Muhammad Noer

How to be a Good Speaker in a Presentation

November 22, 2017 by Muhammad Noer

Do you want to be a good speaker and to impress your audiences at the same time? Well, there is no shortcut for such things. You have to practice and practice industriously and learn from the experts and also explore your speaking ability in every occasion.

Here are some tips you can practice in everyday life.

Learning by observing

The easiest thing for you to learn is observing how good presenters perform. You can learn from TED videos that you can watch for free. For instance, you can learn by watching global or local TED like TED Jakarta.

Besides TED, you can also watch Pecha Kucha videos. There is something interesting while you watch Pecha Kutcha videos. Each video shows a presenter performs 20 slides which every slide switches every 20 seconds automatically. Each presenter must make sure that his presentation corresponds to every change of the slides.

Learning by Practicing Together

You can also improve your speaking skill by following Toastmaster club near your place. Toastmaster is a non-profit organization that helps people to improve their speaking skill. You can learn further about it in this article.

Learning by Following Training Class

Besides doing autodidact learning from videos, observing other speakers or joining speaking club, you can also learn by joining training.

The advantage of joining training is that you will be managed to improve your presentation skill, from formulating your presentation’s material, transforming it to visual slides in instantly and delivering your presentation convincingly.

Now let us go back to our topic, how to baa good speaker.

1. Deliver a Story

A good presentation doesn’t only give facts and data but also wraps it with good story to make your presentation understandable.

2. Know Your Audiences

Knowing your audience is imperative. You will deliver a presentation to them so you must know who will attend to your presentation. You must know their position in their company. By this way, you will be well connected to them

3. Visualize What You Deliver

Delivering a good presentation needs a skill to elaborate complex idea into an intelligible visualization. That’s why besides you must learn how to speak understandable language, visual slides also help you to perfect your presentation.

4. Speak Naturally

A good speaker doesn’t pretend to be anybody else. He just becomes the way he is. By speaking with your own style, your audiences will see you as a confident speaker because you are the way you aye and not being exaggerate on everything.

5. Perform with Confidence

Show yourself! Deliver your ideas! Don’t hide behind your slides! Use a clicker to help you move from one slide to another easily.

6. Do an Eye Contact

Among many tips to perform in front of audience, eye contact is one of the most important things. Eye contact shows that you care. It is a prime stage to create connection between the speaker and the audience.

7. Don’t Do a Blocking towards Your Audience

It’s a sin if you do this thing: block the audience. Don’t block your audience even though your presentation is over. Can you imagine what you feel when someone is not facing towards you while you have conversation with him? You will feel that you are abandoned. That is exactly what the audience feels. That is why don’t make a long and gobbledygook slides. Instead, you make visual slides which are more interesting and evoking the audiences.

8. Don’t apologize

Apologizing is a good thing. But apologizing to the audience as an excuse of your imperfect presentation is bad because it just shows that you are not a credible presenter. So, make sure you avoid such thing!

You are a star in your presentation. You are the one who manage the scenario of your presentation. So, take control!

How To Prepare for Questions from Your Audience

November 8, 2017 by Muhammad Noer

Question and Answer Session is always present in every presentation. The aim of this session is to help the audience understand more about the material that has been delivered. So, as a presenter, you must be ready to face all the questions from your audience.

Question and Answer Session is sometimes stressing presenters. They are afraid they could not answer all the questions well. Besides, this session is actually something good for a presenter. This session tests his ability in delivering presentation. When he answers questions, he actually performs his competence especially on the material he delivers.

Besides, question and answer session can also give you an opportunity to interact more intimately with your audience. From the questions that the audiences ask, you can measure their knowledge about the material you deliver. So, this session can assist you to evaluate your performance.

In order to be ready on facing questions from your audiences, here are some tips you can use:

1. Give Limitation

It is better to put the question and answer session after you finish delivering the material. The aim of this is to make sure the audience won’t throw you questions while you are still delivering your material. By giving the limitation to the time to ask questions you will not be interrupted during your presentation. It also helps you to focus on your presentation.

Besides, you also can limit how many questions they can ask in one session. The limitation of the amount of questions will make the audience aware so that they will think over about the question they want to ask. They will ask you about important and urgent things. This will make your presentation more effective and efficient.

2. Carefully Listen to your audience’s question

Listen to the question carefully so that you can comprehend the question well. This is important so that you can give the most appropriate answer that the audiences really need.

3. Think about the answer carefully

After the audience ask you a question, pause a moment to think! It is important for you to digest the question in order to give the best answer.

How if you can’t give the right answer? Don’t be panic! Sometimes, as a presenter, you can’t predict the question they ask.

If that happens, first thank to the audience, then you can apologize for not being able to answer the question properly. You can also give further discussion of forum to satisfy the audience. For instance, “thank you for the question. But, I apologize for not being able to answer that properly because this question needs further research. So, you can leave me your email address. I will send you the proper answer as soon as I have done my research on your question.”

You can also reject the question that is “out of the line”. You can say that the question is irrelevant and out of the context so that you don’t need to answer the question.

In fact, if you prepare you presentation material properly, you can answer all the question your audiences ask. By preparing the material, you learn about anything you will deliver in your presentation.

You must make sure that you do the preparation well, make the material that is understandable, use proper and understandable language. You must also make sure that your audiences don’t fall asleep. If they fall asleep, they don’t comprehend the material and ask you less important questions.

It is also recommended to make good supportive material, like slides, pictures, or videos that can help the audience absorb the material.

If you are well prepared, you don’t need to worry on facing questions from the audiences. You will answer all the questions properly and satisfyingly. To be a great speaker, you must master the technique of presentation. One of the indications that your presentation is great is when the audiences understand the material and be moved by the presentation to do what the presenter expects.

Preparing an Effective Presentation

October 25, 2017 by Muhammad Noer

Delivering presentation is sometimes frightening for some people because they must speak in front of people they don’t know yet. In time you must deliver a presentation, you must be ready to receive many questions from your audiences. You are sometimes afraid of delivering an ineffective presentation.

A presentation is not frightening at all actually. A presentation is a media for you to perform your ability. It can be your way to improve. By delivering a presentation, there will be many people understand your ideas, but with one condition: you must deliver an effective presentation.

The key to an effective presentation is a proper preparation. There are many things you have to prepare. But, many people focus only to prepare the material, like making slide show or video to make a more interesting presentation.

Preparing the material for your presentation is important, but that is not the only thing you have to prepare in order to deliver an effective presentation. What are they? Here are some tips for you to be able to deliver an effective presentation.

1. Know Your Audiences

This is actually the most important thing: knowing your audience. If you know them, you will understand them. By that way, you will position yourself as theirs. So, you can prepare the material that fits to their needs.

Knowing your audience doesn’t mean that you must know them in person one by one. But, you can know them from their position. For instance, you must deliver a presentation in front of managers. You must look up, about what field they handle, how many staffs they have, or their educational background.

By knowing the information, especially detail information about the audience, you can prepare the proper material for your presentation. The presentation material for financial managers is different to human sources managers, although the theme is the same, about the proper way to communicate to staff.

People with different background need different approach to receive information.

When the audiences are in the same level, you have to look for information that can unify them. When they gather to hear your presentation, there must be something that unifies them.

2. Make a Structuralized Material for your Presentation

After knowing your audiences, the next step is to prepare clear and structuralized material, and the most important thing is that your material should be understandable.

For example, you want to open a presentation with a story, you should make sure that you also attach some stories in the middle and the end of your presentation. By doing so, your every session of presentation is interconnected to each other.

By making a structuralized and interconnected material, you will be able to direct the audience to your purpose of delivering your presentation easily.

3. Prepare a Visual Material for Your Presentation

A presentation without some helping tool will be a boring presentation. So, make sure you prepare some visual material, such as slide show or even videos to make your presentation more interesting.

For slide show, make sure your slide is not too full of sentences. Summarize important points of your presentation to be shown in your slide show. Don’t forget also to give contrast and proper illustration. If you want to give your audiences some data, it will be better to deliver it in an interesting diagram or table.

The most important thing is to make sure you make understandable slide show. Use the fit font size and make sure the balance between your writings and pictures.

4. Use Understandable Spoken Language

When you deliver a presentation, use good and understandable language to the audiences. For you are assumed using bahasa, use daily bahasa. You must notice the grammar, but sometimes using slank or jargon is okay as long as it fits to the aim of your presentation.

5. Practice

You are required to keep mastering your presentation ability although you have delivered so many presentations.

Practicing in front of a mirror about the best way of the way you talk, your body position and body language. Besides, you can practice in front of your close friends or family. Evaluate whether they understand your presentation or not. You can ask their opinion about your way of elaborating your presentation. If there is any imperfection, take time to practice more.

Those are some tips to prepare a presentation in order to make effective presentation. If you think that you have some imperfection in doing so, you can attend seminar and workshop from those who are experts in presenting world.

Presentation is sometimes frightening but it can be overcome. There’s the technique and you can comprehend and practice it.

What is the Purpose of Your Presentation?

October 11, 2017 by Muhammad Noer

Imagine you are preparing for something. You prepare your suitcase, fold and pack your clothes into your suitcase. Most of the clothes you prepare are shirts. After you finish packing, you are ready to go ahead. Unfortunately you are going to the beach for vacation. And finally you cannot wear your clothes in that beach.

That is what you will feel if you prepare a presentation, while you are not knowing the purpose of the presentation. Without knowing the purpose of the presentation you are going to perform, you won’t do the presentation well and properly. Your presentation will be a waste of time for both of you and the audience eventually. You cannot give the proper information and the audience cannot get all the points.

The main purpose of a presentation is to inform. Your presentation must be well prepared in order to be able to give information to the audience properly. There are two kinds of giving information.

1. Giving information to those who don’t know about the topic yet (to inform)

2. Persuade people to use something they already know (to persuade)

Each Type has its own Trick!

The purpose to inform is different to persuade in a presentation.

Informative presentation is usually done in front of the audiences who don’t know yet about the topic or are not familiar with the topic. Here you must give facts and data so that in the end of your presentation the audiences got new information. For this type of presentation, the preparation you have to do is make an understandable material.

However, the persuasive presentation is a little bit more complicated. Here you will face the audiences who already know and are familiar to the topic you are going to present but they are not interested to it yet. This type of presentation requires your best communication skill. In the end of your presentation, the audiences are expected to change their minds. Those who are not interested to the topic are now interested in that, or at least they are willing to try to use that.

Everything Begin with the Material

The success of your presentation depends on your ability as a presenter. You are may be not a star, but if you have a good communication skill, you will be a star after you deliver your presentation. The audiences will thank you for they have got useful information to bring home.

In fact, a presentation is a communication. A success communication is when the communicator could deliver the message properly to the communicant. At the end, the communicator and the communicant have the same understanding and knowledge about something.

So, communication in delivering presentation will need 3 things:

1. Message bearer (communicator)

2. Media

3. Message receiver (communicant)

Those three things is interrelated to each other. If the communicator could give the message through the right media, the message will be accepted and understood by the communicant.

The material for your presentation must be strong and understandable. By understanding easily to the presentation you deliver, the audiences will be interested to your presentation.

Prepare Your Material at Your Best

Before you arrange the materials, collect all the things you will deliver in your presentation first. You must deliver things that are relevant to the purpose of the presentation of course. If its purpose is to inform, you must give new information and things that are not familiar to the audiences. If its purpose is to persuade, you must deliver the benefits and advantages of the thing you deliver.

Write down all things you will deliver. Write down all things that come up to your consciousness, that relevant to your presentation. After that, evaluate them. Re-read your writings, and if you find things less important, remove them.

If you have the fixed material for your presentation, classify each idea. Classification will help you to deliver the material easily to the audiences. After that, make the media for your presentation. The very common media used for presentation is slide show.

Make a simple but attractive slide show for your presentation. A slide full with writings and pictures will bore the audiences. In opposite, a simple slide will grow curiosity so that the audiences will pay attention to your presentation.

After presentation media is made, you also must prepare yourself. You must deliver the presentation properly. Public communication skill is highly required to be a good presenter. Not all people are gifted to do the public speaking, but everyone can deliver a good presentation, with one condition: practice, practice and practice.

Tips for Delivering an Effective Presentation

September 27, 2017 by Muhammad Noer

Having a beautiful PowerPoint slide is not enough to guarantee your presentation success. There is time where you must deliver those slides effectively in front of the audience.

Here are four specific tips on how to deliver an effective presentation you should know.

1. Get rid of the obstacle you will possibly face

In our presentation, we often have a very limited space due to the things around us. For example, desk, chair, and LCD projector which are put right in the centre of the room. This can cause the presenter can only stand in one side of the room.

You cannot stand in the centre of the room or walk across to the other side of the room because your shadow will block the slide show while you’re walking across to the other side of the room. That is why you should know how to set LCD projector properly.

Your movement also will be limited because of the microphone you use. Wire microphone will make your movement limited. That’s why instead of using the wire mic, you can use the wireless one. By using wireless mic, you can move freely because you will not be bothered by the wire we usually find if we use the wire mic.

2. Use Remote Control Clicker

If you use presentation slide, I think it is a tool you should have. Unless, you will have to deliver your presentation near your laptop. You can imagine the frustration faces of the audiences who should wait for you to walk to your laptop to turn the slide.

“Ooo…. I don’t need such tool, Sir because I have asked one person to sit near my laptop to operate the slide while I am delivering my presentation.”

This way has weakness. First, we feel sorry to the person you asked to operate the slide because he must sit near the laptop in the whole presentation only for click the next button.

Besides, you will have to say “Next… next.” as in instruction to move the slide. It is often destruct the attention of the audience.

Second, although you have given the instruction, still there will be mistake on the timing to turn one slide to another. Your presentation plot can be disturbed or even worse.

That’s why you should use the remote control clicker. Make sure you are the one who take full control over your presentation slides. When you choose a remote control clicker, I suggest you to choose the one which has fade to black feature, with which you can switch your slide off immediately.

3. Mind Your Body Orientation

When a presenter is delivering his speech often his body orientation changes, not facing the audience anymore but facing the slide instead. When this happens, the presenter looses contact with the audiences.

A presentation is one of many communication forms where eye contact is a must and crucial. It is like the analogy when you want to talk to a person and he stares at his phone instead of your eyes. Of course you don’t want it, do you?

That is why you should be aware of your body orientation. Remember that the most important thing in your presentation is your audiences. Your task is to communicate with them, not too focus on the slide you use.

4. Use Speaker Note Feature

Speaker Note will function as your “cheat” while you deliver your presentation. Consider this note as an insurance you can use if in the middle of the presentation you forget what to say.

But you need to know that speaker note can only be used only if it’s needed. You must do the preparation and practices to deliver your points.

If in the presentation you only read the speaker note in your laptop, you will not perform an amazing presentation.

Those are four tips on how to deliver PowerPoint presentation you should know. Try it yourself. If there are other tips, don’t hesitate to add and write it down in the comment below.