Many residents of our homes for rent in Owasso struggle with professional presentations or just plain hate doing them. Delivering the perfect professional presentation can be challenging, especially if you haven’t done one before. It taps into the anxiety many of us have around public speaking and can require as much or more time to prepare as it takes to complete other major projects.

With a few simple tips, though, we know you can nail your next professional presentation and develop skills that will help you throughout your career! That’s why today we’re taking the time to share some of our tips for effective and engaging presentations. Let’s get into it, shall we?

Use Visuals As Supplements, Not Stand-Alone Material

If your presentation includes a powerpoint or similar visual aids, avoid the trap of putting all the information in the visual aid. Your visual aid(s) should be only a supporting part of your presentation; it need not—and likely should not—stand on its own. Not only will your presentation be less engaging if you (and your audience) are simply reading from a slide, but you also miss out on the main value of visual aids, which is to add a dimension to your presentation that your words alone cannot provide.

Images, short videos, charts, and figures, or even funny gifs may be better uses of your visual aid software/materials than simply writing all your points out in bullet form. Just make sure what you include adds clarity or nuance, strikes the right tone and helps engage your audience.

Address Your Audience

Speaking of engaging your audience, no presentation exists in a vacuum. It’s important to take your audience into account when creating and delivering your presentation. While preparing, take time to think about what your audience knows and doesn’t know, and what interests them so that you can present information in a way that is engaging and easy to understand. When it comes time to present, make sure to actually address your audience. You don’t necessarily have to elicit audience participation (although this is a great strategy for longer presentations), but make eye contact with them and make it clear you’re talking to them rather than simply talking while they happen to be watching.

Pace Yourself

It’s a presentation, not a race. It can be easy when presenting to let your anxious energy turn into a feverish pace that’s hard to sustain. Slow down, give yourself time to think, and give your audience time to digest the information you’re presenting. By pacing yourself, you’ll also help avoid some of the less professional-sounding verbal patterns we tend to rely on when we’re rushing to collect our thoughts, including fillers like “umm,” “uhh,” and “like.”

Practice Makes Perfect

For a coherent presentation that flows smoothly and fills just the right amount of time, you’re going to have to practice. Even if you’re pressed for time, try running through your presentation (out loud if possible) at least once so you know what you’re going to say, when you’re going to transition between visual aids, how long your presentation will take, and where you should stop for questions. You can do this at the office or you could enlist the help of a friend or two to practice doing it in front of a charitable audience at home in our Tulsa homes for rent.

Have a Back-Up Plan

Nothing feels worse than spending hours preparing your presentation, then realizing the internet isn’t working, the file is corrupted, or you don’t have the right adaptor for your office’s presentation hardware. You can do a test run ahead of time in order to be prepared, but also try to have a backup plan in case things still go wrong. Print out your presentation notes and other materials in case you need to rely on a hard copy, and save any digital materials in more than one place (e.g. email it to yourself and also save it to a flash drive).
That’s all the presentation tips we have today! If you enjoyed this post, go ahead and bookmark our blog page for easy access to future recommendations, tips, and features. You should also be sure to follow Legacy Living on Facebook so you can stay informed about all the special events, promotions, and updates about our Tulsa homes for rent.