As a keynote speaker it is very crucial that you must smooth out the bumps of your presentation. One of the best way to tell if your presentation was successful is to pass out evaluation forms for your audience to rate you on how you did. Another thing you can do is to ask some of your audience members if they truly understood or absorbed the techniques and ideas that you taught them. The success of your presentation greatly depends on the feedback of the audience. A positive feedback from the audience would be that they will greatly anticipate the next part of your presentation while a negative feedback will cause some audience members to get easily bored or to walk out of the room. Here are a few ways that you can perfect your presentation.

Doing Heaps Of Research- If you wish to have a flawless presentation then do research about your clients company or about the topic they have provided beforehand. This is very important if you wish to relay to your audience several techniques and ideas about how to change their life and work strategies. To ensure that you cite the proper examples and present the right techniques to your audience then do some research and look into how to motivate these individuals into moving forward and implementing these new ideas and techniques into their daily rituals.

Preparing Your Presentation Beforehand- As the keynote speaker must always prepare your presentation a week or more before the actual date of the event. This is to ensure that you can fully review everything that you’ve prepared and thus you can make the necessary corrections before delivering it. You can also practice delivering your message so that you can memorize it by heart and present it with ease. Always remember to always be prepared and expect to make a couple of changes while presenting to flex your piece so that it will fit with your audience.

Getting To Know Your Audience- Observe your audience and see how they react to certain examples or topics that you present. You can immediately know if a person is interested or if a person is stubborn enough to listen to you by looking at their facial expressions. If their reaction to some topics or perhaps example shows concern and interest then you’re on the right track. You’ve hooked the crowd into understanding what you want them to understand. But if you can see their expressions has mixed feelings, boredom, or yawns then there is something wrong with your presentation. The audience is getting bored and is getting confused as to what to believe and what you are talking about.

Inserting Humor And Seat Exercises- Remember that when delivering your presentation, always insert a joke or two to let your audience know that your also know how to have fun. Just little jokes about how their bosses or about an employee that should get fired. Keep in mind to avoid racial and ethnic slurs that may offend some members of your audience.

One quality that sticks out to me as make or break in athletics and is common among all the greats is confidence. You never see someone win the gold medal at the Olympics who is timid or unsure of his or her abilities. It’s a quality that can truly take someone from good to great in anything. This goes for pitches and presentations too. Ever walk away from a speaker who moved or inspired you that wasn’t confident about their subject or their mastery of it?

Here are three tips to get you more confident before your next speech so you thrive next time you step in front a group of people.

Know your stuff: This would equate to having great fundamentals in sports. These are the things that are the foundation of your skill, and in your speech it is really as simple as knowing your topic well. Be familiar with the subject, so that you can answer questions, and be able to adjust in case something goes wrong. You’ll be more comfortable and your audience will sense it.

Practice: Pretty obvious, but I think it’s still important to point it out. You are never going to be confident giving a speech if the first time you present is in front of your audience for the real deal. No athlete competes without putting in hours at the gym or on the practice field first. Practice out loud, and try to practice it at least once in front of another person… dogs don’t count here. My goal is always to practice the full speech three times before the real one.

Posture: Someone in your life has probably told you to stand up straight or not to slouch; well for presenting they were dead right. This helps in two ways. The first is that it makes you look more confident to your audience, and that means they’ll be more receptive to your message and view you as the authority. The second is physiological. When you stand up straight and push your shoulders back your brain actually produces hormones that make you more confident and less stressed. It’s important during your presentation, but I would like to challenge you to practice it all day. I like to use doorways to remind myself. Every time I walk through a doorway I try to check my posture and correct it if I can.

There you have it, 3 easy ways to be more confident (or at least seem more confident) in your presentations and pitches. Know your stuff, practice your presentation 3 times, and practice good posture (hopefully all day).

Try them out for your next big speech and reap the rewards of a more powerful message.

Follow my instructions for one moment: I command you to: Sit down! I command you to Standup! If you want to standup you must do it in the present. Your physical power is only in the now. You cannot stand up in the past. You cannot stand up in the future. You can wish you could stand up a month ago. You can wish you could stand up yesterday. You can think about standing up tomorrow. But you can only physically stand up right now. This illustrates the point that you have no power to change anything in the past and you need not worry about the future. What you can do is change your thoughts about what has happened in the past. No one has the power to change your thoughts except for you. You can feel guilty, sad, and angry about past events, but none of those feelings will change your present. If you let those feeling overwhelm you, then they can paralyze your actions. But just as your thoughts can paralyze your actions, your thoughts have the ability to move you forward in the present.

You must decide that you are here now. The successful accomplishment of your dreams and goals requires acknowledging that you are now where you are. Accept that where you are now is ok, at least for now. Obviously you wouldn’t be reading if you didn’t want to change things about your life, but for now accept that you are here now and nothing can change what has gotten you here.

You hate your job
You are overweight
You are in a bad relationship or abusive relationship
You have a handicap.
You have no confidence.
You feel unattractive or unloved.
You are financially broke or are in debt.
You have problems with your children
You have problems with members of your family.
You have no true friends.
You have no job

All of the above can be make you feel overwhelmed, but it is where you are now. If you are a mountain climber, it is important to know that you must firmly place yourself in one place before you can begin to raise yourself to the next step. If you tried to climb while, looking down you will be overtaken with fear, If you try to climb by looking up, you will get overwhelmed with all that is ahead of you. You must only focus on where you currently are in order to move ahead. You don’t want to get stuck on the mountain of life. You will starve, get weak, and fall off. Learn to reach for the next ledge and pull yourself up on inch at a time.

It is OK to be upset or angry with your current situation, but only as a way to create you to make positive changes and change your current situation. You cannot feel sorry for yourself because the rest of the world does not care. The rest of the world has its own problems. Whenever you feel yourself caught up in the emotions of guilt, anger, and self-doubt, say to yourself. “I am here now, now what? “This does not determine where I will go or what I can be” Then pick a course of action to move your forward to the future that you want.