A great group of people met in Washington DC to overcome their fear of public speaking and to improve their presentation skills. One of the key learning points for the group was understanding how important energy and enthusiasm is to a presentation. There is an old saying that, “people will not get excited about your presentation unless the speaker is excited.” This is a very true statement. If you can’t be excited about your topic, then you can’t expect anyone in your audience to get excited.
I hear many people in our Fearless Presentations ® Workshops tell me all the time that they are accountants or engineers and that “there is nothing exciting about explaining what they do.” It’s important to understand that if the process that you are explaining isn’t exciting, then focus your speech on the results.
Presentation Class in Washington DC Shows Presenters How to Add Energy to Boring Speeches.
Here is an example. A student once told me that she sold accounting software. Now, I have to admit that explaining why a company should change accounting software doesn’t sound very exciting. But, when I asked her what made her software better her attitude changed. She said that with their software, the average data entry person could save, on average, four hours a week. The software made data entry much more streamlined.
I don’t really understand what her software does. But I can get excited about having an additional four hours a week to work on important tasks. This is where the results are what you get the customer excited about. So, next time you feel like you’re having a struggle with enthusiasm your topic, ask yourself, what the benefit of the Result is. You should be able to get excited about presenting a great solution to even the non-exciting issues that they face.
For a complete list of upcoming classes, visit the upcoming presentation skills classes post. You can can click here for details about the Fearless Presentations ® class.