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Many presentations are doomed to fail from the start because the presenter believes they lack authority. We see so many clients who are genuinely scared about presenting to a room full of eminent people, but they really shouldn’t be.It’s amazing to see how the same people can completely change their outlook and overcome the fear of presenting once we give them some quite basic advice. So we will share this advice now, and we promise that all of the public speaking tips and techniques we are about to share are applicable to absolutely anybody, whatever level of ‘authority’ you think you may have.
How to Make it Easy for Yourself
It’s only natural to start planning a presentation by thinking about yourself and what you will say. Still, your best chance of eliminating the issue of ‘lacking authority’ and getting audience engagement is to start by concentrating on them.
Get this right, and the content of your presentation will effectively write itself. If you truly understand who you are speaking to, you will have a good idea of what they want to hear. And if you say what people want/need to hear, then it is completely irrelevant what high-powered job or dazzling expertise they may have. They will listen to you. Every time.
Research, Research, Research.
This really is the easy bit. It doesn’t require talent, it doesn’t require charisma, it has nothing whatsoever to do with how confident you are as a public speaker… it’s simply a matter of diligence. Just who exactly is going to be in the audience, and why are they there?
One email or phone call in the run-up to your presentation could be enough here – in fact, you may not even have to do as much as that. If you are speaking to other members of your company and/or existing clients, for example, you may know some or all of your audience personally. In this case, the brief is simply to evaluate what they might be hoping to gain from listening to your presentation.
If you don’t know who you will be presenting to, then find out! In almost any conceivable public-speaking scenario, information on who will be in the audience will be readily available. You may not know them like you would know work colleagues, but you only need a small amount of information to make that all-important educated evaluation. What companies/organisations are represented? What is the range of expertise in the room? What might they be trying to learn?
To reiterate the point: once you’ve done this educated evaluation, whatever ‘authority’ you may appear to have in comparison to the audience should be of no concern. The very existence of an audience suggests there are people in the room willing to listen to what you have to say, so the only remaining challenge is to say it with confidence to increase audience engagement.
Open Their Ears
There’s the old adage that people always prefer to do business with people they know, like and trust. The same applies to what we’re talking about here, i.e. if your audience knows, likes and trusts you then by default you will have enough authority to compel them to listen.
An interesting example to cite here is Sam Carling, recently appointed as a Labour MP. Sam is only 22 years old and likely to be named “baby of the house”. He has acknowledged that he is younger than other party members but rather than focusing on his age, he has spoken at length about his passion and commitment to improving the services in his constituency of North West Cambridgeshire.
The takeaway is that you should not be apologetic or look for an excuse to be self-deprecating. You should think about what sides of your personality/back story you need to share to get people to like you.
Craft the Message and Deliver with Conviction
Once the audience is on your side your authority will only become an issue if your message is confused and/or your delivery of the message is poor. There are a multitude of things to consider here, such as eye contact, body language, use of pausing and the simplicity of your arguments, but the upshot is always that if your basic presentation skills are good enough, your authority is good enough.
DO NOTS
Pretend to have authority you don’t actually have. It can be tempting to exaggerate your back story to increase audience engagement, but you can do more than enough to engage your audience without having to pretend. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of misleading people, the risk of tripping yourself up (not to mention the extra nervousness you will feel when trying to avoid this) is far too great to make it a viable option.
A Final Note on Authority
Why is authority important anyway? Our parents had authority over us when we were children but that didn’t stop us trying to influence them. So the same should be true of an audience you’re presenting to. If you’ve done enough homework on the audience, a well-executed presentation should be good enough to influence anybody.
If you would like to learn more about using rhetoric and body language to persuade an audience and would like to overcome the fear of presenting, contact us today.
Belinda is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of SecondNature International. With a determination to drive a paradigm shift in the delivery of presentation skills training both In-Person and Online, she is a strong advocate of a more personal and sustainable presentation skills training methodology.
Belinda believes that people don’t have to change who they are to be the presenter they want to be. So she developed a coaching approach that harnesses people’s unique personality to build their own authentic presentation style and personal brand.
She has helped to transform the presentation skills of people around the world in an A-Z of organisations including Amazon, BBC, Brother, BT, CocaCola, DHL, EE, ESRI, IpsosMORI, Heineken, MARS Inc., Moody’s, Moonpig, Nationwide, Pfizer, Publicis Groupe, Roche, Savills, Triumph and Walmart – to name just a few.