make certain the room
suits your needs and
requirements.”
listening to presentations all day, the chances are greatly increased that your audience members will drift off to peacefully nap during your talk. If the room is freezing, attendees will spend all of their time in your enlightening presentation thinking about how cold they are; those who aren’t hearty members of the Polar Bear Club will just get up and leave.
Audience Seating
There will be times when you are scheduled to give a talk in a room that is too large for your presentation. Your talk is planned for 50 participants, and you are in a ballroom with seating for 1,000. There will always be audience members who choose to sit in the very back of the room, even though they will be 2 miles away from the speaker and there are hundreds of empty seats. As the presenter, you are well within the range of acceptable behavior to ask people gently and with good humor to move forward. If you are doing a workshop for which people need desks and tables, and you are assigned to a room with a theater-style setup (chairs only), it is very appropriate for you to locate the conference planner and ask how she can help you solve this problem. It might be possible to have a crew come to rearrange chairs or add tables or to move to another room. You’ll be able to solve major problems, however, only if you have followed the suggestion of showing up 30 minutes to an hour in advance to check your room.
Testing the Equipment
Microphones Once you have someone working on changing the room to your satisfaction, it’s time to check out the equipment.
Start with the microphone to make sure it works. Ask someone to respond to your question, “Can you hear me in the back?” If you are using a wireless mic in a very large room, the setup crew should explain the limitations of the equipment to you before your presentation begins. For example, after being turned on, some wireless mics have a several-second delay before they are operational. Unaware of this delay, nervous speakers will often
turn the mic on and say something and, when nothing happens, they turn the mic off, declaring that it doesn’t work. Some mics will not work if the person talking is standing in front of or near the speakers. Practicing a few seconds with the equipment before your presentation begins will result in your being cool, calm, and well prepared.
Projection Equipment Next, check out the projection equipment.
Most people use some version of a slide show. Modern-day slide shows (that used to be actual slides projected via a carousel pro-jector) are projected using software such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple Keynote and a laptop computer. To begin checking out the projection equipment, plug your laptop into the projector and make sure it works. Advance a few slides just to make sure every-thing is working. It’s a good idea to have a slide on the screen when people enter the room; this slide should have the title of your talk, your name and affiliation, and the name of the group that invited you.
Music: Moving From Acceptable to World Class
Adding music to your presentation and room ambience will make everything a little more complicated, but music is unbeatable when it comes to setting the mood and warming up the environment as the audience files into the room. You can bring your own music on an MP3 player or cell phone. These can be preprogrammed to give just the effect you want for your talk and your audience. For exam-ple, quiet classical music will relax everyone, whereas New Orleans jazz will get your audience energized and excited. In workshops we have done all over the country, one of the most common feedback comments is “I loved the music!”
Meet and Greet
If you get to your room 1 hour ahead of time and sort out all the equipment problems, you will have about 15 to 20 minutes to spare.
People will be coming in and getting their coffee and taking their
seat. Take this opportunity to meet some of the people who have come to hear you speak, particularly those in the first few rows to whom you will be talking when you start your presentation.
Delivery
The first recommendation for a great delivery is practice, practice, practice; this comes from countless books on public speaking and Toastmasters International, the leading organization in the United States that teaches and promotes good public speaking.*
Practice in front of a mirror, practice with a friend, and finally, if possible, practice in the room where you will be speaking. Taping your practice talks and reviewing them in the privacy of your office will enable you to objectively analyze how your presentation looks from the audience side. Videotapes will show you if your body language was stiff and might provide the feedback you need to try a different style of presenting, such as stepping away from the podium, using a wireless mic, or actually walking right up the center aisle and around the audience where you can see people up close and talk directly to them.†
The second recommended practice for a successful pre-sentation, right after cleaning out your pockets of course, is to relax. This might seem very difficult given the stress associated with talking to large crowds, but it works. Just before you go on stage, and
while you are out of sight, take several deep breaths. Remember that you are having a conversation about a topic that you know well and that you are here just to tell your story. These people wouldn’t have invited you if they didn’t want to hear your story. You’ll be fine.
* Go to www.toastmasters.org for a complete set of recommendations on public speaking and a way to find a group near you.
† You will need a wireless remote as well if you are going to go mobile and show slides at the