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Depending on your line of work, you may be called upon to give a stress management presentation or organize a workshop. Usually, the person who gives a stress management workshop is a public speaker, physician, counselor, or Yoga teacher.

Who should be the speaker in a stress management seminar or workshop? You are looking for someone who is outgoing, knowledgeable, full of positive energy, works well with the public, and can communicate clearly. This same person should be able to give solutions to stress reduction “off the top of his or her head.”

Depending upon your familiarity with stress management, time for preparation, and how comfortable you are with giving a presentation, you may be the best qualified person for the task. Public speaking challenges are many, but all are manageable. Each component of a presentation can be prepared and refined, until you have a “masterpiece.” When you have given a few stress management presentations, you can refine any components that are “weak.” You will know what parts of a presentation are weak by the reactions of your audience.

Research and identify with the line of work. As an example: Health care workers, customer service, and manufacturers, each experience stress, but their jobs create unique stress situations. With this in mind, make yourself familiar with the every day stress situations that go with the particular jobs in your audience.

Preparation and research are part of every presentation, but after your first presentation on stress management, you will have a template to build on, improve, and constantly revise. You should speak in terms that will be familiar to your specific audience. For example: As collective groups, health care workers, teachers, and customer service representatives, have their own interests and jargon.

You will want to provoke interest, understanding, and participation. At the same time, you want your specific audience to respond favorably. You must also anticipate reaction to your presentation. Therefore, make sure that your points are reasonable and have credible resources; you will receive a favorable reaction from your target audience.

Your speaking voice can be worked for projection, clarity, and pitch. Many people are unhappy to hear the sound of their speaking voice played back through a recording device, but most of us can work our unique voice to get the most out of it. By using a mirror, audio recorder, digital recorder, or video recorder, you can get the most out of your voice.

© Copyright 2006 – Paul Jerard / Aura Publications

Could you drive your car, speak on the phone, eat a pizza, read the newspaper and watch a movie all at the same time? Probably not, particularly if you’re male. But that’s what many audiences are expected to do all across the world, every day as presenters toil to prove how smart they are, missing the point by a country mile. Which is probably what the audience does too.

You Can Present With Confidence

A presentation is not an opportunity to prove your intelligence or your grasp of the topic. The audience assumes these things already, which is why they came to listen to you (unless of course they were forced to!). Your job as the presenter is to package your information in a way that is easy to absorb, thus enabling your audience to make a decision based on your recommendations. It’s to inform, and in all likelihood to persuade too. Sexy slides are an added bonus and can make the experience more enjoyable. But too many slides just add to the confusion.

People can only focus properly on one idea at a time. This means that once you get to the next point, the listener will move off what you were saying previously in order to keep following your current train of thought. So the logical question is – how many key points can you pile into a presentation before you completely flummox your audience? In order to make a decision, they need to understand the point – the main point, that is. And if there are too many points, your presentation becomes a mish-mash, and then logically there is no main point.

It is understood that a compelling presentation requires great delivery. But unfortunately that is not enough. Cluttered content delivered well equals a poor presentation.

So what do you need to do?

First you need to decide on the purpose of your presentation, and what the main message will be. This answers the question “why?”. Everything you prepare should tie in to that main message. Next, you should strive to keep it simple. Avoid the overload that so many presenters feel obliged to dish up. Keep slides to the minimum. If some detail is a requirement, you can provide it via a handout or web link at the end. A few good stories or metaphors to illustrate your main point are much more effective, serve to engage an audience and are always appreciated.

Think about the best presentations you’ve experienced. You may find that they were almost always the simpler ones that were easy to follow. For the presenter, simpler presentations are easier to prepare because they’re… simpler. They’re also easier to rehearse, and to deliver. The audience enjoys them more. And you, the presenter, increase your chances of attaining your objective.

Uncomplicate your presentations. Keep them simple and fun. Keep clear of unnecessary clutter. Stay focused on your key objective, and get the result you were aiming for. Game, set and match.

Perhaps one of the most wasted opportunities in higher education is the area of student oral presentations. Because we live it every day, we understand the inherent benefits of

• preparing a convincing argument,
• presenting it to others, and
• responding to their questions and signals.

As a type of alternative assessment (i.e., a way to find out what students are learning via a means other than a traditional paper/pencil exam), oral presentations allow students to master an array of life skills that seemingly can be mastered through few, if any, other vehicles. Although many professors do require students to make presentations, often, unfortunately they provide such muddled expectations of student performance that students are set up for failure. Some students will thrive in spite of their professors’ poor handling of the process; many others, however, will become so unnerved that they will literally become sick. How can you make sure that you do not waste the opportunity to help students be successful?

First explain to students that they already do oral presentations every single day of their lives – presentations that are called by such innocuous names as conversations, discussions, and interviews.

Second, to help students deliver a solo performance in front of the entire class, you can stair-step them to that point rather than tripping and shoving them into what they often perceive as a lake filled with alligators.

• For the first step, start small, by having students interview a single other student and then report the results, while seated, to the rest of the class.
• Move up to panel discussions, in which each student is expected to present a specifically selected portion of a broader topic.
• Continue upward by having students deliver an extemporaneous thirty-second response to a course topic drawn from a hat or shoebox.
• Finally, if you have provided ample verbal feedback (not just numerical scores) throughout the preliminary activities, and have given students a clear rubric will in advance, they can reach the high point of giving a short presentation in front of the class. Even those few experienced, high school debate team members you may have who are capable of delivering a moving presentation on the first day of class will benefit from the preliminary activities.

Many students may think that oral presentations should be limited to speech classes, but the reality is that being well prepared to make presentations to other individuals is a necessity in today’s society. This applies to health care professionals, salespeople, administrators, training officers, managers, teachers (duh), and on and on. To leave your students unprepared would be to shirk your responsibility as an educator. When you have worked to develop your students’ speaking skills, as you well know, you will see the concomitant growth in self-esteem, poise, and leadership.

That’s a good day’s work, isn’t it?