Presentation Delivery: Don't Turn Your Back On The Audience - TJ Walker Video
Presentation delivery and speaking expert TJ Walker offers some essential advice for those speakers prone to using their PowerPoint slide-shows as a teleprompter: don't turn your back on the audience.
Very often, after going to great pains to create a fantastic looking presentation, presenters use it as nothing more than a guide for themselves, taking their cue from the slides as they come up one by one. This leads to both poor presentation design - if your presentations are actually useful as a prompt, chances are they are too text heavy - and really detracts from your overall delivery.
Every time you turn your back on the audience you are not only depriving them of the chance to read your body language - an essential part of communication - but you are also sending out a negative message. TJ Walker asks:
''What do we say when a friend betrays us? We say 'He turned his back on us. She betrayed me, she turned her back on me.'
Well, guess what? That's what your doing if you turn your back on your audience when you're giving a PowerPoint presentation.
Turning your back on someone is historically seen as an act of betrayal, and if not betrayal, at least rudeness.
For your presentation to be a success, it's important to give your audience every chance they can get to read your message. Not just literally, through your slides and hand outs, but through the way that you deliver it. There is something profoundly unsettling about staring at the back of someone's head, and rather than do so, your audience are likely to fixate on your slides or worse, drift off somewhere else entirely.
If your slides are supporting your presentation, they are doing a great job. If they are your presentation, you probably have work to do on your presentation delivery techniques.
There is, as always, an exception to the rule. TJ Walker explains that:
''One exception is that you've introduced a concept, you've talked about it, you've set it up. Then you have a visual, to make that idea come alive.
You push the button, the slide comes up, you shut your mouth. Then, if you want to turn for just a few seconds, so the audience has only one thing to look at, you want to step out of the spotlight for just a moment, that's okay.
But don't talk with your mouth facing the screen.
''
In this sense, it's obviously fine to take the spotlight off yourself for a moment, and switch it to your slide, but it's worth bearing in mind that this switch of focus should be a temporary one, to add impact to your overall delivery. Delivering the whole presentation to the back wall isn't going to have any impact at all.
So remember that your slides are for your audience, and not for you. There are better ways to prompt yourself than reading from a slide.
posted by
Michael Pick
on Tuesday, December 19 2006
Tuesday, January 15 2008
URL of this article:
http://masterview.ikonosnewmedia.com/2006/12/19/presentation_delivery_dont_turn_your.htm
