How to Prepare for a Big Presentation

Do you have an important presentation coming up?

Writing a good presentation can be challenging, especially if you have a fear of public speaking. When you’re nervous about speaking in public, there’s a tendency to over prepare. Meaning you might feel the need to write and remember every word.

However, a presentation is not a memory test. Scripting out every word increases the pressure to get each sentence perfectly right. In turn, this increases your stress levels—something to avoid when you already feel nervous about public speaking!

In this blog, I’ll share my top tips for how to prepare for a big presentation.

How not to prepare for a presentation

Script everything out
Memorise it
Try to recite it word for word

Instead, here’s what I do to prepare for a big presentation.

Create an outline
Know how you’ll start and end
Practice out loud

The result: confident, relatable, authentic.

Here are 5 steps to a great presentation

1. Define your purpose and audience

Before you start writing, it’s important to know who your audience is and what you want to achieve.

Who is in your audience?
What do you know about them?
What information might they want?
What are their interests and priorities?
What action do you want them to take afterwards?

This might require some research and potentially reaching out to some audience members in advance.

Then, you will want to think about what you want to achieve on two levels.

How do you want to come across (e.g. calm, confident, professional, relaxed etc)
What is the main point of your presentation? What do you want to achieve?

2. Create an outline

A good presentation should have a clear and logical structure to make it easy for your audience to follow.

Introduction
Body
Conclusion

Create an outline that covers the main points you want to make, to achieve your goal, and organise them logically. I always prepare an attention-grabbing start and know exactly how I’m going to end the session. But, I let the bit in the middle flow. I have an outline of what I want to cover but I don’t overly script it. Having an outline helps you sound more natural, relatable, and authentic compared to reciting something word for word. Use clear, simple, and concise language that your audience can easily understand. And avoid jargon or overly technical terms that might confuse some people.

3. Use visuals to capture the audience’s attention

Research shows that 46% of people can’t sit through a presentation without losing focus! So, you need to pull out all the stops to hold their attention.

Visuals can help convey your message and make your presentation more engaging. I like to use interesting and thought-provoking images (great free images can be found on Unsplash and Canva).

Avoid overpacking slides with words. When you’re nervous of public speaking you might be tempted to put everything you plan to say on your slides? Then if you freeze it’s a safety blanket. But I think this can make you rely too much on the slides.

The worst practice is reading directly from them – you don’t need to do that! (you may as well just send out the slides). Instead, use slides with one or two bullet points or even a single compelling image to grab the audience’s attention.

Want to explore audience capturing designs? 20 presentation ideas that will inspire you is on Canva (my go-to design site!).

4. Practice your delivery (but don’t over practice)

Practice your presentation out loud several times before delivering it to your audience. If possible, practice in front of a small audience, such as friends or family.

Plan ahead how to handle questions from the audience. Will you take them at the end or introduce checkpoints for questions? Deciding this in advance can help manage unexpected interruptions. But remember, the aim here is not to learn the presentation word for word!

Confident, impactful presenters are not perfect presenters (there is no such thing!)

5. Leave your audience with an emotion

People remember how you make them feel. So, how do you want your audience to feel?

Determine the emotion you want and what your call to action is. Be clear about what you want your audience to do as a result of your presentation. Is there a tangible action you want them to take? Or do you want them to further explore your topic? People should be left in no doubt what you want them to do next.

So, in conclusion, these are my 5 steps to help you prepare for that presentation. Try them next time you have a big presentation and let me know how it goes!

Why do I always get nervous when public speaking?

Check out this blog post. I’ll help you understand some of the reasons why you might feel nervous when talking in public and what you can do about it.

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