What Makes a Great Presenter?

I have seen some fantastically talented presenters  – and I know that it takes work. In fact, the skill of presenting is NOT a single behavior, but several skills that work together – both internally and externally.

In fact, the behaviors of a strong presenter are anchored in the following SEVEN elements:

1.    Connect Personally - Putting your personal self into your content actually makes you more authentic and believable. Stay to your professional self and you won’t get the advantage of Neural Coupling, where your audience becomes more active and engaged

2.    Build Relevance - Consistently relating your content to your audience’s needs and behaviors is incredibly important to connect to their Egocentric Perspective and achieving Resistance Reduction, making your content to feel like more of a valuable resource

3.    Provide a Narrative - Providing a connective tissue that knits together different content elements is a guaranteed way to create a Reduced Cognitive Load.  That means the audience spends less time trying to understand and more time absorbing your perspective.  

4.    Entertain -Using a sense of drama  to create a building effect, so each content section can be a reveal that leads to a cliffhanger – and then leads to the next section’s reveal/cliffhanger. This adds suspense and drama, creating a Dopamine Loop that makes your audience enjoy the pattern of "reveal and learn".

5.    Create Engagement - Removing the barrier between presenter and audience is critical because it combats Attention Decay, while also creating validation and social cohesion. And the Ikea Effect is created by an audience that participates in engagement, because they believe in the content more because they participated in it.

6.    Gain Agreement -Achieving the presentation goal is actually reaching a mutual agreement to proceed. This creates a sense of closure referred to as Cognitive Consistency and Social Cohesion. Everyone should walk out of the room satisfied.

7.    Document Next Steps - Ensuring that an agreement actually has actions that will make it become tangible. Assigning responsibilities for actions activates the brain’s Executive Function – triggering task acceptance and the mental prototyping steps needed to complete the task. It also combats the Bystander Effect, in which responsibility is diffused within the group and no one actually accepts ownership of the task.

Use these seven elements in your next presentation. You will be amazed at how much more effective you are.

I do impactful presentation coaching for all levels of an organization, focusing on Charisma, Storytelling/Scripting, Deck Development/Design and Presentation Delivery. If you want to immediately improve your ability to present and persuade, then contact me. I can get you to where you need to go.