How to sound smart and be confidence in your presentation

nadhiljanitra (30)in #education • 7 years ago (edited)

I have a friends who thinks that one of the scariest things for him is when he has to presentation in front of many people. He always think that there is something wrong with him. He looks into his shirt, pants and even his shoes. And i believe that this happens to a lot of people out there, especially to our introvert friends. This things made me interested to make a post about how to prepare a presentation that makes us more confidence and sound like a really smart person.

The Preparation

There is an article that written by Matt Haughey, a programmer and bloger from America. He says that there are several ways that can help us to feel better and be confidence in our presentation.

There is some hypothesis from lots of people but in the normal course of human existence, any more than 5 or 6 pairs of eyes on you means trouble. And now imagine if there is 300 or even 3000 pairs of eyes, of course it's gonna be a nightmare. He had a trick for it, you just have to believe that those 3000 pairs of eyes aren't there to kill you, but to learn from you. I think this is a first key to build up your confidence at presentation. Matt Haughey always think that they are all monkeys, and you are the prettiest monkey and they desperately want you to tell them where the best bananas are located that will turn them into pretty monkeys as well. Tell your self that you are here to share your knowledge for them, and i will feel great about it.

The next one is to master your presentation very well. You make your presentation, then you're the only one who know what is it about. Create a story or narrative so you can bring your audience into something that you wanted. Presentation will be a lot more interesting if you tell it with systematic and connected one of each other. Otherwise, you'll lose attention from the audience if can't tell it with systematically.

Practice and practice is always a good thing. Practice isn't just for preparing your words, but practice can build up your confidence also. And confidence is a very fundamental thing in any presentation. Without it, you'll be nervous and forget all of your things that you will tell to the audience.

Matt Haughey said that the less words the better. I'm fully agree with him. The Function of your slide is to help your presentation with visually. Things that you can't do it with your words. A lot of words in your slide would make your audience feel bored. One of Matt Haughey slide's looks like this :

source : https://medium.com/@mathowie/an-introverts-guide-to-better-presentations-be7e772b2cb5

Nice, full-bleed images with just 5-10 words max, with fonts at very large sizes. And even in some of his presentation, he doesn't have some words in it. They’re just images (sometimes screenshots) that are somewhat related to whatever point he want to make.

The Presentation

After we do all those preparation, the next thing is the presentation. There is one great example of presentation from Will Stephen at TEDx Talk New York. He done a TEDx presentation for 5 minutes long and he tell "nothing" and literally nothing. In that presentation there isn't any one of information that we can have like any other TED talks. But there are thing's that we can learn from this presentation. Which is how he done it very well and we can use those technique and applied it in our presentation.

The first lesson that we can see is when he walk into the stage. Look how calm he is when he walk and when he talk. He had the confidence because he knows what his going to tell to the audience. He knows what he doing in that stages. And again that is important for us. Just calm, no rush and be confidence.

The second lesson is pay attention to his voice. Notice when he had a different pressure on his words and pause every time he talk. Look at 3:00 in the video above. He use a different pressure when he talk about numbers and it's good. With different pressure it can make a presenter look more charming and smart. And that is what we wanted our audience to think. We want our audience thinks that we are smart, so they can have more attention into our presentation. With pressure on our voice, the audience's attention will stick to us. Imagine if our voice is so low, the audience can't hear what we say clearly. They will bored and even worse, fell a sleep.

The third lesson is control your word's speed when you speak. Don't talk too fast or too slow. Be calm and relax. Look how Will Stephen put his hand into his pocket and walk slowly. This move will make you feel confidence. the audience's attention will stay at you and follow you every time you walk. Own the stage because the stage is yours.

And the last one is when he nearly ended his presentation. He slows down his voice as he wanted to tell the audience something important like a conclusion of his presentation. And this is the time when he says about our result or conclusion of what we are talking. Give some pressure and bring our audience into something that we want. Give some twist or quote from a very famous person so we can looks more smart and did our research.

And that's all the tips and trick from me how to sound smart and be confidence in our presentation. And i have one important point for every presentation. Which is we have to knows exactly what we are talking about. If we know it, we can talk as much as we pleased and ready if there is someone who ask about our presentation. And i'm gonna end my post with a quote from founder of Apple: