Breaking the Patterns. Engage your audience when you present

Venice Chairs, One of my luckiest shots, right time, right place

When you break patterns - you bring relief from boredom. When you bring your real self instead of being a "presenter" and you can connect with the audience you bring a sense of vitality. I often ask in my classes "how many interesting presentations have you been to?" - the answer is usually less than ten in their whole lives!

So what are you going to do to break your patterns and bring life to the audience?

some ideas to help you:

tell a story at the beginning that pulls people in - don't start with a company history

• make it personal, allow some vulnerability - talk about your biggest mistake perhaps and what you learnt from it

• involve the audience more

• move into the audience

• get the audience to do an exercise

• finish well and on time or even earlier

• don't do a presentation - have a conversation instead. Presentations are not necessarily the best way to discuss an idea. They might be a good way to introduce an idea. So the point below

• or do a very short presentation and invite discussion

• ask the audience to pair up and discuss an issue

• ask them questions and have the patience to wait for an answer

• allow silence so that audiences can think about what you are saying

• take a risk and do something very different

• don't use a slide when you can use dinner plate! The giant squid has eyes the size of dinner plates. So pick up a pair of dinner plates and hold them up to your face - that's the size of their eyes. No one will ever forget that.

• bring your statistics/numbers into the real world. The sea of cermaic poppies at the Tower of London was a stark way of showing you how many soldiers had died in the great war. Saying a network handles 40 gig a minute doesn't mean much but if you say " you can download 15 HD Hollywood Blockbuster films in 3 minutes with this new system" gives you a better idea of the new system.

note about the photograph This was amazing luck to find this scene in my camera lens. Although this picture looks calm and elegant - I actually took whilst Venetian Church bells were ringing 10 foot from my ears. It was taken on film and I only had two shots left when I saw it. AND no extra film. Before I had a digital cameras!