20 Tips to Improve Your Presentations

How you communicate is just as important as what you say. Here are some tips to help you communicate your message clearly and with greater impact.

1. Trust Your Instincts: Scientific evidence suggests that gut feelings determine such perceptual issues as believability and degree of importance. Since audiences inherently possess the ability to discriminate accurate from inaccurate signals with regard to body language, voice inflection, and movement, it's imperative that you believe in what you're saying.
2. Acknowledge Interruptions: A stack of books crashes to the floor during your presentation. Should you continue as if nothing has happened? No. Acknowledge the interruption and every one in the room will be thankful for the relief you provide by mentioning it, especially the person who dropped the books.
3. Maintain Eye Contact: Use the three-second method. Look into the eyes of a person in the audience for three seconds at a time and finish your sentence or thought before looking at another person. Every now and then glance at the whole audience while speaking — making sure everyone in the audience understands that you are aware they are present. Eye contact allows you to connect with others and make them feel involved in your speech.
4. Adopt a More Relaxed Stance: Practice relaxing your chest and shoulders. What may at first feel sloppy to you may not look that way at all. A more relaxed stance will help you look more approachable and less detached and nervous.
5. The Most Versatile of all Techniques = The Pause: Pausing gives you time to think about your next point or about some reaction or response you're seeing in the audience. It also gives you time to take a few deep breathes and gives your listeners time to absorb what you have said. The best speakers in the world use pauses often and deliberately.
6. Close with Style: End your presentation by summarizing your main point as succinctly as possible. Close with an interesting remark or an appropriately powerful punch line and leave your audience with a positive impression.
7. Finish with Time to Accommodate Questions: Everyone always appreciates this and it offers the opportunity for people to stick around and chat, which always leads to positive opportunities.
8. Strategies for Handling Difficult Questions: No one can know the answer to every question. But you can learn to field even the toughest questions with confidence. Try one of these proven strategies:
   
   
   • Reflect — Toss the question back to your audience
   • Get back to them later — Be specific about when
   • Parallel answer — If you don't know the exact answer to a question, offer what you do know quickly to demonstrate some credibility and then combine this strategy with a previous technique.