top of page
Search

Why, and how, to improve your presentation skills (in English)


Guess how many Powerpoints are created every day around the world ? According to the BBC, it could be as many as 30 million! Yet 4/5 professionals said they shifted their attention away from the presenter during the last presentation they attended (figures from Prezi).


If you’re someone who attends meetings as part of your work - and I know that most of you reading this go to plenty of meetings - you’ll also understand 79% of people said that most presentations are boring, according to a survey by Presentation Panda.


When you go to the effort to put together a presentation for any audience, you’d like your audience to listen to you, and go away thinking about your message. Right? You don’t want to be the presenter that no one is listening to, and you certainly don’t want people to think your presentation is boring.

Why improve your presentation skills?


Being able to speak to an audience, however big or small, and transmit your message effectively, is one of the most important communication skills.

Presentation skills are vital once you get to a certain level in your job:

  • 92% of respondents in a poll by presentation panda agreed that presentation skills are critical to success at work: good presentation skills are vital for a professional personal brand.

  • You can present your projects to the big bosses and get buy-in for what you’re doing

  • You may be asked to contribute to your company’s town hall meetings, giving you visibility and more opportunities within your company

  • You may also find yourself representing your company by speaking at events. Again this visibility brings career opportunities..

  • Even if you rarely make presentations, working on your presentation skills will help you to create stronger and more persuasive arguments, to have more impact within your team and organisation.

Get my top tips for engaging your audience when you're presenting.


How to improve your presentation skills

It’s no secret that to improve, you need conscious practice. The most efficient way to become a better speaker is to have someone help you identify your strong and weak points: you can do it yourself by recording yourself, you can hire a coach or follow a training.

When you’re presenting in an international environment

If you’re working in an international environment, you’ll be doing a lot of your presenting in English. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is doing presentation skills training (or public speaking skills - there are some differences but a lot of overlap) in their native language and then assuming that taking English lessons to work on their grammar and vocabulary will get them to the same level in presenting as in their own language.


Not true! Why is this a mistake? For two reasons:


First of all, we need to learn how to work with our brains in the most efficient way. When you train and practise a certain skill, your brain creates new neural pathways and strengthens existing ones. The more you practise, the stronger the neural pathways are and the more you automate your skill.


Training to be a better public speaker in your own language is great, but it won’t mean that you will automatically be a better speaker in a foreign language. Your brain needs to create those neural pathways separately, especially if you are not totally bilingual.


Think about this: if you are a pianist, you don’t practise for your Mozart concert by playing jazz. If you’re a champion sprinter, you don’t train for the Olympics by doing marathons. You need to train and practise the exact skill you will perform.

Secondly, the way that you speak and present in English is not the same as in French. Did you know that the linguistic distance between you and the audience is less in English than in French? The way you use your voice to speak to an audience in English is quite different to French. And the way that information in English is structured is also different to French. You don’t want to lose your anglophone audience, so it’s important that you know how to speak to them.


Last year, I was in a speech competition in French. Speaking in public in English is something that I’ve done for years, but I notice that when I present in French, a lot of the non-language related aspects are not as good as they are in English: I don’t pause as much, my voice is not as clear and I need to be more focused on how I’m engaging the audience as it doesn’t come as naturally as it does in English. I need presentation skills training in French!

So remember: presentation skills are important, even if you don’t make a lot of presentations, and you need to train them. And if you present in English as well as French, you should be training those skills in both languages and separately.

Do you want to train your presentation skills in English? We run “Power Presentations in English” training: find out more here.


 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page