Do you lose your audience once you speak up? Or do you carry them along so they keep a high attention level throughout your presentation? A catchy structure is one of the important aspects you should consider. A strong introduction, an interesting main part and a meaningful conclusion are equally important. Guide your audience by transitions such as emphasized pauses and changing your position on stage. Also add interactions using polls, quizzes, and short discussions. Sometimes surprising twists and turns help.
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What do speakers need for a high-class presentation? The “Presentation Rocket Day” is promising some valuable answers – and delivers!
The event is aimed at people who want to present more effectively. In addition to classical rhetorical skills and the confident, convincing stage effect, the aim is to convey information in an interesting way and to make optimum use of media.
Staging and focus are well received by the audience
Of course, successful presentations offer much more than just the mentioned aspects. Hermann Scherer speaks plainly in the first presentation: Read more
A source of good and often inspiring lectures are certainly the TED Talks and their independent TEDx Talks. One of the speeches that has inspired me in recent years is the talk “How great leaders inspire action” by Simon Sinek. Of course, we can discuss whether his performance could be further optimized: There are only a few laughs in the audience, the eye contact between speaker and audience is not optimal and the speaker often takes his glasses (exactly 22 times) – to name just three examples.
Nevertheless, why is his 2009 TEDx talk the third most seen of about 3 000 TED talks worldwide? Why has his presentation, which he held live in front of just 50 listeners, been clicked more than 42 million times on ted.com and a good 15 million times on YouTube to date? So what did Simon Sinek do right?
Simon prepares the last section of his science presentation. He wants to draw a clear conclusion by presenting new findings and discussing them with the audience. As in the beginning and middle part, he is accompanied by his mentor Sarah, who can draw on her wealth of experience and provides Simon with valuable information for his performance.
The first impression at the beginning of a presentation can be reinforced or revised in the closing and the follow-up discussion. It is Simon’s second chance to be positively remembered by the audience.
The majority of presentations end in the classic way: contents are summarized once again. Resulting conclusions and a “thank you” follow before the moderator leads over to the discussion.
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Dr. Stephen Wagner
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53129 Bonn, Germany
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