5 tips for improving your presentation skills
This month, our blog pieces have considered the important of personal brand in the context of the legal profession. This doesn’t just mean how you present yourself on LinkedIn: it also includes how you grow your network, how you go about cultivating your career path and what else you do alongside this.
In defining your own personal brand, you need to decide how you perceive yourself and how you want others to perceive you. One of the most obvious ways in which you can control how other people see you is by improving your presentation skills. This applies in many different situations. It could be a partner presenting billing figures to senior leadership, or a paralegal reporting back to their line manager on legal research. Here are some tips that can help people in both examples (and everything in between).
Define your Target Audience
Who you are talking to will determine what you say and how you say it. Think about which aspects of your topic are relevant to your target audience, then assess your audience's interest from your own perspective.
Who you are talking to will also have a massive impact on things such as the language you use. If you are speaking in front of a non-specialist or mixed audience, an overly specific use of jargon (in particular, legal jargon) will only confuse your audience. If you’re presenting information to a client, it might be more relevant to use non-specialist terms to help them fully understand what you are telling them. By contrast, if you are talking to colleagues, then there is less of a need to change how you speak because they will likely be more familiar with jargon and specific terminology.
Set out the Story
Good presentations will be like good stories: they’ll have a clear beginning, middle and end. In the legal profession, many presentations will leave little room for narrative design, so in order to do achieve this impact, it’s worth setting out the structure of your presentation right at the start. This will tell your audience exactly what to expect from the outset and should give them greater capacity to engage in detail rather than leaving them to try and work out the gist of what you’re telling them.
In your introduction, it is worth saying what your conclusion and suggested actions are (if applicable) before you explain why this is the case. This will cover your back if you run out of time, but it will also reinforce your own perceived confidence in your conclusion.
Work on your Body Language
This makes a huge difference to how engaging your presentation will be and how seriously you will be taken by your audience. When people get nervous, they tend to move around a lot and struggle to meet people’s eye. This can subconsciously make them seem less trustworthy because these signs often overlap with those displayed when somebody lies. Eye contact, open posture and appropriate hand gestures are all tools which you can use to combat this issue and encourage your audience to engage with you.
Set your Slide Structure
Reflect the hierarchy of content in the way your slides are designed. Emphasize headings and overshadow additional information with smaller font sizes. Building on the theme of setting the story early in your presentation, you should try to present your most important information first so that it is not lost on your audience.
Part of this structure is the visual aspect relating to the basic design. Fonts, headings, bullet points and colours all matter and should be relevant to the audience, message and brand the presentation relates to. Consistency is a big part of this.
Less is More
People don’t like reading huge blocks of text on a screen. There’s no hard and fast rule for addressing this, but a good principle to start from is the 6x6 rule. This is the idea that you should have no more than six lines of text per slide, with a maximum of six words per line. You don’t have to stick to this rigidly, but if you build from this rather than from an essay, you’ll keep enough “white space” (empty space) on the slide to focus your audience’s attention.
Even better than slides full of words, are slides involving graphics and images. However, these visual elements have to be more than purely decorative. Incoherent or irrelevant graphics / images will distract from the essential information, so try to use graphs, charts and designs that support your statements, or contextualise them.
Conclusion
Finally, as a bonus tip, practice! This sounds simple, but the reality is that being well prepared is half of the battle. If you’ve practiced your delivery and your pacing, the other tips will be easier to apply. The content will be more familiar so you can focus more on body language, plus, doing a trial run will help you to get a feel for whether your written and visual prompts actually add value for your audience.