Personal advices to give a presentation to small groups

I'm sure that everyone that had to talk face-to-face to an audience experienced the same half nervous half excitement feeling. You start talking, the presentation begin low, slow, like humbly asking for permission to talk. Then, if you are lucky, you begin feeling more confortable, you connect with your audience, let yourself go and the event go smoothly. Otherwise, if you do not get over the initial shock, this is going to be an unpleasant experience to everybody, specially you. Here I give you my own advices to fall within the first category and end up enjoying the rewarding experience of presenting your work. 

Delivering a talk is highly dependant in your experience and your attitude. There are those speakers that want to keep a low profile (and voice) and wish to be eaten by the earth and never be seen again. There are those that don't give a crap and talk they script out of their chests. And there are those who, at the beginning they wish to finish as soon as possible but they end up asking for five, ten or fifteen minutes more to keep talking. My advices are mainly for starters (because seniors would not care in reading this, to begin with). I'm barely going to talk about format or content since these advices are more psychological than estructural.

1. Be motivated, confident and avoid frustration. I'm not experience enough to bare with demotivation or frustration but, based on all the presentation I've attended, the major two sins of any speaker are unwillingness to communicate and willingness to confront the audience. If you don't have reasons to give the speech, why to give it? If you think the audience is plotting against you, change your mind or you'll make them that way.
   
   However, I do know a little about confidence and shyness so we'll deal with them in the following points.
   
2. Practise, practise and practise. Practising is way more important than the content or the slides. Your slides, and even the content, are just the way to support, guide and enhance your talk. Your speech, and more importantly, your attitude, are your weapons to convince your audience that you have something which worths their time and attention.
   
   How do you do to have a good attitude? Be confident. How to be confident and overcome your shyness? Practise even more until you have the chain of thoughts and the discourse well prepared. You might not, and you shouldn't, learn by heart your script, but practising and repeating it with flexibility will help you know what to talk about at every moment and how to guide your audience through the topic. For presentations in foreign languages, this advise has the additional benefit of reviving the vocabulary in your mind.
   
3. Know and meet your audience. It is important to have an idea of who are you talking to and to customise the level of your speech to that of your audience. More importantly, however, it is to meet your audience, that is, to talk to them prior the speech, to realise that those who listen to you are actually humans and not soul devourer daemons. And, in fact, it might even happen that they are interested in your presentation! You might not be able to, or even want to, talk with them before the presentation, but you can do it during your presentation. This leads me to the next point...
4. Make the audience talk to you. You are presenting for a small group so take advantage of it. This benefits both their understanding and your confidence. It is much more involving and rewarding if you know that your audience is keeping the pace and actually understanding what you are talking about.
   
   If they are really into the topic, ask the hardest questions. If they seem lost, ask yes/no questions. If they are gone for good, try to make a rise-hand poll. If they are beyond recovery (using their Facebook, twitter, Buzz, etc) and you feel confident and familiar with them, say the name of any of them and slowly and clearly ask a basic question. Jokes and funny slides might help to catch the attention but they are tricky and require some expertise. Ah, and if you succeed to make them talk, don't screw it up by being so hard about their mistakes or nonsenses, up to a limit.
   
5. Make the audience wonder in one slide the questions you are going to answer in the next slide. It is said that 55% of our communication is non-verbal (gestures, body language, etc), 38% is vocal (tone of voice, inflexion, etc) and just a mere 7% is through actual words. That means that if you talk about your topic but do not follow with your tone, gestures and slides, the speech is easily forgotten. In fact, the best way to make somebody understand is to make him reach the same conclusions in his own way. As Confucius said, "I hear, I know. I see, I remember. I do, I understand". This is difficult to master but, if you achieved to have a communicative audience, it is very rewarding seeing them asking questions that can be answered by just saying: "I'm glad you asked because that leads me to the next slide." ;-)
6. Easy slide, hard slide. People agree with and like the things they know. They are usually interested in learning more about what they know. However, your presentation might not be directly focussed on their interest -we cannot please everyone- therefore let's introduce some generic, related and basic stuff from time to time to give them a hook to get involved with. People is going to disconnect from time to time, and if you go deeper and deeper in your topic, the sooner anyone disconnects, the sooner you'll never recover him from the deaths.
   
   Reconnection slides are a good opportunity to regain your audience. Reconnection slides are usually placed in between your harder, heavy ones. Reconnection slides are those that most people should feel somehow familiar and confortable but with a special touch, a link to the rest of your topic, just to keep them intrigued. Then, you catch their attention to the following boring, heavy-stuff slide. In reconnection slides they might think, "Oh, I know that. I work/read/spoke about it. Wait, there is that detail there which is different. Intriguing... I should ask him about that, or how to apply his presentation to my interest." You get the idea.

Here you have the example of a great orator: Randy Pausch, a former professor of the Carnegie Mellon University. His presentation is captivating but, sadly, it was literally his last lecture. I let him to explain himself.

Video: Randy Pausch - The Last Lecture reprised
"Achieving your Childhood Dreams" (10:10)

This was it, but of course this is not an extensive (not even a good one) list of hints for delivering a good presentation. Every dog knows his own tricks, so please comment your own so we all can take advantage of them. Who knows, maybe you'll be the audience of someone who took your advice into account...

References:

• YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams (1:16:27). This is the real "Last Lecture", not the reprised version above.
• YouTube - Randy Pausch Inspires Graduates (6:33). With all the commotion of his last lecture and all the media afterwards, he was invited to deliver an inspiring speech for graduates. This is a good example of start slow, gain confidence, and end up kissing "the audience" ;-) 

You might like:

• YouTube - We are All Connected (4:12) featuring Carl Sagan et al. The great divulgers of recent times "singing" some of their most famous quotes in Symphony of Science.