentation

For many of us, presentation is simply something that we have to do: We have a conference paper accepted, we have a scheduled reading group meeting, or we have a seminar that we are assigned. However, let’s look beyond the obligation to see what is the “point” of giving these talks?

Essentially, we “sell” something in any presentation. It can be an idea, it can be a research paper, it can be a project proposal, it can be new product. We pitch to sell something in these presentations. And when we realize that we are trying to make people “buy” something from us, suddenly, presentations do not seem to be so vain anymore.

Convincing presentations, according to Mrs. Ferrier, share one common characteristic: they make the audience Feel something to urge them to Take an Action. Essentially, if you can make your audience feel good enough (or scared enough), they might “buy” your stuff.

So, how can we build such presentation? Mindful preparation and a lot of practice. The process of preparing a presentation can be divided into three parts:

1. Prepare the Content
2. Prepare the Slides and Notes
3. Prepare the Delivery Techniques

Preparing Content

When it comes to content, Clarity is the King. We achieve clarity through focusing on the content overlapping between our objectives and the needs of our audience; and through cutting everything else from our presentation ruthlessly. For instance, if we are trying to convince our customers to decorate their garden with our roses, we have to focus on the simplicity of growing our roses, instead of the rose-shaped chocolate pie that we bought yesterday (even though it is really tempting).

Objective and Audience

To decide the objective of our communication, we have to be brutally honest with ourselves. To know our audience, we have to do some investigation, through asking the event organizer or coming earlier to have a talk with our potential audience. Different audience requires different types of vocabulary and content organization. For instance, task-oriented, introvert audience usually enjoy facts and details instead of constant interactions. A people-oriented, extroverted audience, on the other hand, requires the opposite. Similarly, the content for people knowing under-the-hood of the topic must be different from the content for people having only superficial “satellite-view” of the topic. A good strategy is starting with big headlines and then moving to the minute details.

Building the Contents

With the objective and audience decided, we can start building the content of the presentation. The first step is brainstorming with mindmap to draw out all ideas related to the topic. Just keep going until you cannot continue. It might take a while. As a demonstration, I included the mindmap of this blog post.

After the mindmap is created, the next step is filering with respect to our predefined objectives and audience. Clarity is the king. Anything that does not lie in the interaction between audiences and our objective must be cut out ruthlessly.

Building the Outline

With the filtered content in hand, the task of building an outline is trivial. The only issue here is building a 10-second grab. As stated previously, we only have 10 seconds to convince our audience that our presentation worths listening to. So, how can we open our presentation with a bang that hook the audience in the first 10 seconds? We have to be creative and precise.

1. Introduction
   . 10s grab
   . Significance of the topic
2. Body
   . Topic 1
   . Topic 2
   . Topic 3
3. Conclusion

Preparing Slides and Notes

The Slides (e.g., a Power Point file) is a visual tool. It can aid, or break a presentation. In fact, the research of Prof. John Sweller showed that showing text on a slide, even in small amount, while talking actually reduces the retention of the audience. Therefore, it is crucial to design effective slides. This can be done by:

1. Reducing the amount of text. Use graphs and photos instead, unless it is absolutely impossible. Using “Smart Arts” can actually increase the slides-making process while increasing the clarity of the slides.
2. Reducing the number of slides.

Again, the use of visual aids must also be filtered with the objectives and the audience of the presentation. In short, do not use the image of an elephant jumping around while the main text drops letter by letter simply because “I can”.

The nodes that accompany the slides is a useful tool that is commonly misused. The worst way possible to use notes is storing the whole script and read it word-by-word in the conference. Instead, the notes should be used to remind us of the outline of the presentation. They should be printed in large font so that they can be seen easily when placed on the table away from us. A good set of notes help us to focus more on the audience while staying with the script.

Preparing the Delivery

The purpose of all stated preparations is to build our confidence for the actual presentation. An effective presentation depends on the way we deliver the content as much as the content itself. The ultimate goal of the presentation is to “sell” our message. This goal can be achieved with a set of techniques.

First, 10-second grab. As we stated previously, it takes audience only 10 seconds in the beginning to judge a presentation. To deliver our message effectively, we need to grab the attention of audience immediately in the beginning with big headlines and buzzwords to cause emotional response. Emotional response is our target. If we cannot stir-up our audience, it is unlikely that our message can reach them. We can cause emotional responses by targeting needs of our audience. Logic (e.g., facts) is also a powerful tools, especially in technical presentation. After all, a presentation without any useful information is a waste of time, and most of us hate wasting time. Finally, any exciting presentation must conclude with a call for action, else, all of our efforts would lead to minimal, if any, concrete results.

Performing these techniques requires confidence and familarity with presentation that can only be achieved through exposure. In other word, the more presentations we do, and the more feedbacks we receive, the more skillful we becomes. Feedback is the key to improvement, especially something that are invisible to us such as our gesture, facial expression and posture.

The Biggest Secret

Even after all of the stated preparations, there is still a secret left.

That is practice, practice and even more practice.

Steve Jobs, a master in presentation, is well-known for his intense preparation. He starts to prepare months before the actual event. Another example is Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, a popular speaker in TED events. She rehearses [200 times] before a presentation.

As I stated previously, feedback is crucial for improvement. A good to to get feedbacks from our rehearsal is through video recording. Through the process of recording, evaluating and fine-tuning, we will gradually approach an effective presentation that can be delivered effortlessly.