By Poornima Vijayashanker
This week one of my primary goals was to create an outline for my upcoming TEDx talk: Taking the Time to Tinker. The talk isn’t until May 10th, but the folks at TED take these talks very seriously and believe in early preparation! My coordinator, Gail, scheduled a call with me for Friday morning at 10am.
During the week, I had a lot of work I had to focus: I had to present at a Femgineer Forum, teach my Lean Product Development Course, mentor people, and get through a myriad of other things on my todo lists… You probably experience the same 🙂
Then on Thursday afternoon, I decided it was time to buckle down and begin preparing my presentation. I needed to create an outline! However, restricting myself to an outline was too much for my already over-tasked mind to handle. So I took a little bit of a step back.
What is the major message I want to share with the audience?
Why is this message even important to the audience?
What are some stories that I can share to illustrate this message, both personal and general?
Once I asked myself these 3 questions, magically my mind began to focus, and I was able to create my outline!
But even after that I knew that my outline was super rough. I felt like there were too many points and stories, I needed to pare it down, but wasn’t sure what was essential and what wasn’t.
Now there is one thing I do when I get stuck like this: I ask for help! I’m a firm believe in getting an outsider’s perspective. So when I jumped on the call with Gail, I mentioned to her what I needed help on specifically:
Paring down the content to what is essential because I only have 15 minutes to present!
Making sure there is a logical flow.
Making sure that it’s fun and engaging for the audience.
Gail gave me some great pointers and the perspective I needed to effectively prepare my presentation.
Moving forward, my next step is to revise my outline in greater detail and get Gail’s feedback one more time on it via email. Once that’s done I’m going to put together a slide deck for the presentation. Gail and I have a follow up call setup in a few weeks where I’m going to run through my presentation with her. After that I’ve got a couple run throughs with the official TEDx team, and a final dress rehearsal the day before the event!
You’re probably thinking to yourself, “Wow that’s a LOT of preparation, but it’s of course a TEDx talk, so that makes sense. BUT I don’t think I need to prepare that much for a 1-1 or group meeting, lightning talk, or conference presentation…”
OK maybe you don’t months of preparation, but you do need to prepare! Think of it as preparing mini-presentations.
Here’s why:
Every audience needs to be motivated. Even if you’re just pitching something to your colleague or boss they have to have a reason why they are going to listen to you for X minutes. If you don’t prepare what you’re going to say then you’ll be caught off guard and they won’t take you as seriously.
Every audience has dissenters. And you need to be prepared for what they throw at you. I’ve lost fingers to count on for the number of people who come up after I’ve given a talk at an event or conference, and either debate me or ask me for more clarification. I make sure I have some additional information that I can provide to address their concerns.
Every audience wants to engage with you but to engage they have to feel like you’re talk has a good flow and your style is casual and conversational. To be comfortable you have to practice!
You cannot hit these three points without taking sometime out to prepare and of course rehearse your talk. Plus another key ingredient, getting outside feedback early on from as many folks as are open to giving it to you! It doesn’t even matter who they are. I used to give tech talks to my non-tech friends just to see if they were mildly interested and could follow what I was saying. It was also a great test to see if I had gone into too much depth.
What are you strategies for preparing for a presentation and keeping an audience engaged? Please let me know in the comments below!
Now if you’re still unclear or unsure about how to prepare, then come out to the next Femgineer Forum on June 19th in SF at 6pm. I’ll be covering the topic: Why You Should Speak at Technical Conferences, register here.
