1) Practice your presentation OUT LOUD. Find a room where it won’t seem funny to speak aloud to a wall and do it. Hearing the sound of your own voice can actually be surprisingly distracting when you’re ‘live’ in front of an audience, so better to work through that in private.

2) Reconcile yourself to the idea that it WILL NOT go EXACTLY as you envision/plan it – too many variables in a public forum that are out of your control, and you won’t necessarily perform in lock-step with your vision, either. That’s not necessarily a bad thing- the performance can often inspire grace notes which were not in the original presentation which can make it even better so don’t fear this.

3) Toastmasters is great, but do shop around your meetings if you can -and move on to a different meeting if you aren’t being affirmed and appropriately challenged. To wit- I attended one Toastmasters group until the following incident: One woman got up and gave a gangbuster presentation about something about which she was passionate; the ‘leader’ then spent the entire post-game analyzing and critiquing the ‘fact’ that she was ‘overly-emotional’ and ‘shaky’ (which she was not). By the end of it (even though many of us confronted him in real-time about this), she went from being happy/confident to self-conscious/compromised. Turned out he was a fundamentalist Christian with some pretty rigid ideas about how women should behave- her performance triggered ‘issues’ in HIM which had NOTHING to do with her competence and appropriateness of her behavior. I moved on to a different group with a better leader; it was worth the extra 20 mile drive to do so.

I hate the existing system and I want to challenge it, I just don’t know how to combine an interesting presentation with making sure these 50 points get disseminated. One thing I’ve tried is just tacking on a few slides at the end that I don’t actually cover during the presentation. But there’s always someone in the crowd that wants clarification on point 28, and then everyone else wants to know why we’re avoiding talking about the other ones.

Kinda late posting on this one, but I’ll check back if anyone is behind on their reading like me :)

I’m definitely a really big non-fan of PowerPoint. I hate it when people just read off slides. Kind of insulting to the audience. Glad to hear that you’re not settling for that, Trent!

Trent, it’s nice to have a book that puts it all together and can be used as a reference and guide. Thanks for the review

However, the point that ‘If your slide is nothing more than a reiteration of what you’re saying in bullet point form, then that slide is useless’ made me stop. I think I disagree. In education, we been taught to use of both text and spoken word when presenting new information. Yes, it’s potentially redundant, but it also can be extremely important when trying to help people with different learning styles learn and remember information. Having key points or an outline available in text helps many people follow and better understand what you are saying out loud. Of course, this does NOT mean wordy slides and reading from the screen; but I think there is a place for bullits in good presentations…especially where you are trying to get the audience to actually learn and remember several main points.

I too believe that communications skills are critical to success in many jobs in this world.

Planting someone in the audience to give you good feedback is also helpful.