
Presentation skills in SA: afraid of the audience
Presentation skills in SA play a big role to address the problem of presenters being afraid of the audience. So, the first step in acquiring speaking skills is to stop being afraid of the audience and start adoring them. One must understand that the audience has, after all, taken the trouble of coming to your lecture, surely to listen to you and most certainly not to execute you with their cold stares. Once this fear of audience vanishes, acquiring presentation skills in SA suddenly becomes that much easier. This however is not to suggest that a presenter should take the audience lightly. On the contrary, one should rehearse repeatedly till the perfect pitch, diction and pauses are completely under control. Moreover, the presenter should be ready with a more than one way of presenting the topic. The biggest plus point of a presenter is an ability to rightly gauge the mood of the audience. If the audience is already bored by a flurry of weighty presentations and eagerly awaiting the lunch break, the speaker must immediately cook up a few funny anecdotes or remarks to jazz up the atmosphere. The basic tenet of presentation skills in SA and communication skills is to arrest the attention of the audience and that has to be achieved at any cost! So, no matter how very serious your presentation is or how much care you have to taken to stuff it up with relevant details it would do you no harm if you be a little less serious as you start off your speech. So, gauge the mood of your audience and modify your presentation accordingly, Heavens will not come crashing down if you have to prune your speech a bit if circumstances dictate you to do so, since the final test of presentation skills in SA lies in how well you have bonded with the audience.

