What kind of speaker are you?

It will help you to get the most out of this blog, if you have a clear picture in your mind of the kind of presenter you are now vs the FFF model I've introduced. In this next short piece I'd like to give you time to identify your current strengths and weaknesses in relation to the model and see the advantages of being able to develop a more flexible approach.

All of us, as experienced presenters, will tend to have our own preferences about how we prepare and give presentations. That's fine as long as we realise that our current strengths will take us only so far.

So What’s is Fit, Focus & Flair?

Fit:
Your presentation should be built with the needs of your audience at the front of your mind and in all of your preparations you should look to answer the following questions:

• What do they want/need to know?
• What don’t they want/need to know?
• How can you find out before you start to prepare?
  

Focus:

What is the very least that you can say on the subject in the simplest way and the shortest possible time? If as the research suggests, 8 hours after you have stopped talking, your audience will have forgotten 95% of what you said. The questions for you at the Focus stage are:

• Which 5% of everything you could tell them about your subject, do you want them to remember most?
• How can you deliver this message in the shortest possible time?

Flair:
You have a duty to inform and entertain the audience so flair will make the difference between “professional” and “exceptional”. Flair asks the presenter the following questions:

• What can you do to make the presentation as clear, logical and simple as possible, because simple, logical and clear is the first step to brilliance in a speaker…
• How can you make this clear, simple, logical presentation as memorable as you can? Because that’s the point of making your speech, to make an impression, to leave a lasting imprint, to help people to remember what you’ve said.

The model is a simple as the three stages we’ve described here. It is also far more complex and we’ll go onto explain it in more detail and give you real examples of how you can achieve more fit, focus and flair in your presentations over the next posts.