You're about to give a presentation. How can you avoid the most common mistakes employees make?

The biggie! Too much information. Most of my clients need to rid their presentations of way too much information. Tip: documents do not belong in slide shows.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD KEEP EACH SLIDE SIMPLE AND TO THE POINT. DO NOT PUT YOUR LIFE STORY ON A SLIDE. 30 POINT FONT / 10 SLIDES / 20 MINUTES.

Tailor your message: Understanding your audience allows you to customize your content to resonate with them. Adjust your tone: Knowing your audience helps you strike the right tone eg, when presenting to senior executives, use professional and concise approach to convey key points effectively. Address pain points: By identifying your audience's challenges, you can offer solutions that address their specific needs. Highlight benefits: Show how your presentation benefits your audience eg, A new sales strategy can lead to increased revenue and career growth for sales representatives. Use real stories and examples that resonate with your audience to make your presentation more relatable and impactful.

Make your presentation interesting and engage with your audience! Pop in an activity to ensure the audience is connecting with your message.

3 most common mistakes - 1. talking too fast/too slowly - so BREATHE! 2. Using poor visuals i.e. dark font on light background; should always be the opposite to make it easier on the eyes! and 3. Vomiting too much info - you should have max 5 slides, I have gotten rave reviews for 1-slide presentations!

Establishing a coherent structure is essential for ensuring that your presentation effectively communicates its message and engages the audience. By meticulously planning the sequence of ideas and incorporating transitions and summaries, presenters can maintain clarity and momentum throughout the presentation, facilitating comprehension and retention of key points. Moreover, a compelling opening and closing serve to captivate attention, establish rapport, and leave a lasting impression on the audience. Utilizing outlines or storyboards to organize content provides a roadmap for seamless delivery and enables presenters to refine and polish their message for maximum impact.

Move from context to content. Context entails the background, purpose of the presentation, agenda and introduction. Content highlights the key details, information and call to action from your presentation. Hence instead of straight away overloading the audience with information, spend some time to paint the bigger picture to hook their interest. After all, if you manage to get their attention, you can always provide additional details via attachment.

Planning the structure of your presentation is an essential attribute of the corporate segment. The beginning of your presentation determines the focus that people will give you throughout the presentation, the middle engages people so that they do not become bored, and the end of the presentation demonstrates your goal and what you hope to achieve, as well as what you expect from the audience. But why? There are lakhs and crores of meetings, sessions, talks, and presentations taking place both physically and online. As an employee, it is your responsibility to know and understand the audience while presenting yourself.

Dicas úteis:Lembre-se sempre o foco da apresentação é a ideia que você quer passar. Se algum imprevisto ocorrer ( e eles ocorrem) , mantenha a calma. Tenha bem claro os principais insights que quer passar.

Avoid the wall of text! When slides become too text-heavy, there's a risk that the audience will focus more on reading the content rather than engaging with our spoken presentation. An easy way to check if your slides are distracting is to ask yourself if someone were to receive the slides without context, would they be able to discern the information as if they were reading from a scientific journal? If the answer is yes, then you have too much information on your slides, and the presentation could have been a proposal or email. Hence, it's crucial to highlight key takeaways and present data in visually appealing formats to maintain audience engagement and ensure they're following along with our verbal delivery.

Maintaining a balance between visual appeal and functionality is crucial when designing presentation slides. By prioritizing simplicity, clarity, and consistency, presenters can enhance audience focus and comprehension while minimizing distractions. Thoughtful use of visual elements such as images, charts, and diagrams reinforces key points and facilitates understanding, while adhering to brand identity ensures coherence and professionalism. Additionally, aligning slide design with audience preferences fosters connection and engagement, enhancing the overall effectiveness of the presentation.

Understand your audience's needs, expectations, and level of knowledge on the topic. Tailor your message to resonate with them, and engage the audience through questions or interactive elements to maintain their interest.

Understand the audience to get the tone right (not too shallow or too detailed); dress according to occasion; prepare / rehearse; anticipate possible questions to think about your answer.

Make eye contact with different members of the audience throughout your presentation. This builds a connection and keeps the audience engaged. If nervous, look at their foreheads or just above their heads as a workaround.

Engagement is one of the best methods to avoid your audience from being distracted. We could be constantly distracted by incoming emails, texts or even inner voice in our mind- hence engagement helps in involving them throughout the presentation. Consider asking open and closed ended questions. Hear from them on their thoughts and opinion. Facilitate discussion to relate to them.

Plan your presentation to fit within the allotted time, leaving space for an introduction, main content, conclusion, and Q&A. Time your rehearsals and adjust content as necessary to avoid rushing or overextending.

Putting too much into a presentation is a common mistake that people make. You want to show you know a lot and end up running over time and coming across as unprofessional. Also, just because you know a lot does not mean your audience can absorb all that you cover. Once you have established all of the potential points you want to make, be rigorous in cutting it down to the three most important points leaving plenty time and opening for questions where the audience can drill more on things they want to understand further. Once you have the structure, dry run the presentation with a trusted audience to test timing and gather feedback and then rework it again.

In my experience, being witty and injecting a tad bit of humour shows that you're comfortable with the topic, which leads to your audience being slightly convinced that you know what you're talking about and try to summarise and tie it back to the main point at the end.

Structure your presentation with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Introduce your topic and what you'll cover, present the information in a logical sequence, and summarize key points at the end.