Competence in presentation skills is a definite asset. Not only will these skills help you advance as an employee (great presentations help win deals!) they’re also a reliable source of steady income as a freelancer. Indeed, many today who need something extra aside from their regular 9 to 5 job, find moonlighting as a speaker a great way to make ends meet.

If you want to be a great presenter, and consequently get that speaking career off the ground, what are the presentation skills that you should master?

Content Design

Delivering a talk begins with designing a great program or speech. If you’re presenting a learning workshop, you would need to ground your presentation on the learning objectives of the course or training program. If you’re delivering short keynote speeches, you would need to anchor your speech on an overarching theme or central message. A speaker able to structure their speeches strategically are more effective in reaching their audience.

Designing great content relies on two sub skills: research and critical thinking. If you want your audience to leave the auditorium feeling like they spent their time well, make sure you share something useful in your talk. You can prepare quality content by researching books, academic journals and formal company literature; or you may draw from your experience or ability to dissect ideas. Critical thinking helps you lay your ideas with logical flow in mind.

Public Speaking Skills

Content design is for behind the scenes, but what about presentation skills for the day of the talk itself? To deliver a talk effectively, you would need to be a good communicator. Start with the clarity of your verbal communication; make sure you know how to project your voice well, enunciate properly, and vary the inflection in your voice so that you don’t sound monotonous. Non-verbal presentation skills are also critical; you must be able to exude confidence as you talk.

Public Speaking presentation skills also involve effective use of presentation aids, such as audio-visual aids, hand-outs and even actual samples for the audience’s review. These aids should enhance a presentation, and illustrate concepts and ideas that can’t be effectively described by merely using words. Care must be given so that they don’t distract your audience from what you are saying.

Facilitation Skills

If you have the opportunity, it’s great to make your presentation interactive. You can ask the audience some guide questions, solicit their ideas, or constantly verify understanding of what you are discussing. All these require facilitation skills. Facilitation skills include, but is not limited to, encouraging audience involvement, linking similar responses, brainstorming techniques, and throwing back questions to the group. A speaker who can not just deliver talks, but actually facilitate a group-centered discussion is a more dynamic speaker.

Evaluation Skills

Lastly, if you want to hone your presentation skills, you must know how to gather and use feedback. Evaluation is usually a neglected aspect of the presentation giving process, but it’s critical to not just a program’s growth, but the speakers’ as well. Handing out evaluation questionnaires, soliciting the opinion of randomly selected audience members, and getting peers to critique a presentation are just some of the ways speakers can evaluate their work.

I personally don’t think most real estate investors should bother trying to negotiate Short Sales themselves. Frankly, it’s just too time-consuming for most people and the stress of being put on hold and arguing with the banks’ loss-mitigation people is just too distracting to your overall business. You’re probably much better off finding a service provider who can negotiate on your behalf for a fee.

But if you ARE convinced you want to negotiate your own Short Sales, you definitely want to pay attention to the story I’m about to tell you: “ARE YOU NUTS?!”

That’s what I heard a professional Short Sale negotiators scream into the phone recently. Yep, that’s a direct quote. I don’t advise doing this often and certainly only if you are a skilled negotiator with experience – but sometimes it does actually pay to “flip out and lose it” on the phone. But hold on before you go throw a gasket. When you do this, it should be a conscious and purposeful negotiating decision – NOT because you are just upset and need to blow off steam.

Skilled negotiators manipulate their own STYLE and STRATEGY. You can be strategically adversarial and stylistically cooperatives OR sometimes your style needs to shift to something… shall we say, more combative. However, those shifts into yelling and screaming are the stylistic and purposeful CHOICES of a skilled negotiator. When I heard this negotiator yelling “are you nuts!!” at a lender, I knew he was allowing himself to “get upset,” but I also knew that he wasn’t really upset.

He was making the choice in his negotiation plan that “getting upset” was necessary in order to accomplish a certain outcome. It’s all part of what it is to be a skilled and experience negotiator – they keep their cool, even when it appears that they’ve lost it!

How many conferences and events have you been to where you have been preached at by someone in a pinstripe suit, drowning you with countless volumes of PowerPoint slides? Most people that stand up at a conference are brilliant at what they do – they are truly experts in their field and have more knowledge than they could be possibly share with you the audience in half a lifetime, let alone their current allocated time slot. Many (not all) of these speakers haven’t got a clue about engaging and connecting with you and as a result they are totally forgettable. When asked afterwards who you remember, the chances are the most you’ll remember will be the fact that they all wore pinstripes.

When I started speaking publicly I was what I call a competent corporate presenter – meaning I had a strong voice, spoke with authority and got my message across in an effective and professional’ manner. I use the word ‘professional’ here in an ironic way, as I believed that I was presenting professionally because I looked and sounded the part – I wore the corporate mask of professionalism. I had a serious tone to my voice, had plenty of facts to pass on and had a grown up expression on my face.

Therein lies the issue – the Corporate Mask – this is where professional people stand on stage and present as they have been conditioned to do so, having seen colleagues and peers get ‘through it’ by using “Pinstripes @ PowerPoint”.

By contrast the memorable presenters and speakers are having fun, they are enjoying themselves and are carrying the audience with them. Hiding behind vast reams of data, facts and statistics does not connect with the audience – however telling stories that relate to the important messages, reinforce the message and potentially inject some levity into the room will make most speeches and speakers memorable.

You can use Google to get some top tips for using PowerPoint – my strong advice is to avoid using PowerPoint at all. If there are any acts and figures then use a hand out afterwards to remind everyone of the key points mentioned. Nearly all presenters and speakers that use PowerPoint are guided by the slides, thereby making their speeches stilted and lacking in flow – without it they become more natural and expert in their delivery.

Also, why is it that when someone delivers wearing the “corporate mask” you rarely see them smile? Is it because smiling doesn’t look professional and serious? Yet without a smile on stage the presenters look grumpy and angry, as though they do not want to be there. Try using some simple anchoring techniques and positive associations in the mind to make you smile more. There are many tricks you can play on yourself whilst presenting that are not visible to the audience but will make you feel relaxed and smile – I’ll let your imagination go wild now as these triggers need to be personal and have a positive effect on you.

Pinstripes & PowerPoint with a grumpy looking face will turn off the audience before you have even opened your mouth. Start with a smile, warm up before you go out, have loads of energy and speak from the heart not from the head, this will make you truly memorable for all the right reasons.