Being able to communicate your ideas clearly in a presentation, putting forward your firm arguments during a group meeting as well as talking in a persuasive manner about your product or service are essential to be successful in any business today. All these require confidence and strong public speaking skills. While only a few people are born with this talent, there is still hope for the rest of us, as these competencies can be easily developed. In this series I will try to give "short-cuts", some easy-to-follow tips to increase your impact as a public speaker.

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Sometimes NTB ("Not Too Bad") is your next move

A good talk requires an awful lot of preparation (no question about that) - it could take days even for professionals! When I am leading presentation skills development workshops, I usually advice participants to rehearse their large-audience speaches approximately 20-25 times to be able to step on the stage with confidence. If it is a corporate presentation, it might take 5-8 hours to put it together and practice it (if someone is very experienced it can be done maybe in two hours...)

But most cases I receive the answer: "I do not have so much time!"

And this is the point where the boring or killingly painful presentations are born: a lot of people decide to improvise instead of preparing. They obviously haven't heard the famous adage from Thomas Mann:

"I need three weeks preparation for a good impromptu speach." 😂

Preparation is the key!

If you do not have a lot of time to prepare, there are still a lot of things that you can do! In this case do not aim to be perfect, just choose a NTB (Not Too Bad) option. Here are a few tips:

• Forget the PowerPoint or Keynote slides - even if there is someone else doing them for you. It is very difficult to present based on someone else's logics. The only way you can be powerful in your speeches if you tell your OWN ideas!
• Write the three most important thoughts you would like to talk about on the back of your name card. (It takes 2 minutes)
• Take 3 more name cards and write some supporting stories, data and/or arguments to support each of your three topics. (It takes 3 minutes}
• Take some time to think about your audience: what will be important or interesting for them? What would they agree with? Which are the parts where you would need to convince them? Make changes, set the focus of the presentation accordingly. (It takes 5 minutes.)

Well, this is a summary of NTB: and it takes ONLY 10 MINUTES!

What if you haven't got 10 minutes? I would say that they it is better to cancel the presentation and you would gain approximately 45 minutes. LOL 😂

If you have no option to cancel the presentation and it is an internal, corporate one however you have absolutely no time to prepare, then you might choose to make it interactive and ask your audience what they would like to hear about. Then moderate a Q&A session giving answers to the questions raised.

Sometimes NTB is the best we can achieve!

If you are interested in the previous part of this series, you can find it here.

This post has been crossposted on both Steemit and Whaleshares.