How to Give a Presentation Without Overstimulating Your Audience
There’s nothing worse than being bombarded with too much information at once. When you’re presenting, keeping your audience interested and engaged is more important than ever, but when you try to do too much, you end up overwhelming the audience—and turning them off to your message entirely. So how can you keep your audience interested without overstimulating them?
1. Stick to an Outline
One key tip for how to give a presentation without overstimulating your audience is to stick to an outline. Not only will doing so ensure that you stay on track with your message, but it’ll also help you manage your pacing and keep calm in front of everyone watching. A well-organized presentation should provide clear transitions between topics, making it easy for listeners to follow along as you speak.
2. Have an Interactive Excersice Ready
One of the best ways to help with overstimulation is not something you’d expect. It’s actually by using interactive exercises and activities in your presentation. After all, sitting for an hour and listening to someone talk can be overwhelming (not to mention boring), so it’s important to change up your presentation format in order to really hold your audience’s attention. Using quiz questions can help you find out if your message was clear enough. Or make use of the open ended questions where you can let your audience speak. Read more about all the different interactive question types.
3. Stay on Schedule
The adrenaline rush that comes with speaking in front of an audience can often make us run over-time, but there are a few ways we can avoid it. Otherwise people will start to lose interest and it will be harder for you to capture their attention. Start by planning your talk carefully and try not to get distracted.
4. Take Breaks
Make sure you take breaks. It may sound like a big contrast with the point mentioned above but take breaks every 5-10 minutes. This helps your audience stay awake and alert, if they’re getting tired of what you’re saying. In fact it’s proven that taking short 10 minute breaks every hour makes us more productive in our work.
5. Pay Attention To Body Language
An important thing to do is pay attention to body language—if people are fidgeting or checking their phones, it could be a sign they’re feeling overstimulated. If you notice signs of boredom or disinterest, stop talking and ask questions instead of continuing on with your speech. People will appreciate being asked for feedback as opposed to being lectured at for longer than they desire.
Robert Daverschot
Robert is a professional moderator, presenter and speaker coach. Robert has years of experience at home and abroad and works for a broad range of industries. He has interviewed ministers, captains of industry and even His Holiness the Dalai Lama. In his dealings with the audience, he always uses Sendsteps. With it, an audience is able to voice their opinions, whereby attendees can cast votes or send in comments to speakers and panels on stage. As such, events turn into lively dialogues with everyone being able to speak up!