Presentation skills: Effective Presentation Delivery

Part 1: Preparation

This week is about preparation. Preparation is the key to dealing with anxiety and fear, various technical, semi-technical faults and live mistakes. We will cover the proper ways to rehearse, ways to deal with faults and mistakes.

Part 2: Voice

This week is about key principles of delivery: how to spread attention between audience, yourself and material, how to visualize and feel in order to appear more passionate, how to do semi-warm-ups (if only needed) and how to speak with an audience.

Part 3: Contact

This week is about the contact with your audience. Connection with the audience is the most important part of the delivery. No connection — you are talking to abyss, your message is lost. But there is no single ultimate indicator whether you have the connection or not. It is more like a cloud of small nonverbal and verbal signs: faces, gestures, smartphones, questions and so on. So you need to look for, decode and response to the feedback.

Part 4: Q&A

This week is about Q&A and improvisation. Q&A’s are risky, because you can be caught off-guard and look stupid, but in the same time exciting — live demos are always more fun than screencasts; and important, because anyone can memorize a somebody else’s speech, but only the author can answer tough but valuable questions. So we are going to cover some basic dos and don’ts and then my proven algorithm of dealing with questions.