One statement I often hear from clients is: “I do fine when I know what I’m taking about. It’s when I have to present material I don’t know well that I get nervous.”
There’s a good reason for that, and a caution, as well. When you know your material well, when you are an expert, you can inhabit your content. You don’t struggle to remember what to say next because you have lots of options. You are at ease with your presentation. You can move around in the material as you would in a fluid conversation, and it feels easy because you’re confident that you know what you’re talking about.
The opposite of this happens when we don’t know our content well, and we’re reliant on our memory, notes, or slides to get us from one point to the next. Since we’re not comfortable with the content, we don’t have any choices when we finish one thought—we have to come up with the next one we wrote down, or we’re out of things to say.
This means we don’t really know the content well enough to be presenting it. When I’ve seen speakers do this, it always has the feeling of a middle schooler doing a report in front of the class about a topic they read two articles and a Wikipedia page about.
What gives us confidence as speakers is the knowledge that we have something to share with the audience that they wouldn’t know otherwise.
Have a presentation coming up? Let us help you build that confidence!
