There’s a very easy and powerful way to self-assess your presentation skills. It can be very difficult at the same time. Let me explain.
Last week, I shared important best practices for preparing to be great when you deliver your presentations. Now that you’re prepared, it’s simple to assess your performance. Record yourself. Record using your video conferencing app or set up your phone or camera to record the video and audio.
Then watch it and listen to it. Separately.
Watch it without the audio so you can see if you have any physical mannerisms that are distracting: your posture, the way you move your head, how you use your hands, off-putting facial expressions. Then listen to it without the video. This will tell you if you have any vocal characteristics to be concerned about: low energy, speaking too fast, excessive filler words such as uh, um, right.
This can be the difficult. It’s hard for some people to watch and listen to themselves. We neither look nor sound like we think we do. It’s jarring, at first. I was a television news anchor in a previous life and watched my performance every day so I could improve. But it took a while to get comfortable watching myself. I had a co-anchor for many years who never watched herself because it made her so uncomfortable. A senior executive I coached for many years couldn’t watch himself. If you can make it past the discomfort, it’s an extremely valuable exercise.
I also encourage you to solicit feedback from audience members. That’s very helpful too but, in my experience, they’re never as tough on us as we are on ourselves. Watch and listen to yourself, take notes, work on improving one thing at a time. Before you know it, your presentation delivery will improve significantly and you will learn to enjoy hearing and seeing that person presenting to you.