If the mention of presentations on your syllabus makes your heart race and palms sweat, fear not! This blog is here to guide you through some effective presentation skills and share some tips to boost your confidence. With these strategies, you’ll be able to handle all future presentations with ease and success.
Effective Presentation Skills
-
Communication
Communication means how you deliver your message and how your audience receives your presentation. Speaking clearly and confidently shows good communication with your audience while ensuring your presentation is properly conveyed.
-
Body language
Posture, eye contact, hand gestures, and facial expressions are all components of body language. Your body language has the power to transform your presentation and convey a confidence you might not yet feel.
-
Voice projection
Projecting your voice allows your audience to properly hear your presentation. The way you project your voice can make your presentation more engaging, and the way to do this is by standing with your shoulders back and enunciating your words.
-
Posture
Slouching and looking tense sets a bad tone for your presentation. Positioning yourself confidently with your back straight helps you to remain open while taking the formality of the presentation into account.
-
Understand your audience
Understanding your audience means understanding their needs and interests so you can base your presentation around them. This will allow you to make your presentation more engaging and easier to understand.
How to Boost Your Confidence
-
Develop strategies
Some strategies you can develop to help your presentation confidence include grounding yourself, practicing your presentation, and deep-breathing exercises.
-
Breathing techniques
Breathing techniques can help ease anxiety and get rid of any pre-presentation nervousness. Taking deep breaths beforehand and maintaining a smooth cadence during your presentation will help increase confidence.
-
Note cards
Writing a script or having some talking points prepared on note cards can help you feel more prepared for your presentation and help you avoid potential awkward pauses.
Be sure to also check out the library’s soft skills guide! This guide has great information and resources related to communication, creativity, and positive attitudes, all of which play a part in presentations.
Coursera Staff. (2024, January 30). What are effective presentation skills (and how to improve them). https://www.coursera.org/articles/presentation-skills
Did you know that the South College Library provides students, faculty, and staff access to over 100,000 eBooks? Find eBooks related to your academic studies, personal interests, and self-improvement. Do you enjoy reading fiction books? The library’s collection includes novels, collections of short stories, and poetry too.
Rethinking Diabetes by Emily Mendenhall
In Rethinking Diabetes, Emily Mendenhall investigates how global and local factors transform how diabetes is perceived, experienced, and embodied from place to place. Mendenhall argues that the link between sugar and diabetes overshadows the ways in which underlying biological processes linking hunger, oppression, trauma, unbridled stress, and chronic mental distress produce diabetes. The life history narratives in the book show how deeply embedded these factors are in the ways diabetes is experienced and (re)produced among poor communities around the world.
Breathe Easy by Donald Mahler
Most people don't think about breathing; it is an automatic, unconscious act. However, the majority of those with asthma (26 million Americans); chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD (24 million Americans); or interstitial lung disease (1–2 million Americans) are aware of their shortness of breath because it interferes with work or other daily activities. As a result, these individuals seek medical attention for diagnosis and treatment. Breathe Easy, written by a pulmonologist, explains what constitutes normal breathing, what causes someone to feel short of breath, and what can be done to improve one's breathing. In chapters on asthma, COPD, and interstitial lung disease, Dr. Donald A. Mahler addresses the origins and treatments of these conditions and offers advice for both standard and alternative therapies to breathe easy. Other chapters describe how we breathe, how to understand respiratory difficulties like chronic shortness of breath, the correct use of inhalers, the effects of aging on the brain and body, and the benefits of exercise. His final chapter provides valuable advice about traveling with oxygen. Illustrated with over fifty enlightening medical graphics, Breathe Easy offers a complete and compact guide for the millions of Americans who are limited by their breathing.
Small Engines
This updated edition of the best-selling Small Engines and Power Equipment is more than a simple engine repair manual. Designed for beginners with little or no mechanical experience, this book is a graphically appealing, step-by-step guide that covers the most important engine maintenance and repair skills you'll need to keep your equipment running at peak performance. It also shows exactly how to perform mechanical upkeep and repairs on the most common outdoor power implements. With new and improved content for today's motorized equipment, this DIY bible includes engine and mechanical repair plus maintenance instruction for all your outdoor power equipment, including lawn mowers, snow blowers, chain saws, power washers, generators, leaf blowers, rototillers, wood splitters, lawn edgers, and weed whips.
Pride Parades by Katherine McFarland Bruce
On June 28, 1970, two thousand gay and lesbian activists in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago paraded down the streets of their cities in a new kind of social protest, one marked by celebration, fun, and unashamed declaration of a stigmatized identity. Forty-five years later, over six million people annually participate in 115 Pride parades across the United States. They march with church congregations and college gay-straight alliance groups, perform dance routines and marching band numbers, and gather with friends to cheer from the sidelines. With vivid imagery, and showcasing the voices of these participants, Pride Parades tells the story of Pride from its beginning in 1970 to 2010. Though often dismissed as frivolous spectacles, the author builds a convincing case for the importance of Pride parades as cultural protests at the heart of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.
What is Tai Chi? by Peter Gilligan
This book grew out of a question one of the author's students asked. The answer proved to be longer than either teacher or student could have anticipated. As he looks at the complex art of ‘Tai Chi', the author answers questions such as why, unlike in other martial arts, ‘Tai Chi’ has no gradings; how hard you should try; and how to make the most of your teacher. A wide range of material is covered, including fundamental points about the mechanics of movement and the energetic aspects of practice, as well as the relationship between body, mind and spirit that emerges. This insightful book covers all aspects of 'Tai Chi', answering questions that are beyond the scope of many classes.
Kitchen Chemistry by Cynthia Light Brown
Bring chemistry to your kitchen with a book that offers hands-on science activities that can be done with ingredients from your pantry and the refrigerator! What's going on when you cook in the kitchen? Science! In Kitchen Chemistry: Cool Crystals, Rockin’ Reactions, and Magical Mixtures with Hands-On Science Activities, readers ages 9 to 12 discover that the cooking, mixing, and measuring you do in the kitchen all has its roots deep in science—chemistry to be exact! Starting with an exploration of atoms and molecules and how they make up the world, Kitchen Chemistry goes on to discuss mixtures, reactions, states of matter, solutions, and more! By using familiar scenarios such as boiling water, baking cookies, and creating slime, kids make text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections that deepen their understanding of the world around us and the connection to chemistry to be found in every area of life.