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Effective Presentations

All over the world thousands of business presentations are being given every minute of the day. Up and down the country, in offices, conference rooms and hotels, companies spend vast sums of money hiring rooms and projection equipment, employing staff, paying their expenses. The delegates spend their time and money attending these events. But how many of these presentations are effective? How many deliver the desired result? How many change the way people think?

While it is an absolute truth that you can’t influence all of the people all of the time, the sad fact is, that for many presentations, the result is a complete waste of time or even worse they have a negative affect on the delegates.

So how do you give an Effective Presentation? What makes the difference between an average presentation and an Effective Presentation?

The Main Components

There are five main components of a presentation:

o The Objective

o The Speaker

o The Room

o The Audience

o The Material

Think OSRAM, to help you to remember each of these components and consider each in turn to maximise the effectiveness of your presentation.

The Objective

What do you want the audience to do as a result of your presentation? This should be quantifiable and measurable. Remember to use a call to action at the end of you presentation to reinforce your objective.

The Speaker

Like it or not, you will be judged on your performance. So overcome any fear/nervousness or turn it to your advantage by using the energy generated by the adrenaline to add more power to your presentation.

The Room

Ensure you make the most of the physical environment. Keep it tidy and make sure everyone can see you and the screen (assuming you are using one) and can hear you clearly. Make sure that you know how to operate any equipment. Don’t forget to turn off your mobile and the screensaver on your laptop.

The Audience

Probably the most important part of any presentation. Without them you would be talking to yourself. You should know as much about them as possible: Who are they, how many of them are expected, what are they interested in, what do they want to hear, what is in it for them?

The Message

It is surprising how fast the time goes when you get up and start talking. In a 30 to 45 minute presentation you will only have the time to convey between three and five main points. So keep it simple! If you can’t state your central message in one or two sentences, you probably haven’t narrowed your topic enough, or clarified your thoughts enough.

1. Decide on three to five key points.

2. Develop supporting evidence for each key point. Include statistics, stories and examples.

3. Develop a strong introduction and powerful conclusion.

4. Use visual aids to help communicate your message.

5. Perform the presentation with enthusiasm, variety and passion.

OSRAM (Objective – Speaker – Room – Audience – Message)

Put them together correctly and you will turn on a light in people heads. Brighten up their lives. Get your audience to see and understand things, about which they were previously in the dark.

Welcome To The Age Of Partnering
Remember when every business used to view themselves as an island? This made life pretty simple for anyone doing sales negotiations – it was always us vs. them. Well, it sure looks like someone farther up the corporate ladder has been reading those business self-help books and they’ve decided that there is a better way to go about doing things: partnering.

Why Does Becoming A Partner Make Life So Difficult?
So just what is a partner? In simple terms (and it can get a lot more complicated if you let it), a partner is another company with which your company has decided to form a special, deeper, relationship. For a sales negotiator, this new type of relationship can complicate our lives immensely.

Before partnering came along, you had a great deal more latitude in how you conducted a negotiation: simply put, you really didn’t care that much about the other side of the table – you just wanted the best deal for your company. Partnering changes all of this.

The key here is to view a partnership as a bonding of two companies together (dare I say “marriage”? ) This is much different from a simple long-term partnership where you treat the other firm nicely, but you know that it’s not going to last (perhaps “dating” would be the right word here).

What Role Does Win-Win Negotiating Play In A Partnership?
One of the biggest changes that a partnership brings about in the life of a sales negotiator is the arrival (with a “thud”) of win-win negotiating. Instead of having the latitude to walk away from a deal with a partner, you’re pretty much expected to be able to reach an agreement with them. After all, they are a partner, right?

What this means is that the clever sales negotiator (you) now needs to use win-win negotiating techniques to find more things to negotiate about. The more discussion points that you can put on the table, the better your chances are that you’ll be able to craft a deal with your partner.

One important point that often gets overlooked when sales negotiators start to use win-win techniques with partners is that this does not mean that everything gets shared equally. Instead, what it really means is that everyone walks away feeling satisfied – one side may get 60% and the other may get 40%, but everyone feels as though they got what they needed.

Oh Yeah, That Power Thing
Power is a big part of any negotiation – who has it, how much of it they have, and how you can get more of it. You need to realize that just as in the fact that win-win deals don’t mean that everything is shared, the balance of power will always be unequal.

How much power you have often flows from how much information you have about the other side (your partner), and how much information they have about you. Since it’s a partnership, both of you will know more about each other than most parties involved in a standard negotiation would.

Since you know that you will be negotiating with your partner, as a sales negotiator you have a responsibility to make sure that others in your company don’t end up giving all of your negotiating power away. Sure openness is a good thing, but let’s not take it too far.

What All Of This Means For You
The role of a sales negotiator has become more complicated with the arrival of business partnerships. What use to be a relatively simple process of going into a negotiation with the goal of only improving your company’s position has now been changed.

In order to look out for a partner’s wellness during a negotiation, win-win techniques need to be used. This brings up more complicated issues surrounding what makes a deal fair for both parties and just how to make sure that you retain your negotiating power.

Business partnering is not going away. Sales negotiators need to accept this fact and adjust how we go about negotiating with this new type of opponent / adversary / other side of the table. If we can find ways to create deals that fully benefit both sides of the table both today and tomorrow, then we will have come to terms with the brave new world of partnerships.

Transformational Counseling is about assisting others to transform their life. Transformational Counseling is a process of assisting others to learn how to let go of the past and live fully in the present. To live fully in the present is to become awaken to what is truly real and to our own natural power. Much of our life is spent living in the past, and in the process, attempting to fix it, to make it something that it is or was not. It is from living in the past that we also attempt to create our future, the result always being a living of life as it was in the past. Transformation takes place when we learn to exist in and be present to the Now.

The practice of staying present to our natural power and to that which is real is becoming conscious to what is so, to the Now, to the present. What is so, the Now, has no meaning and exists outside of thought and language. As human beings we tend to give meaning to everything, including other people, ourselves and even life itself. It is in our meaning making that we leave the present and create our life from the past, a life that can be filled with a great deal of anxiety, fear and stress. What is so merely exists and it is in the experience of the Now that we begin to live a life of power and freedom, a life and way of being free from our past.

A specific technique that is very powerful for practicing staying present to the Now is meditation. It is in meditation that one creates the space to experience a very deep state of relaxation, a state that is very healing to both the mind and body. As we know, in meditation ones metabolism slows down, including heart rate and blood pressure. The consistent practice of meditation will reduce anxiety and stress. For some the practice of meditation allows them to access true Being. For others it is way of reconnecting to the Spirit within us. It is in the consistent practice of meditation that the subject and object distinction inherent in language, thought and meaning making collapses thereby resulting in our access to the present, to the Now.

The meditative process can be enhanced by the use of therapeutic relaxation music. Music has always been a very powerful modality for promoting a very deep state of relaxation and even healings. I have found that musical compositions that are harmonically slow, repetitious, with sustained voices, which are rhythmically, random in tempo assists an individual in experiencing a very deep state of relaxation. A second important component of the use of therapeutic relaxation music is the use of binaural audio tones that have been interwoven into the music. The binaural tones, through a process referred to as entrainment or frequency following, gently guides or directs the mind/body to generate more of the targeted frequency of brain wave activity for an even more profound state of relaxation.

The meditative process of practicing staying present to the Now is as follows:

1. Take a comfortable position in an upright sitting position.

2. Allow your legs and arms to be open.

3. Allow your eyes to focus upon a chosen object. The chosen object could be a candle light in a darkened room or any point that you choose.

4. As you focus on the chosen object, allow your muscles to slowly relax from the top of your head to the tips of your toes.

5. Take three slow deep breathes in through your nose as you inhale. Hold each breath to the mental count of four. Slowly exhale each breath out through your mouth. Continue to breath at a slow pace after the three breaths.

6. Continue to focus on the chosen object. When your mind wanders to some thought or thoughts slowly and gently bring it back to your focused concentration upon the chosen object. Simply let go of the thoughts that arise. The thoughts are from the past. Stay focused to what is so.

7. Continue the practice for a prescribed period of time and then go about your daily activities. Each day that you practice you may even choose to lengthen the time you spend with this technique.

The ability to stay in the present, to access the Now, can be enhanced with the consistent practice of meditation. What this will necessitate is one making the practice of meditation apart of his or her daily schedule. With the consistent practice of meditation one will also create the ability to stay even more present to what is so even when not actively engaged in the meditative process. It is through a commitment to the practice of meditation on a daily basis that one will begin to live more fully in the Now.

Harry Henshaw, Ed.D., LMHC

http://www.enhancedhealing.com