EP03: Protecting your Face – Prepping for Big Presentations

"It was a career defining moment...but not in a good way." Host Karin Reed shares her personal experience of a disastrous presentation and reveals the crucial lesson she learned: protecting your face is essential for a successful presentation.

 

As conference season approaches and listeners may be preparing for career-defining opportunities, Karin shares her expertise to help you make the most of these big moments. She introduces a powerful metric: for every minute of presentation, dedicate an hour to preparation. This may sound daunting, but it ensures you deliver your best performance and captivate your audience.

 

Karin delves into the critical step of analyzing your audience. She highlights the curse of knowledge, where we assume our audience knows what we know. By understanding your audience's background, expertise, and blind spots, you can tailor your content to resonate with them, making it relevant and engaging.  To support listeners, Karin has created a bonus worksheet to help with audience analysis.  You can download this resource for free at www.speakerdynamics.com/bonuscontent.

 

Karin also shares practical tips on presentation delivery. Whether you prefer a full script, bullet points, or a hybrid approach, she encourages finding a method that allows you to sound authentic and deliver your message with conviction. She also explores the importance of managing the presentation environment, from utilizing confidence monitors to controlling your content.

 

Protect your face by investing time in preparation, understanding your audience, and controlling the environment, you can ensure your career-defining moments are positive and impactful.

Quotes

• “If you have a 20 minute presentation that you're delivering, you want to devote 20 hours to preparing for it. So that means for every one minute of presentation, you should allot one hour of prep time. And before those of you in the audience are saying, there's no way we can do that, Karin, I don't expect you to do it for every presentation that you do. But if you have a high stakes presentation, that career defining moment, I would highly, highly recommend that you do put that time in, in advance.” (5:29 | Karin Reed) 
• “Whenever I'm thinking about putting together any sort of piece, I always try to think about, okay, who is in my audience? You know, what do they care about? What is valuable to them? Because if they don't care about it, they're not going to listen.” (7:54 | Karin Reed) 
• “Steal a practice from the theater world, which is where they freeze the show. So the reason why you freeze the show is that you want to give the actors an opportunity to really practice it and rehearse it well. You know, so when you freeze a show, it means that no more changes can occur. So I want you to think about how you can freeze your presentation, you know, set a deadline, say, okay, on this day, whether it's two days before the event, whatever works for you, say, we're going to freeze this right now, there can be no more changes.” (19:42 | Karin Reed)
• “The value of good content will be lost if you are not comfortable delivering it.” (20:45 | Karin Reed) 

 

Links

Connect with Karin Reed:

Website: www.speakerdynamics.com

Speaker Dynamics University: https://university.speakerdynamics.com/

Speaker Dynamics on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/speakerdynamics/

Karin Reed on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karin-reed/

 

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