kepyourp.info

Presenting can be done in various ways. Most of the time speakers stand in front of an audience at an event in a convention center, facing a group of clients at their company’s conference room or addressing a crowd at their community center to give a few examples. The tools that we have at hand to improve our presentation skills normally focus on these situations. What if you have to present while being seated? This can happen at a small meeting e.g. delivering the quarterly results to your board members, having a sales meeting with one potential client, addressing a small interest group or perhaps your health or physical condition prevents you from standing. Check out the following tips to make an impact when you and your audience are seated.

1. Positioning yourself at the table

When you sit at a table (for instance to make a presentation to your board members), the upper part of the body is visible only. Realize that if you are a tall person that you loose the impact of your length. How can you compensate that?

- If possible sit at the head of the table to increase your visibility.

- Make visible eye contact with everyone around the table, let every single person in the room know that you see them. Call them by their names if appropriate during the meeting to strengthen the connection.

- Sit up straight, keep your back in a comfortable yet upright position.

- Keep your head up and avoid looking at the table.

- Focus on your breath, breathe slowly and deep in your belly. Imagine that the air is going through your body, down your belly, down your legs and feet into the floor. This will relax you and give you clarity of mind.

- Focus on your feet and make a conscious connection with the floor, this will ground you. Keep your legs next to each other and notice how solid this will make you feel. It will add power to your speech.

- Put your arms on the table to increase the solid position. You can leave your hands with the palms on the table or folded over each other, avoid the ‘prayer’ position (clasping your hands) or folding your fore arms as it will block your open position. It is OK if you alternate between all of these.

- Use your head, arms and hands to make gestures that support your speech.

- When you like to sit back in your chair, try not to appear too comfortable: don’t sag, keep your back as straight as possible, put your arms on the arm rests or relaxed in your lap if the chair has no arm rests. Relax but show that you are alert.

- Your emotions will be picked up easily when people are sitting close. Use your facial expressions adequately: smile and express your enthusiasm. Be sincere and do not hide your feelings but balance the way you express them because they will have a larger impact then addressing a huge room full of people.

2. Focusing on your voice

When you present ‘up-close and personal’ in a small group at the table, you need to be aware that your voice has a huge impact. You will most likely speak without a microphone and sometimes without visual aids so you need to pay special attention that you will be heard and your audience can follow you:

- Speak slowly but not too slow.

- Speak clearly but not too loud.

- Articulate well and use tone variations.

- Pause and renew eye contact.

- Breathe into your belly to relax yourself and support your voice

- Use the right words e.g. include metaphors and describe images that people can relate to. This will support the audience to follow your story.

3. The use of visual aids

When you deliver a presentation at a table you can use visual aids to add structure and focus to your speech. Pay attention to the following:

- If you use a laptop: make sure you don’t hide behind it, it should not block your upper body.

- Put some key points on a flip chart or white board and stand up now and then to address the key messages or to point where you are in your story. This will make the presentation more lively.

- When you don’t use a flip chart or white board, you can use notes or distribute your presentation as a supplement to the agenda. Stay aware that people might be distracted by these papers. They will read them, check them to follow your line of thought. Don’t look at the papers too much yourself, you will loose eye contact. A pause in your speech will usually draw them back to you.

- When you use PowerPoint slides on a screen then you should stand to create a connection with the audience and not sit down while everyone is facing the screen. A connection is made with people not slides. If you can’t stand, sit next to the screen to make yourself visible.

Next time when you have a meeting or presentation use a few of these suggestions and when people take their seats you know that you will have an impact even if you are not the ‘chair’!

In financial terms, the Present Value refers to the total amount that a series of future payments is worth at the present time. To calculate this value, you use the PV function which returns the present value of an investment.

Syntax of the PV function is as follows:

=PV(rate,nper,pmt,[fv],[type])

Rate refers to the interest rate per period, usually per annum. For example, if you invest in a fund, such as an education fund for your kids and the fund pays 10 percent annual interest rate with monthly payments, your interest rate per month is 10%/12, or 0.83%. You would enter 0.83%, or 0.0083, into the formula as the rate.

Nper is the total number of payment periods in an annuity. For example, if investment is over a 10 year period, and makes monthly payments, your investment has 10*12 (or 120) periods. Then enter 120 into the formula for nper.

Pmt is the fixed contribution payment you need to make each period. This amount cannot change over the life of the investment. If pmt is omitted, you must include the fv argument.

The fv and type arguments are optional arguments in the function (indicated by the square brackets). The fv argument is the future value or balance that you want to have after making your last payment. If this value is omitted, Excel assumes a future value of zero (0).

The type argument indicates whether the payment is made at the beginning or end of the period: Enter 0 (or omit the type argument) when the payment is made at the end of the period and use 1 when it is made at the beginning of the period.

Let’s assume you have the followings:

Interest Rate (Rate) is 10%

Total number of payment periods (nper) is 10 years or 12*10

Fixed contribution payment you need to make is $500 per month.

Then the formula would look like:

=PV(10%/12,10*12,500,,0)

And it produces a result of -$37,835.58

Excel produces a negative result because it represents money that you would pay, an outgoing cash flow.

What the result means is that if you’re asked to pay an up-front amount that is less that the present value, it’s a good deal. If this up-front amount is more than the present value, you should choose to pay an annuity or a series of payment. This is because the present value of the annuity, -$37,835.58 in this case, is less than what you are asked to pay.

Let’s look at another example and say you’re purchasing a vehicle. You have 2 choices to finance your purchase. You can either pay up-front which cost you $20,000. You can also finance the purchase of your car by paying $400 per month for 5 years at an interest rate of 10%.

To compare the true cost of this purchase, you need to compare the present value of the monthly payments to the $20,000 you would pay today. The formula in this case would look like:

=PV(10%/12,5*12,400,,0)

Which gives a result of -$18,826.15

This means paying $400 per month for 5 years is a better deal as you would be $1,173.85 ($20,000 – $18,826.15) better off.

Presentation skills are very important in organizations and leaders make presentations all the time to board members, employees, community leaders, groups of customers, etc. It is possible to make or break an organization from a presentation and so top leadership should strive to have the best presentation skills.

List and prioritize goals

Listing and prioritizing the top goals that you want to accomplish with your audience is the most important of all presentation skills. You may think you know what you want to accomplish or what you want to say in your presentation, but if you’re not clear with yourself and others, it is very easy for your audience to completely miss the point of your presentation.

Be clear

Being clear about who your audience is and about why is it important for them to be in the meeting is important since members of your audience always want to know right away why they were the ones chosen to be in the presentation. You should therefore make sure that your presentation makes this clear to them from the start.

Design openings and closings

This is one of the most neglected of the important presentation skills. The presenter should design a brief opening, about 5% to 10% of the total time presentation time, to present goals for the presentation, clarify the benefits of the presentation and to explain the overall layout of the presentation. A closing should also be designed and it should also be about 5% to 10% of the total time presentation time, covering a summary of all key points from the presentation.

Keep time

This is one of the most important of the negotiation skills, but many people think that the longer their presentation takes the more its effect will be. Well, this is not so because people often get tired when a presentation goes on for longer than they had expected.

Effective delivery

Effective delivery means that you observe presentation skills such as maintaining eye contact with the audience so that they can feel like you are talking to them personally, varying the speech to prevent monotony and making sure that the audience doesn’t notice you looking at your notes for too long.

Other presentation skills include setting a clear tone such as hopefulness or teamwork among others from the onset and setting aside a Q&A session after the presentation.