Ace Your Presentation Skills and Raise Your Visibility

I want to talk about presentation skills and visibility. 

As you're positioning yourself and elevating your career, two important things to consider are your presentation skills and your visibility. 

And by raising your visibility it can be anywhere - whether that's raising your visibility at work, whether it's raising your visibility in your industry or in other industries, or whether it's raising your visibility through your online presence or through networking. It’s all part of you positioning yourself.

It's important to start thinking about this because here's where you want to start becoming known for your skills and your talent - when you start raising your visibility and start uplifting your presentation skills and become known as a confident presenter, or as someone who can help someone else with your skills and talents, which is how you get referred around. 

Some of the ways you can look at to raise your presentation skills and raise your visibility is, besides plenty of other resources, is on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn learning is one place where they have a bunch of courses on presentation skills.

The great thing about that is if you're doing your studies on LinkedIn - you are active on LinkedIn - which further means, being active on a platform simply keeps ranking you better as the algorithms work to rank you up.

And so my recommendation is that you have a look at some of the LinkedIn learning courses on presentation skills and start working your way through some of that.

You know, if you have a paid LinkedIn account where you can get some free learning, why not?

There's a host of presentation skills on YouTube, another free resource, and there’s other places like Udemy and you can go through organizations like the Australian Institute of Management. There’s no shortage of places and sources offering presentation skills courses which can help you uplift and elevate your presentation skills.

The other thing I want to say about presentation skills is you only get better with practice. So it's kind of like the interviews skills I spoke about when we spoke about interviews and, you know, acing interviews.

Very similar - practice, practice, practice.

Talk to the dog, do a presentation to the dog, talk to your family – practice how you want to present on certain topics.

Record yourself, study your body language as you speak, all of those things, you know, study your body language. See where you need to uplift your skills and where you already look great and see if you're comfortable engaging with a camera?

All of those things, when you're working on getting better and better at presentation skills, watch others. Attend the town halls at our places of work, or even when you attend online presentations or zoom calls, watch how senior management or other managers are presenting. Listen to the language they use, watch how comfortable they are on camera.

Notice if they are actually remembering to hold eye contact with the camera – and of course we can glance down. I glance down when I'm presenting to my notes and things like that. But you know, always remember to lift up your face and to actually make contact with the camera, with your eyes.

TED talks are a great source for watching others present. There are a gazillion of them, a gazillion TED talks you can see for free where people have spent countless hours perfecting their pitch. So have a look at some of those. Many of them are anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes long so they're not that long.

And then the thing that you can do personally, to start practicing your presentation skills. Speak up at your meetings, speak up at work meetings, you know, ask questions, be curious, simply asking a question will often always lead to someone else having to talk more than you, because then they are answering the question.

And watch how people answer questions, watch the good ones and notice how they speak, how they use their hands, how they stand or sit or how they change the tone of their voice. It all matters and it all takes practice.

So if you have a skill that you know you're particularly good at – something that other people could benefit from learning – why don't you hold a training session? Stand up in front of your colleagues and conduct a training session on a particular skill that you might be known for? It's a great way to build the presentation skills and it's a great way to become more visible.

Because….

To progress in your career – you must become more visible.

It’s not always comfortable – and it’s not always easy – so start small. 

One of the things I've started doing over the last years is conducting interviews, doing interviews with other people, talking at summits, doing podcasts with people and anywhere I can add value. It's all about raising visibility and also getting more and more comfortable with my presentation skills because it's not something we never perfect.

We all have our moments of nervousness. We stumble over our words. You probably noticed me stumble over words in the various videos that I've presented, but you know what, that's okay. You want to be natural in your presentation. You want to, you, you, you want to show the human side.

You want to show that, you know, you can stumble, but you can still keep going.

That's the whole idea.

So simply practice and look at ways that you can elevate your presentation skills. I'm giving you a couple of resources to consider and practice, practice, practice.

And that's how you also sometimes land the higher paying jobs and land the referrals for really great companies.

So best of luck, keep practicing, filming, studying your videos, just do it like Nike says, just do it - over and over - you'll get better and better as you do it over and over.