You should now have enough language, structure and advice to give a professional presentation. However, to make your presentation truly stand out you are going to need to regularly connect with your audience.
The diagram below is a representation of two presentations in the minds of an audience. The vertical axis shows the audience’s probable interest level and the horizontal is the duration of the presentations.
The black line illustrates a typical lecture style presentation. As you can see, without any engagement with the audience, initial levels of interest are likely to quickly collapse and remain low for the duration.
The red line, however, is the same presentation, but this time the presenter has used some advanced techniques to engage the audience and thus create temporary peaks in their interest levels.
These peaks of interest combined mean a great deal more overall impact with your audience. Previously on the Global Communication School blog we recommended that you hook your audience’s attention in the opening of your presentation. Unfortunately, the audience will soon tire if you repeat the same attention grabbing technique so the following posts are going to introduce a variety of ways to hook your audience.
