Your presentations are boring. If you are anything like the vast majority of public speakers and PowerPoint presenters, this is the inescapable truth of the matter. The only reason that you haven't noticed the tears in your audiences eyes is that you were too carried away with your own boring presentation to pay attention. You need to learn how to avoid boring your audience to death, or chances are you won't have one left by the end of your presentation.
Photo credit: Gilles DeCruyenaere
''But...''
Of course there is always a good excuse for being so deathly dull. It isn't your fault, and most of the time - when you aren't giving presentations - people describe you as the life and soul of the party. It's just that:
- You have to give your audience a lot of technical information
- You have no choice but to say things in a dry and unembellished way for legal reasons
- Your boss insists on your sticking to the script
- Your sophisticated audience expects you to delve deeply into the details and figures
- Your PowerPoint scripts don't give you room to express your true personality
- Blah, blah, blah...
These are just some of the excuses that people make for being a boring, sleep-inducing speaker. In today's video tutorial speaking expert TJ Walker critiques this apologetic, but ultimately resigned approach to presentations being sleepy affairs. Here it is:
Video courtesy of Speakcast.com
He asks a fundamental question about these feeble get out clauses:
''What's the one thing that all of these excuses have in common?
Your audience couldn't care less about any of them. They don't care. They're not buying it.
So many speakers waste hours and hours of time fixating on 'oh, let me change the colour of this PowerPoint' or 'let me make sure my suit's perfect', 'let me make sure the tie's the right colour'. I'm not saying those things are irrelevant. A lot of these little details do add up. But when it comes to a speech, there are some big things that really do matter.
''
So what are these key factors? Because if you get the big things right, the smaller details will fall into place. TJ Walker suggests that:
''One of them is - are you interesting enough?
If you're not interesting - if you're boring people to death - the tie, the suit, the colour scheme of your PowerPoint is not going to matter.
But the flip side - and it's really good news - is that if you're really interesting, if you're not boring, people will forgive you if your tie's a little crooked, or your shirt tail's hanging out, or you have an occasional 'um' or 'ahhh'. They'll forgive all of that - they'll still think you're interesting.
''
The biggest mistake you can make is not advancing your slide too soon, choosing the wrong colour tie for the occasion or even fumbling your opening line. The biggest mistake you can make is being a boring presenter, and for this there is no excuse - a sleeping audience is a sleeping audience, whatever else you do.
Deprive them of that extra beauty sleep and spend as much time making your presentation interesting as you do choosing your animated transitions and the images on your slides. Your audience will thank you for it.
