Presentation skills were the topic of my 2014 session at SQL Bangalore, Performing an Effective Presentation. It was a soft skill session, not a session about SQL Server. What follows is a recap of the evening, then the presentation skills from it that still hold today.
An Evening With the SQL Bangalore Community on May 3, 2014
SQL Bangalore is a SQL user group, and everything SQL gets discussed there. That month had a SQL Server 2014 theme, with a community launch of the release. The speakers were strong, and each one did justice to the subject. If you were in Bangalore and missed it, you missed a good evening.
SQL Bangalore user group audience
More than 250 people showed up. I enjoyed the sessions of Amit Banerjee, Balmukund Lakhani and Vinod Kumar. You can read the announcement of my session in the earlier post on this blog.
The photographers at the event
What the Session Covered
This session was about speaking, so I told a story from my life. I talked about who inspired me and how I learned to speak in public. I told stories about two legends who inspired me. The session was not recorded, so the slides and the lessons below stand in for it.
Pinal Dave presenting at the SQL Bangalore user group
These four slides use pictures and a few words. One is titled Story Time. Slides like these invite the audience to look at the speaker, not read.
A story needs characters, and a cartoon is enough. Three friends on a slide set up a story faster than a paragraph of text can. The audience sees who the story is about before the speaker says a word.
Another slide reads Exercise. Giving the audience a task is one of the quickest ways to wake up a hall after a long day.
The last slide here is only pictures: eleven monkey faces and no text. A slide like that gives the audience something to look at without competing with the speaker.
Presentation Skills That Still Hold
Technology changes every year. The way an audience listens doesn't. These habits hold in a Bangalore hall and in a video call alike.
Start with one message. Write it as a single sentence before you open a slide deck. Every slide either supports that sentence or goes. A talk with five messages leaves the audience with none.
Tell a story. A story gives people something to carry out of the room. Facts fade by the time the audience reaches the parking lot. A clear story about a problem and its fix stays. Keep the story true and keep it short.
Use few words on a slide. If the audience reads your slide, they stop listening to you. Put the detail in your voice and the picture on the screen. Slides that need a long caption belong in a handout.
Practice out loud. Reading your notes silently doesn't count. Say the talk once with a timer. You will find the slide that takes too long and the sentence you can't say. Cut both.
Give the audience something to do. An exercise, a question or a show of hands wakes a room up. People remember what they did.
Slow down. Nerves make speakers fast. A pause after a key point feels long to you and feels natural to the audience. Take a breath before each new idea.
Repeat the question. When someone asks a question, say it again before you answer. The rest of the room hears it, and you get a few seconds to think.
Why Soft Skills at a Technical Meetup?
You could argue that a SQL user group should stick to SQL. The community cares about the code, and it should. A correct answer that nobody understands helps nobody, though. The best query tuning advice still has to be explained. The listener is a manager, a teammate or a room of 250 people.
Presentation skills are not a separate subject from technical skill. They are how technical skill reaches other people. Every DBA explains a problem to someone every week, whether on a stage or in a chat window.
What to Remember
Choose one message, tell it as a story, and keep the slides light. Practice out loud, give the audience a task, and slow down. Thank you to SQL Bangalore for the evening.
Pick one habit from this list for your next talk. Do that one well before you add another.
A good talk is not a stage performance, it is a conversation that one person leads.
Published by Pinal Dave on SQLAuthority. More of my work at pinaldave.com.
Discover more from SQL Authority with Pinal Dave
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
