If you ever aspired to advance in your career, to lead and inspire and make a difference one day, then giving speeches and presentations comes with the territory. If you fear it, or do not know how exactly to do it, you need to think again. You should not only imagine big stages and fully-booked auditoriums, a good speech and presentation could take place in your team’s small meeting room, or in a client premises where the decision to hire your company’s services is dependent on your 10- minute presentation.
It happens to be that there are those who were born blessed with a gift to speak, influence, argue, and persuade, but at the heart of the matter, it is all about training, then more training, to be able to stand in front of an audience, and talk to their hearts and minds about the subject entrusted to your presentation abilities.
A skill that most of us around here are, how to put this delicately, lacking. I have been to gazillions of meetings, presentations, workshops, and conferences throughout my career, and I can say with confidence that the worst presentations that I have ever been to were conducted by locals or Arabs. I know it is a tough generalization, but it is based on personal experience. There are Saudis and Arabs who can do it perfectly, it just happens that in relevance to the larger sample, the percentage is very low. I think the essence of the problem is in education; we are yet to comprehend the value of soft skills and its effects in building a successful and productive personality. Soft skills training, including the ability to speak and present in public, is virtually nonexistent in our public school system.
There is a video that I have seen recently of a group of Saudi students with a journalist from the local TV news trying to interview them about a site visit they had just completed. The students were in the intermediate school, somewhere between the 7th and 9th grade, and during the live coverage, all of them were awkwardly avoiding the microphone and the journalist’s questions. The whole video was embarrassing, for the journalist and for the students. Actually, it was embarrassing for us all to realize that our kids in such an age are unable to coherently speak few words to articulate their ideas, to express themselves.
In general, we have all fallen victim to the “power point” culture; write a few lines, throw out a couple of pictures and numbers on three or four slides and that is it, you would feel like you have accomplished your mission in delivering the goals of your speech or presentation. However, in reality, nothing could be further from truth; such a set-up normally causes nothing but dull, boring, can’t-wait-to-flee-this-room kind of presentations!
There are hundreds of advices on how to master the skill of public speaking and giving presentations, however, the two that summarize them all, in my opinion, are: Be yourself, and keep it simple.
You could learn all the techniques of how to speak, to use your body language to deliver a message, but it will never work unless it comes from within you. Presentations are not about acting, it is about you living the speech and believing in it. That is why it will not work if you tried to be someone else other than you. Learn the techniques and use them, but most importantly, try to imbed them into you, to adapt them to your own personality and style so you come across natural and unpretentious.
Then, there is simplicity; it takes the message way further than complicated, pretentious presentations. One of the best presentations in modern history was the one given by the CEO of Apple, late Steve Jobs. No fancy photos and animations and fonts, just simple, elegant, and to the point messages, mastered by the presenter’s ability to grab the attention of the audience and keep them interested in what is to come.
Richard Branson, the owner of the Virgin empire, wrote in one of his books “great leaders are not just simplifiers but that they can communicate to their entire audience in terms that are universally understood,” hence, simplicity. He continue, “Close your mind to the fact that you’re on a stage with hundreds of people staring at you and instead imagine yourself in any personal comfort zone like your dining room at home where you’re telling a story to a group of friends over dinner,” hence, be yourself.
