By the end of this video, what you'll be able to figure out is how do you write a great script so that way you can present to a large audience. What we'll look through is why preparation is key to providing a great talk to a large group. This is the Practice and Leader podcast. I'm your host, Parul Bhargava, and let's discuss.
We're going to go through a couple of steps here to talk about exactly what you need to do and how do you start defining your content. As a way to be able to present to large groups, this could be for a keynote, presenting to a team, it could be presenting information about how you've delivered this brand new, great feature of something.
Let's go ahead and start off with the first step, which is what is your topic? This is where you need to define what you'll be talking about or presenting in broad strokes. This could be just general ideas. This does not need to be refined as this is part of the next steps you'll have to do anyway. As you go through and you define what the broad strokes are, start brainstorming ideas about your concept and see if you can find a selection of topics with more specificity.
You'll use these things to be able to then group them into themes so that way you can identify are there common trends that you can present and ideas that you can build a showcase for your audience. As you look through, you'll find that some ideas, eh, they're not so good. Other ideas, much, much better.
Go through and find those best ideas and then select the theme and its subsequent listed items to then move on to the next step. The next step is how do you research your concept? This is where, you know, searches, libraries, they're your friends, go do research, go look up news articles, go look up content about from textbooks, go find anything you could find to be able to build on the topic that you're trying to speak about.
This could be something that you're presenting to individuals about, let's say, a paper that you've written, or alternatively, it could be, hey, I've written this brand new feature for software. I need to go write explanatory section about why this feature is great. Make sure that you're also using industry relevant sources.
If you're writing about coding, make sure your resources port that reference. Don't just choose anything, make sure you're going through and you're looking for the right content that you can reference. And record each of those references, because you know what? Your audience is going to want to know about it.
Determine what is the story that you want to tell, and how are you going to convey it? This could be what you use in the next step to be able to figure out, okay, well, here's how I'm going to tell the story or this narrative, because you'll need to be able to tell this overall. Next, how do you convert your concept into actual content?
Your first step in looking at this after you've done your research is, what is the thought line you want to be able to present? So that way it hits home the hardest. Is the research that you've done going to be able to support the outcomes that you're looking for? And if you're finding that you're missing some elements, you're missing some topics that you know, I feel like I should go get some more references.
Go spend the time and go do the research. It'll pay off in dividends. Now that you've finished your research and you've now developed this concept as far as you can, we're now going to look at how do you create sections of content that logically progress from one section to another. And what you're going to want to do is figure out how do you integrate segues So that way you can actually move from from section to section seamlessly.
As you're thinking about how you present this information, are there personal stories or narratives you could tell which will help materialize this concept for people so that way it becomes concrete for them? In this specific case, I'm actually using this methodology to actually write this video. In a previous life, when I did a presentation at the Trustworthy Computing Conference many, many years ago, we talked about how do you present metrics and how do you Define what does quality look like?
And I presented that to a large crowd. It was that experience with them helped. What does this process look like? And we'll start talking about some of the next steps about how do you prepare for your presentation? Are there statistics that about this topic or about this concept that would, that is not necessarily common knowledge and would pique people's interest.
Back then, when I think about what I was presenting about quality, one of the statistics I use is that it only takes three check ins into source control to break the software build. And it was one of those statistics that was pulled from. A number of papers that have been published internally, and it was 1 of the statistics that actually struck home for a bunch of people in the room.
They were like, hold on a 2nd. That's all it takes to be able to break something. The. Outcome was, well, what do we need to do differently to be able to make sure that the quality remains high as you're converting your concept into content. Also consider the audience that you're presenting to. Are you targeting all the right people?
Are you speaking to them in the right way? Does this work for an individual contributor? Does this work for a manager? Also consider this has worked for people in your industry and also from not in your industry. Can people relate to it? Now, as we think about how those pieces fit together, we now need to figure out how we're going to prepare this content to be presented.
This we'll jump into next. So how do you prepare to present? It comes down to a couple of simple steps. Make sure that you're outlining, not memorizing. You've seen those presentations where you feel like somebody's reading to you. It doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel like very entertaining. So you don't want to do that.
What you want to do is try to figure out how to use outlines to pull out key concepts that you're presenting in order to be able to give that to the end user rather than memorizing things word for word. Using it as a prompt for yourself through the presentation rather than memorizing each and every sentence.
The delivery of it will become less natural if you're trying to recall it from memory versus trying to speak about the topic. And we've seen that when people read slides. You can see somebody presenting and all they're doing is reading the slide versus actually speaking to you and engaging with you.
Next, there's going to be a certain amount of time that you're allotted. To be able to speak, this could be real for a keynote. It could be for a presentation. You may only have 10 minutes in a team meeting. Make sure you're measuring your time. Do you have too much content or too little content? If you have too little content, go back to researching and see if there's something else you can add or something else that you can develop.
Don't add things in for the sake of adding things in, but just make sure you've double checked yourself to make sure that you've added in the content that was most relevant for this audience. Consider what your body language is and think about, as you're speaking, do your gestures support or distract from the presentation and the points you're trying to make?
If you're going to say, okay, well, there's something big here that's going to be this big, it's going to be included, or it's going to be this small and be able to use gestures to be able to describe those things. Make sure that the language you're using at the time you're using the gestures are also aligned.
Now, if you're presenting live. Check your audience's engagement. Are they slouched? Have you got people sitting on the edge of their seats? Are people checking their phone? Are people have their heads down looking at their computer versus actually making eye contact? These are all elements you could be watching for to be able to see how engaged is your audience.
If you're on an on demand type presentation, take the opportunity to report yourself and practice as many times as you can. This is where it's going to give you the opportunity to be able to say, okay. Did I stumble somewhere? Did I, you know, did I have more energy in this spot versus that spot? This will kind of give you an idea of where you need to practice and where you need to develop the ideas further.
And I talk about practice. You'll know when it's enough, you'll know that you've practiced enough when it becomes almost second nature to you. Those of you looking for a concrete number, you know what, I'm not going to be able to give you one because it's all dependent upon what experiences that you've had and what level of experience you have presenting in front of others.
Some people are able to do it naturally and other people need to practice a lot. I personally have to practice a lot. That's something that I just have had to do. Pay special attention to the sections of your presentation which you trip over more frequently. So this can do either in recording. Or you can do this as you're practicing and seeing, okay, hey, wow, that one I didn't come as naturally to me.
Maybe I should try that one again. Or maybe I should rerecord this because I'm not delivering the content as best as I can. I know I've mentioned practicing a whole bunch here. I have never felt like I should have practiced less. I've only felt that I've practiced just enough. Or that I wish I had practiced more.
So take the time to practice as much as you can, because nothing's worse than regretting that you didn't practice more. Another another pro tip here that I can give you is if your meeting is interactive, see if you can enlist somebody to help you identify and summarize questions that are coming in coming up in the room.
And help feed them to you. That way you can help respond to them as quickly as possible. This is where if you have a partner in crime, that'll be helpful. I'm not talking about planting somebody in the room. I'm talking about somebody is going to be there as part of you delivering the talk. Getting that support is invaluable.
The final step is. You want to close out and remind everyone why they were there. It's what you did, and this is what you defined in that second step. In this case, the reason why you were here is that you wanted to understand the steps that were necessary to be able to deliver a talk to a large audience.
And this is what we've just gone over.
