The Art of Public Speaking and Effective Presentations

Public Speaking
Hi, my name is John Papa and I'm with Pluralsight. This is The Art of Public Speaking and Effective Presentations. I'm going to share with you presentation techniques so you can tell your story, engage your audience, and inspire them to act. Having a good story is key to delivering an effective presentation and then you've got to take your audience through that journey of that story. So, in this course, we're going to provide a map for delivering effective presentations to motivate an audience and inspire them. We're going to form your message, design visuals and demos, prepare for the unexpected because it does happen, and then demonstrate some effective delivery strategies. By the end of this course, you're going to learn how to become a more effective presenter.

Finding and Crafting Your Message
Discovering what your main message is is very important, critical in fact, your entire presentation revolves around it. So, in this module, we'll cover tips on how to find your main message and be able to title in a summary abstract for it. The key is to first discover what your main message is and then how you'll deliver it. If you deliver a presentation without a clear message, it's unlikely that anyone is going to receive it the way you intended. Let's be clear, the goal of your presentation is for the audience to receive that message loud and clear. There should be no doubt about what they walk away with. Discovering your main message is not always easy. In fact, it's often quite difficult, but once you find it, it makes everything else about your presentation tremendously easier. Before you speak, you need to know what you're going to say. What do you want your audience to walk away with; what will they remember in an hour, in a month, in six months? Part of finding what your main message is, is finding what's at the heart of it, that core purpose. Is there something that would cause or inspire you to act? If so, use that to create that message and inspire your audience because if nothing else that they recall, they should remember that main message from you. So what should this message look like? Well it can be one sentence or phrase that sums up your story, but if you draw on your experience then everything you do in your presentation should reinforce that main message, it should all point right back at it, and you want to draw interest from your audience by appealing to what they know and what they want as well and if you're successful, when you're done with your presentation, your audience will remember your main message. They might forget some of the details, but they'll remember what was the main point, what did I get out of it, what's in it for me.

Tell Your Story
Building your message is an important part of creating your presentation, but unraveling that message in a story is equally as important. In this module, we'll discuss how you can unravel your story for your audience to really drive your message home. Think about the stories you've heard in your lifetime, like The Boy Who Cried Wolf. There once was a boy who lied a lot and nobody ever believed him, so a wolf ate him, and that's a very poor version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. And the moral at the end of the story shows that liars are not rewarded. Even when they tell the truth, nobody believes them. What I'm emphasizing here is if you just tell the person your message, you tell that audience what you're trying to get at, don't cry for help unless you need it, well that's not really going to drive it home unless you let them walk through that experience with you. Why shouldn't they do that? What's going to happen if I don't? What's the right way to go about this? And by unraveling that through a story that story sticks with you for a long time and stories apply to any presentation, not just to fables. Now you might be thinking, well I can't apply a story to my technology topic like using HTML5 or Java, but you can. Stories can apply to any presentation that you do. It doesn't have to be overly elaborate, it could just be simply a story of - I set out to create this new product, I started here, and I ended up there. And it might be an unexpected twist along the way of, maybe the technology you thought you were going to start with ended up being a different technology. For example, creating a native app might be what you started out to do for an iOS device, but in the end maybe you went with PhoneGap instead. Why did you do that? What was the moral of the story? By bringing your audience along with you, you can really drive that home. So, in this module, I'll show you how you can craft your story and then unravel it for your audience to help create those "Ah-ha" moments, get their attention and keep their attention, and really relate to them, and in the end, by driving your message home through a story, your audience will remember it more clearly and be more inspired.

Organizing Your Flow and Your Visuals
You've got your message and your story in line, the next step is to put all your thoughts together and figure out how you're going to present them and what sequence you're going to do them in and what kind of visuals you're going to use. This step is the cutting room process where you're just adding what you're going to keep, what you're going to cut, and then how you're going to make it all flow together. In this module, I'll cover how you can organize all your thoughts and put them in a story arc from beginning to end for your audience. Then once you have that story, we'll talk about how you can create the visuals for your presentation. What kind of font should you use? When should you use images? What things should you repeat? What are the animations you should use? How many slides should you include? And by the end of this module, you'll know how to take your story and put it down into a physical presentation that you can then go use.

Demos
A good demo is just another tool to help you deliver your story. So, in this module, we're going to talk about how to create and prepare different demos. When you sit down to create your demos, a couple things you get in your head - is it helping your story and how many demos should I have along the way; should I do all demos and if I do, what are the scripts for those demos; do I know step-by-step what I'm going to do; how do I prepare them; and just like in a play, you want to make sure that you're stage ready, how do you make sure your demo is ready to go on stage. And before you even begin writing your demo, there are some things you should be careful of just to make sure that you are ready for things that could go wrong and by the end of this module, you'll have everything you need to design and deliver your demos.

Preparing for A Series of Unfortunate Events
The presentation is ready, your demo is ready and you're ready, right? Nothing could go wrong. Wrong. Some things just happen. So in this module, we're going to talk about how you prepare for that series of unfortunate events that may befall you during your presentation. Like a boy scout, you always want to be prepared for whatever could happen. So think through what could possibly happen and rehearse it in your head so you know how you'd respond when it does happen. And by rehearsing these in advance, if any of these things do actually happen to you, you'll know exactly how to respond and it'll be a lot less stressful. So what could possibly go wrong? Well there's a couple main categories. First of all there's your stuff, you know, your laptop, your presentation, your code, something that you've done that you have control over; then there's things you have less control over, like their stuff, meaning like the projector, the power in the room, how's the stage situated, the Wi-Fi and internet connectivity; and there's you, yep, there's things that can go wrong with you when you're presenting, just like back in the first module and how I told you my story about the first time I ever presented, let's not let that happen to you, huh; and sometimes it's more common and subtle failures like forgetting what you're going to say and what else? Well pretty much anything and everything and the best advice I can give you is, prepare for the things that you do have control over. In this module, we'll focus how you can prepare for all four of these so you know how to respond when or if they happen.

Emotional Intelligence and Communication
If you could step outside yourself and observe how you effect other people, you'd gain a valuable perspective that you can use to improve your public speaking. The key to this is understanding your emotional intelligence and raising your emotional intelligence can have a huge impact on all of your communication, including presentations. So what is emotional intelligence? It's the awareness of the effect of your emotions on other people. It's how you're perceived by other people and how your behavior affects them. It also includes your ability to read your audience to see what kind of effect you're having on them and also being able to adjust to control that impact. And in this module, you're going to learn how to identify your EQ, your emotional intelligence, and see how you can raise yours to be a successful presenter.

Effective Delivery
You've made all your preparations, but now it's game day and all the practice you've done needs to translate into an effective delivery. The reason I practice so much and rehearse different things and experiment beforehand is because once I get on stage, I want it to be all second nature to me, I want to rely on my instinct to get through that delivery - using humor, being confident, using your voice properly, and body language. How do you handle movement, what do you do with questions, how do you respond, and how do you just have fun? So how do you give an effective delivery? Well in this module we'll talk about that because that's what happens between the time you take the stage and the time you walk off.