WE’VE all been there. You’ve planned exactly what you want to say in your presentation and it sounds great – in your head at least.

But when it comes to the crunch and you’re standing in front of hundreds (or even dozens) of people, your breath shortens, panic sets in and the presentation is a disaster.

Fear not though as Simon Raybould, founder of communication training business Curved Theatre Company, is on hand to bring you his definitive guide to banishing your speech making fears.

“According to American research, death is the third biggest fear among Americans, bugs are the second and making public speeches is number one,” says Raybould.

And, judging by the increasing number of corporate UK clients turning to the Curved Theatre, the epidemic of presentation fear is the same on our side of the pond.

Raybould, who began studying communication when his father lost his voice box and voice to throat cancer, has acquired several heavyweight clients in the seven years since he launched his speech training business.

His list of corporate customers includes Tesco, Renault and Japanese construction giant Kajima Corporation. And, as well as doing numerous community projects, the semi-pro actor also works closely with schools giving voice training to teachers.

Join the communication master as he brings you his top 10 tips to making successful speeches.

1. Tune your speeches into what the audience needs to know.
For Raybould the biggest mistake made by people giving presentations is to misunderstand the purpose of them. He explains they are about telling the audience what they need to know, in the way they need to know it and not trying to impress the audience with your knowledge.
“As an example, I went to a meeting recently where a guy from a quango stood up and said ‘my quango is the first point of contact in the region for people who want to do x, y and z’. But in those 20 minutes he didn’t even tell us his phone number, email address or website,” he explains.
“What he did tell us about was the internal re-organisation his company was going through which the audience didn’t need to know.”
 
2. Write your speech before turning to PowerPoint.
The second biggest trap speech makers fall into is to assume they have to use PowerPoint, according to Raybould.
“I’m not saying PowerPoint is evil but it’s a tool that’s very easily misused,” he says.
The reason for his animosity towards the programme is people tend to design their PowerPoint slides first and then write a speech around them, which hinders the creativity process. “For the love of God don’t turn your computer on until the very last thing. Do the creative stuff first and then the PowerPoint.”

3. Be careful not to overuse props to liven up your speech.
He says: “Props are a two-edged sword. If you are confident in them then great but most people use them as a crutch. They hide behind the tool rather than remembering that the audience is there to hear and see them – the visual aid is not the reason for the presentation.”

4. Avoid bombarding the audience with facts and figures.
According to Raybould’s years of research on communication, an audience can only handle “three big ideas, five tops” during a 20 minute speech. “If you give the audience fact after fact they start to drown after about 30 seconds and they lose the big picture.
“Presentations are intended to talk about patterns so take the facts, analyse them yourself, then use the presentation to talk about the results of your analysis.” 

5. Keep slides as brief as possible.
Raybould believes people can read 10 times faster than they can listen to someone reading. It is for this reason he suggests keeping your slides simple otherwise people will be able to read the gist of the speech ahead of you and will be left waiting for you to catch up. “You just want a couple of key phrases on each slide,” he says.  

6. Beware the use of colour.
Since around 10% of the business community are colour blind, it’s a dangerous game to baffle the audience with an array of colourful graphs. “Red and green are a particular problem,” says Raybould. He believes the safest method is to use black on white as different projectors have different settings which can distort the way you represent your graphs.

7. Practice out loud.
“As a culture we are very inhibited so we go through presentations in our head. Don’t do this because first of all you won’t know how long it lasts and secondly there may be words or phrases that just sound naff when you say them out loud. For example, you may have four S’s in a row.”

8. Imagining the audience naked does not work.
While it may be a common technique to calm the nerves before a speech , Raybould believes it “belittles the audience,” when you should be taking them seriously as the speech is for their benefit. He recommends reminding yourself the audience wants you to succeed. “They don’t want you to fail because that would mean they’ve wasted their time,” he says.

9. Focus on your breathing to calm the nerves.
“When we get scared we start to breathe in our chest and that stimulates what’s called our vital flight reflex. The more shallow your breathing the more adrenaline you produce, the more you breathe up in your chest and then you start to sound short of breath. Remember to breathe low and down and out using your diaphragm, that will control the nerves to a huge extent.”

10. Get the audience warmed up.
In most presentations the speaker will throw a question or two into the audience in a vain attempt to get them involved. All too often, however, they are met with an awkward silence and a sea of blank faces. The best way to conquer this, according to Raybould, is to gradually warm the audience up.
“The trick to getting the audience involved is to start early with a closed question, something the audience doesn’t have to commit to.
“Ask for a show of hands in the first few minutes, then move on to ‘yes’ and ‘no’ answers and by the end they will be happy to answer open-ended questions,” he says.
At the question and answer session at the end of the presentation, it is often a good idea to have a question of your own prepared in your arsenal. Since the words “any questions?” often result in an eerily silent conference room complete with tumbleweed, it is advisable to be prepared.
‘Someone at my last meeting asked me if’ or ‘people often ask me’ are commonly used lines to cover up a lack of questions from the audience.