storytelling with data podcast: #98 how to overcome your presentation challenges

Welcome to the Storytelling with Data podcast, where listeners around the world learn to be better storytellers and presenters. We'll cover a wide range of topics that will help you effectively show and tell your data stories. So, get ready to separate yourself from the mess of 3D exploding pie charts and deliver knockout presentations. And with that, here's Simon and Amy. Well, hi everyone. Welcome to today's episode on the Storytelling with Data podcast. And a story that I like to share when I'm trying to address those who might be a little bit nervous about getting up on stage is a time when I was taking a part-time course in acting. Now, this was the first term of this particular course, and at the end our friends and family had been invited to watch our performance. Now, we had, each of us, a few short minutes monologue to perform. Now, if anyone was interested, mine was the Jabberwocky. Now, I practiced this thing over and over again and again, and knew it thoroughly. So, the big night came. We were given an order to perform in, and I was getting more and more nervous as my turn approached. And rather than enjoy everyone else's performance, I just kept repeating the lines in my head over and over again. Eventually, I was the next to go, and as I was just about to practice the lines one more time, my mind went blank. Panic. Despite how hard I tried to recall the first sentence, I just couldn't. The time was ticking down. I knew I'd be needing to stand up soon. I heard a round of applause and knew it was my time. I took a deep breath, stood up, and the words just came out, just how I remembered them. And ever since then, I've taken on just a couple of valuable lessons. Firstly, if you put time and effort into learning the content, you'll will fine when it comes to performance time, and secondly, don't over prepare. Have confidence that you've put that time in, you've taken the effort, and that everything will be all right. Now, if that story resonates with anyone and sends a chill down your spine, then don't fear, as we have a fun podcast episode for you today, which is tackling a number of presentation challenges and how to overcome them. Now, what I like about this podcast is that the themes have all been provided by subscribers to our YouTube channel, which by the way, has a number of videos related to all manner of topics in the world of storytelling with data. We'll link the channel in the show notes later on. And secondly, the other fun aspect of this particular podcast is I'm joined by my fellow data storyteller, Amy Esslemont. Amy, hello, and I'm sure that you probably have a story or two to tell when it comes to presenting. You got one particular terrifying delivery moment to recall? Hello, Simon. Thank you for inviting me to this conversation. Um I have many terrifying presentation stories because definitely nerves, as you mentioned, are a common one. I think most folks face nerves cuz it's intimidating to get up in front of an audience. And I can remember one time I was very nervous, actually defending my dissertation and my course mate said, "Amy, it's good that you're nervous. " And I thought that was strange, but they said, "If you are nervous, it means that you care and you want to do well. " So, that's just was something I that sticks with me as a way to help calm me a bit. Nervous about how the presentation is going to go is a common issue. I think another contributing factor to adding nerves are thinking about how our audience is going to react. Might be worried about how they will respond or what questions they have. I can recall a specific moment in a past life, in a previous role, where I flew to headquarters, the big office, to meet the new lead of the product I was working on. So, I was a about to present a major update on a project we'd been working on. We were trying to log all of our web interactions, bring it into our data ecosystem, so we could tie it to all of our marketing efforts, all of our product trial information, and we created this dashboard as a way to inform all of our marketing efforts. So, I go to this meeting at headquarters with the new head of product, who I'm meeting for the first time, and I start to share this amazing dashboard that we developed. Now, we'll talk about challenges of communicating with dashboards a bit later, but pretty quickly early on, my audience interrupted me and actually ended up completely switching the topic of the meeting from marketing to what they cared about, which was feature development was their priority. So, I had completely missed the mark because I had not done the upfront work. I didn't consider thinking my about my audience, what they care about. I didn't have a clear understanding of the context of the situation.

Now, this is a case where I was obviously communicating for myself, communicating for my dashboard project, but considering your audience and being more thoughtful about this planning process up front is actually one way to ensure greater success when it comes to communicating. I feel your pain. I mean, that sounds like a pretty terrifying story. I mean, not the fact that you were nervous at the beginning, cuz I do agree with you that actually it is good to feel those little bit of butterflies as you go into something, but to get the sense that you've missed the mark. I remember a similar time I presented uh something when the data wasn't actually right, and we got called out from that perspective, and yeah, you just want to just shrink and go into a hole. And but we got some great challenges on our way here, and we've touched upon audience, we've touched upon nerves. We've got a few more as well, and we're going to group these into some specific themes. We're going to look at weak content and structure. So, before we even get into the room to present, well, how can we make sure we've got a good sense of what the communication is going to be? But then, of course, we are presenting to an audience. How can we establish a good connection with them, really begin to understand them? Alluding to uh one of Amy's stories there. And finally, we are going to deal with those nerves when it comes to presenting. And turning back to content and structure, much of what we consider to be weak content or structure can be, as a result of just a lack of time spent on planning or a lack of effort spent on planning. Now, our philosophy here is that every successful communication begins with a plan. And we did receive a number of comments around us simply knowing where to start and how to begin to think about structuring things. Now, one comment from our YouTube subscribers that sums things up pretty well comes from Santho HD, who said, "My biggest challenge was turning complex analysis into a clear, engaging story that truly connected with the audience. Instead, it comes off like reading a dry report. " Now, we often talk about story and ensuring everything is connected in a way that makes sense from beginning to end and feels compelling for our audiences, but how can we ensure that this sense of flow is captured and presented within the structure of our presentation? Amy, what do you think about this one? Yeah, I love the point about wanting to communicate with story, because as you mentioned, Simon, stories have a connection. One thing leads to the next leads to the next. Stories take us on a journey, so this is a fantastic construct to be thinking of. And obviously, we think about story a lot here at Storytelling with Data, in our workshops, in our books. One of the structures of story that we tend to reach for when it comes to communicating data is what's called the narrative arc. So, anybody who's listened to the podcast or read the books is likely very familiar with this. But, the narrative arc is a story structure that we can use that has a clear beginning, middle, and end. So, it does have that connectedness that we want so our audience pays attention. And it also has this element of tension. Tension is the thing gone wrong in our story. It's the thing that keeps us tuned in. binge-watching that show. And if we think about tension in our communications from our audience's perspective around what our audience cares about, that is a great way to engage them and build up to that tension and take them on a journey. And one of the fantastic strategies we use to figure out this structure and how we connect things is the low-tech planning process of storyboarding. Again, another tool that listeners may be familiar with, but I love this process. One, keeping it low-tech because something happens in the brainstorming process when we're not into our tools then we can really play around with our different thoughts of what comes into our communication. How does it make sense to bring that tension to light for our audience? How do we begin giving them background context? How do we end with a clear recommendation? And playing around with these different structures and then sharing it with someone else for feedback is one fantastic way that hopefully Santosh can explore to make the communication more engaging rather than just a report read out. What are your thoughts on story structure, Simon? I mean, I would just completely advocate the use of storyboarding. I'm just preparing some content now for an event that we have coming up and yeah, first step was to get those post-it notes, sticky notes out and just begin to start brainstorming ideas. I just really enjoy getting away from the desk, the computer for a little bit of time and beginning to just jot down ideas with that freedom that there's no constraint around it's got to fit within a slide or it's got to be this style of font color or size. I can just write ideas down. Now, I have a few too many ideas probably in the in that initial brainstorming phase, but it does really help set me up to get one a clear sense of the sorts of things I might be looking to include, but then as I begin to rearrange those sticky notes, I can get a much clearer

sense of that overarching story, the progression, the flow that we've just talked about here. So, it's certainly something that might feel as though it's a bit of an overhead and a bit of a commitment to do in the initial steps, but I really do think it's well worth doing to get a much better sense of how you're going to progress going forward. So, yeah, really good recommendation there on storyboarding. I think and just to talk about tools for a moment because I know folks are engaging more with AI tools, folks work collaboratively with folks that maybe are not in their office. So, and I also have been experiencing a lot of student interactions through my university course. They are more, I would say, tool focused. They maybe have a little bit more resistant to low-tech. So, if there is somebody that is like, "I can't do the storyboard process in low-tech manner. " I would say, "Yeah, you can certainly use tools for this. " There is a Post-its app. There's things different tools like Miro and Figma. But, I would still recommend having fidelity to that brainstorming and editing process. Don't get into the content and really thinking about how you're going to be designing your graphs and slides just yet, but rather focus on the overall structure. So, just a pro tip there if you're somebody that maybe isn't able to do it in a low-tech manner, wants to consider a tool that can support you. It's okay to use a tool, but still the process of thinking about all the different aspects as Simon mentioned and playing around with the structure and how you connect the dots is very beneficial before we even get into the content space. Sticking with planning, by the way, not getting into the content space just yet. I think another dilemma that we have, which you touched on a little bit, Simon, is taking something that's really complex, that has a lot of information. How do we make that clear and engaging? And this is certainly something that came through in the YouTube comments as well. I saw one here specifically from Barbara Benitez that says, "I think the big challenge that I face is trying to include everything that I think is important and not necessarily distilling it into what's important for my audience. How can we do this successfully? " Yeah, the two key words that stood out from that comment, first of all, everything, and the second one being audience. And I think the two don't really combine together that well, because if we do end up sharing everything that we've uncovered or discovered from our initial work, then it's likely to feel overwhelming for our audience, because they don't need to see or necessarily see everything that's been communicated or everything that's been discovered during this exploratory phase of our analysis. And so we like to break things down into a couple of very distinct phases. You've got the exploratory side of things, when, yeah, you are going to be deep diving into all the different pieces of analysis that could well be worth servicing at a given point in time. So you've downloaded your data, you're manipulating it, maybe using your AI tools, maybe using your visualization tools to look for insights, to search for patterns, shapes, and trends. That's all good. That's all absolutely relevant and needed to be done. What we do need to do, though, is think critically at this stage of well, what is now important to be shared with my audience? What did they ask for initially? Do I know my audience well enough to maybe understand what they are going to be caring about? What insights are going to be critical for them? What keeps them awake at night? Their goals, their fears, their aspirations. If can understand that within our audience, then we can look at the exploratory work we've done and really clearly get a sense of what needs to be taken out from that to then be presented to our audience. And this forms the explanatory side of our communication, where we're communicating something specific to someone specific. Now, there is temptations and Barbara, I think you summarized those temptations quite well in terms of sharing everything with our audience. But as I mentioned before, that feels a little bit overwhelming if we were to serve this all of these insights and analysis we've discovered. But I can also completely appreciate I'd probably put my hand up to be guilty of doing this in the past, maybe Amy well as well, in that it is tempting to share the work that we've done. We want to give our audience a sense of the good effort that we put into this communication. We want to give our audience a sense of the credibility, the due diligence, if you like, that we've built up by tackling everything, by analyzing everything. Maybe we want to give our audience just a sense of the pain, the effort that we've gone to in creating all of this work. But it isn't often going to end well because our audience will just be faced with so much they'll begin to think, well, I'm not really sure what this is supposed to be telling me. They might even ask for more data, which I find amusing because you've sent them everything already. So at this stage in time it really is important, crucial to make sure that you take that exploratory work and understand what is going to be relevant to helping produce our best let our audience get a sense of that key message we're looking to share.

Amy, you have any yeah, exploratory explanatory insights to share? No, I think the points you made are really good, Simon. And for anybody who's maybe struggling with that or a little nervous about not showing everything, a couple of strategies or advice I've given over the years are think about ways that you can still bring to light all of the work that you did. You can absolutely start with we went through all of the details. Today I want to cover with you the highlights that really support the decision at hand and anything that's not here, happy to share with you or talk offline or something specific like a question comes up related to something that's not in your content or something that doesn't need to be addressed at that moment. That could also be another time to just queue. Yeah, we did absolutely look at that. It didn't surface in this particular sense, but I'm happy to share that and take that take you through that later. But let's move on and get to what we need to be talking about today. So it's about having a focused directed guided conversation to achieve the goals that you want with your particular audience versus showing all of the data and going through every little bit of detail because as you mentioned, that's often confusing and then you're left at the end with that going okay, so what? What are we meant to do with this or what do we do now? So it's really helpful for us to put that editorial lens on it. Not to say that we're hiding anything or that we didn't do that extra effort, but just we realized that wasn't necessary for the goal we were trying to accomplish or the story we needed to tell to that particular individual. And it's certainly something that I know I struggled with early on in my analytical career because as an analyst, you want to you well, first off, love the data and you want everybody to see it, but you also want to make sure that you're being as clear and credible and as thorough as possible. So just And I think Yeah, really great points. Again, I it's so crucial, isn't it, that we consider audience? We we've already mentioned them a few times already and we're going to mention them a lot more as we go through this podcast. But again, depending on your audience, it may well be that you need to share more. it's a very highly regulated industry you're working in and your audience needs to see all of the evidence. Well, in that case, yeah, you're not going to exclude things cuz that's not going to be best received or well received from that particular audience. But it doesn't always need to be the case, but really that thorough understanding of who you are communicating to and what is it exactly they're looking to see is going to be the best guide to then deciding on what you need to include with your content. And with good plans, we can begin to dive into our tools and start to create our content. We've storyboarded what time of our audience is. We've maybe extracted some of that exploratory work and decided that's what we're going to be looking to surface. But despite our best efforts here, this content creation isn't without its challenges. Especially when the content that we've been creating doesn't necessarily lead itself to a live presentation. Yes, we've talked about them already before, but let's bring up the dashboards. Uh Seb and mentioned that their clients are used to dashboards. And so rarely do they create PowerPoint style presentations to tell a story in a more structured way. Similar sentiment from Jaime Gonzalez Martelo who talks about trying to infuse storytelling into automated, standardized tool where there isn't so much flexibility. Can be a big challenge, but dashboards are commonplace within business. We all know that. So is there a ways to present dashboards effectively or what challenges do we have, Amy, when it comes to presenting dashboards or regular reports? Yeah, I mean, if your audience, like Seb and's audience, is saying I need a dashboard, then I would say you need to give your audience a dashboard. Again, they are you have to meet them where they are. And I have in my past actually used dashboards to create for audiences that wanted that detail. They loved the ability to slice and dice on the fly and take the conversation whichever way they wanted to. So it wasn't such a narrative-driven process like what we've been talking about here today. So, certainly there will be cases. There's even some capabilities within our tools to do this. For example, Tableau has the story points feature. There other aspects that we can use to make this possible. I think it can be a challenge though because dashboards have a lot of data stories in them. If you think about it, they're flexible, they're often dynamic, they have multiple filters. So, they're great at surface seeing stories really quickly. And if you go into a meeting to present your dashboard, you could very well find that your audience gets distracted by one of the filters or one of the categories and is like, "Oh, hey, I know you were talking about something, but could you just click here? Like let's look here. " And suddenly you're off track of where you wanted to be. So, that would be I guess my concern if you

did have to communicate with a dashboard and you had a very specific narrative you wanted to tell. It can quickly go sideways if your audience gets excited about a filter or a color that they're seeing on the dashboard. Because often dashboards are very dense. They have multiple views of data. They have lots of information to look at. So, you aren't necessarily in as much control say as when you have a presentation that you curated to tell a specific narrative as you present. So, some drawbacks there. I will just say that you don't always need to have a story with a dashboard or with a data set. So, I think just being thoughtful about whether or not it's a situation where you do in fact need to have that narrative. Sometimes a report is just that. It's an update. We're just monitoring the trends. We just need to look at a couple things and see if we're off track or on track. It doesn't necessarily need to have a big strong narrative about of it. So, understanding one, what your audience is expecting, how they like to be communicated, and then two, what is the situation you're facing in terms of next steps and action around the data. I know Simon in your past you did a lot of dashboarding and you often talk about executive summaries on some of these standard reports. Yeah, I remember actually a conversation I had with Allison Holstin a podcast interview recently around dashboards. It was a fun conversation and one of the stories that came to light during that conversation is particularly up here where I used to present a an exact summary of a regular update and it was a new a new report that we built and everything was pretty exciting, new metrics, new style, everything was looking good as we went into that first meeting and it was a great meeting. Everything was fresh. And so we discussed all the different metrics, the directions, the trends and then as the meetings went on during the course of the next few weeks, the next few months, things began to a little bit get a little bit stale where the metrics hadn't really changed. We were just essentially monitoring things that were happening and that to all intents and purposes is the point of a dashboard is to monitor those key metrics and so you're not necessarily expecting or wanting things to change dramatically. And so this meeting became a little bit difficult. I was struggling to think about things to say. I was worried about presenting this information because there were no stories and to Wayne's point that's okay. Sometimes it is just an update. And so I began to take a bit more confidence in saying that there's not much to talk about on the dashboard today but there is this one thing I want to call out with regard to this particular metric or this certain situation that I have seen there's been a bit of movement on. And this really began to change things around from just presenting a standard exact summary into more of a deep dive on certain metrics as they became more topical. And I think that really began to change that shift the dynamic of that particular meeting which is very very good way to do it. The other point I meant about dashboards is a lot of people will see dashboards nowadays being self-serve, being automatically refreshed, so they're not necessarily going to present them or publish them. I still think that is always an opportunity within those that are producing or building these dashboards just to take a quick glance when they are refreshed and just see if there are any particular notable movements within those dashboards because it's always a good opportunity then to call out to your main audiences, whether there are some key trends and key differences in those numbers. And I always used to say to my team, "If you produce this dashboard and you published it or it's been refreshed, take a quick look and if there are any key movements, to send a quick email to your main audience member, maybe the managing director of that particular team and just let them know the publication has been released, dashboard been refreshed, but there are opportunities to take a look at a couple of numbers. " I think again that just applies a little bit more of an oversight to your roles within data and working with those numbers and dashboards. Yeah, it becomes that again editorial role. So, you're still giving them the dashboard, especially if they want the information, they want to be able to self-serve or have it at you know, at their fingertips if they're going into a meeting or have a certain question, but you're putting that extra lens on, "Here's something that I'm noticing or is this what you expected or can we have a conversation about these aspects? " And depending on what that is or how likely your audience will be receptive to it, that may be an opportunity for you then to pull out that narrative from the dashboard and communicate it. And when you get into that point, you'll likely want to be thinking about the visuals that you use. It may or may not be the same visuals that are in the dashboard because any given data set can be visualized a number of ways and how we choose to show the information often surface different things. And we had a couple of comments around the topic of visualizations, specifically from M. Dazzum says that as a data analyst, one of her biggest challenges, beyond just general presentation skills, is

choosing the most effective and creative way to visualize output for stakeholders. They often find themselves debating whether to use a graph, a table, or a combination of both to ensure the insights are clear and accessible to everyone. So, a couple things I see, creative ways, the mention of tables. Yeah, we certainly have seen a lot of tables from our clients in the past. Usually, when we are communicating with the explanation that our audience wants to see all the details, we'll show everything in a table, but these obviously can be challenging as well if we're presenting live, right, Simon? Yeah, detail-hungry audiences, we often see those come up as a particular challenge within some of the goals that our workshop participants want to take away with them. How can we deal with these challenging audiences who need to see the detail? We want to tell a story, we want to get creative with the visuals that we share, but they just want to see the numbers written down in that tabular format. First of all, I think I'll say that there's nothing wrong with tables. Tables are a great way to communicate many different types of metrics and dimensions, more than we can ever possibly look to visualize in one or two graphs. We can pack a lot of information into a table. The biggest point I want to make about tables is the way that our audience will interact with a table. Certainly, in a live presentation, our audience sees a table flash up in front of them on the slide, and they will start reading the table. Or they will use or leverage their verbal communication system to interact with that table. Whichever way you want to call it, essentially, they are looking at the detail in that particular grid. And so, they are scanning down columns, they're looking across rows, they're pulling out numbers, they're comparing numbers, maybe looking at the row that's most relevant to them, looking at the latest columns worth of data. All of these things are pretty intensive from a processing point of view. And imagine here the situation where you are looking to then talk to that table, maybe call out a couple of the key observations within that data. Well, if your audience is reading the table, leveraging their verbal communication system, I hate to tell you that listening also leverages that same verbal communication system, and so you can't do both at once. And if your audience is interested in that table, and likely they will be, and if they're there at that meeting, then they're not going to be able to listen to you. So, that's my biggest call out with regard to tables in a live presentation is the challenges that we have when looking to share with them and speak to them at the same time. So, in that case, can we visualize the data? Can we pull out the key aspects of that data? Maybe the column that's most relevant, maybe the couple of rows that we really want to get across to our audience. Well, in that case, we are looking to visualize our information with our graphs and charts that we have available to us, but even that can be difficult because there are so many different ways that we could visualize our data. And very rarely is there one right way to build a graph, build a chart based upon the data that we have. And so therefore, we're then looking, we're hunting for different ways that we could build and showcase this data. I would say though that when it comes to business communication, typical business update that we might be giving, then more often than not, you're going to be best served by using a more common, a more familiar base graph type. So, maybe let's think about categorical data with bar charts, continuous data with line charts. Maybe we could use some dot plots in there as well to help provide that information. Certainly, we could stack our data if we needed to show that composition, but all the more reason though to try and use those more familiar looking charts because if your audience is able to quickly interpret them, quickly understand them, it means that you can be discussing the important things about your data, the interesting key messages that you're looking to share, and then crucially, what you're hoping to achieve with that sharing of the information as well. And I think sometimes there's a little bit of a temptation for those of us working with data to maybe see the latest chart type or maybe see the theme of the day in terms of the charts. I saw one particular point in time, Sankey's were everywhere. And so it was almost like we've got to try and fit the data into a Sankey in some shape or form. And then I managed to build one and create something, and I shared it with my audience who then started looking at it in a strange way, just helpless almost about what it was really telling them. It looked great, but it didn't really give them any insights. And so it was a bit of a learning for me to think actually do I just need to take a step back here and again, think about our audience, and think about what is it and how is it they can see the data in the most appropriate way. So whilst there's no right way or wrong way to communicate our data, certainly thinking about the most appropriate way to share our

information with our audience to allow them to see those insights in the quickest and most efficient way is going to be my top tip for that particular challenge. Yeah, I'd opt for graphs because they interact with our visual communication system and are also often much quicker, but pick a graph that's going to be straightforward cuz ultimately you want to have a conversation about what the information is showing, not spend your entire conversation explaining how to read the graph. I will say if you do have an audience that just loves their tables, I've worked with a lot of finance and engineer folks that just won't let go of the detail in the table. Again, like with dashboards, you have to be your audience where they are. So if you are presenting live and sharing a table, could be a space for you to just give them time to read it. I'm going to put this information up here. It's very dense. So, I'll give you a moment just to look through this. And then from there, you can augment. Maybe you just do a little bit of heat mapping to draw their attention to certain aspects or say, "Okay, now that we've had a chance to look at this, I'm going to make it a little bit easier to see. " And then add the graphs that Simon mentioned. I think that could be a nice way to just help step your audience into visualizing the data rather than giving them everything. Even better if you can get away with not sharing a table live. Maybe you give them the table in advance so that they can see it or you put it in the appendix and say, "Oh, I have all of the detail there for you to look at, but I just pulled out a few insights that I want to highlight. " So, some ways to balance those audience like crave all of the information and want to continue to get their table versus really making it more efficient and thoughtful in how you share that information to aid in that decision-making process. I did like the heat mapping option that you mentioned Amy. That reminded me of some other ways that we can perhaps introduce the table as well. If we do need to show a table, we don't necessarily need to show all of the table straight away. And maybe we could look to build things up. Maybe just show the columns and the row headers initially. They say, "We're going to be building up this table over time. " Don't forget of course in a live presentation, you have the ability to steer the content in the way and the direction that you want to steer it in. So, you build up with the column and row headers and then maybe you add on a couple of the key data points you want to talk about. Maybe use a bit of the heat mapping that Amy talked about. But that sense of animation really again helps create that flow, that connectedness of story that we've already been talking about. And just building things up in the way that you intend for it to be done so. But despite our best laid plans and now we've created some hopefully pretty good slick looking graphs and slides, it still might not be enough to deliver an engaging experience for our audience. Paula Araujo said that they're now spending a little bit more time searching for information, but only receive limited or fragmented details about the topic and audience. In the past, they did used to conduct extensive research on the subject and its context, which helped them fill gaps to make assertive presentations. However, they now lack both the time and the network of contacts to do that. So, if we don't necessarily know our audience that well, and maybe we haven't had the opportunity to get to know them, we may be taking a bit of a shot in the dark at how this presentation will land. Is that a good approach, Danny? What else can we do in this particular space to help Paula there and others? Yeah, I can empathize with this, right? You're not exactly sure what our audience cares about or how to frame the communication in a way that's going to resonate. So, a couple of thoughts if that's a situation you're facing, and we often say you should try to consult for context as best you can. Basically, I like to think of this as asking around others what you can know about your audience if you don't have direct contact to them. For example, maybe you're giving the information over to somebody else will present it, or you've been requested from your manager to prepare something for an audience that you're not familiar. Can you ask your manager for those additional details? Have they worked with this person in the past? Do they know how they like to be communicated or what their goals and objectives are? Cuz the more you can understand this, the easier it will be for you to develop something that's really going to be compelling for them to pay attention and act on the information. If your manager maybe or whoever the requester is doesn't have that detail. Is there more work that you could do asking others that have possibly worked with a familiar audience that's similar audience to who you're preparing your information for? This could even be a place where maybe you ask AI as a brainstorming partner. Look, here's what I know about my audience in the situation. I don't have direct access. What are some other potential things that I'll want to make sure that I bring into my narrative as a way to engage them with the information.

So, the more that you can get really specific on who you're communicating to, what keeps them up at night, what motivates them, how do they like to be communicated to? These are all aspects that you can then bring into your content as you develop it and decision points for you to be even more effective as you communicate. Simon, any additional thoughts here? Have you faced this in the past in previous roles? I the biggest challenge I face is when I initially was presenting to the more higher echelons of leadership. And so, I clearly didn't have the opportunity to spend time with them. And so, really understanding what it that what it was they were looking for from me was more of a challenge. And so, Amy, your point around if you can to speak to your line manager's line manager or just establish the connection in some way to get a much better sense of who they are because even if you unlock small details like the time of day that's the best time to be presented to or particular seat they like to sit at in the boardroom so you don't sit there when you walk in. All these little things that it can just help build up that picture of your audience and just make that content you're going to be sharing with them a little bit more compelling and effective as well. But again, it really does go back to if you can establish and understand who they are and avoid ultimately presenting for yourself because any story that we've ever heard in the midst of time, whether it be a book, whether it be TV, or I was going to say video then, that's a bit old, isn't it? Whether it be a film or a movie, they've all been created for an audience. They've not been created for the author, director, they've been created to be shared with someone else. And with that's how we should be thinking about our presentations, but all too often it's a bit tempting to just craft our communication for ourselves because ultimately it's our data, our analysis, our background, our research, our explorations. All of those different things make it very easy and straightforward just to build our content around what we've discovered, rather than again thinking that little bit harder about who it's for and how can it help them solve any particular challenges they might have. I love that. All great points, Simon, to be thinking about our audience as we communicate as we build our content. But even more than just our content, we can know our stuff, but we might not have the charisma to hold our audience's attention and create that engagement as we go. So, you might have to hear this the audience is going to look at you blankly or simply zone out. I think most of us, at least myself, and does not think of themselves as a natural presenter. So, how can we build this persona? Simon, we aren't all brave enough to take an acting class like you did. I'm curious what you learned in your acting class or through your experience that can help us develop skills in the space. My acting class was feels a very long time ago now, but I've I'm pretty confident that it did help me, certainly with confidence, but also that mindset of if I've able to do this, then I can do anything. It feels as though in that way one of the real challenges I had to do was sing Yeah, singing acapella in front of a room of 30, 40 people. If you can stand up and sing without any background music going on, I think you can get up in front of an audience of your peers and communicate a business presentation. But, how you can build that natural charisma or be confident in your own skins when you're standing up delivering something that is pretty nerve-racking, there are a few ways that I looked to think about doing this to help me build my own confidence or assurance that I'm in the right place. I'm credible. I deserve to be here talking to you, my audience. One thing that I do like to do is when I come into a room, and again, this is more for the workshop styles we teach. It may not be relevant for everyone who's presenting in front of an audience that they always are familiar and know. But, I always just like to get a bit of a sense of the room. And yeah, create a bit of a schema, if you like, of the room set up. Maybe make notes of the tables and chairs and the configuration of the room. And then, as people come in, and I always like to make sure, by the way, I'm early and I'm first there, if possible. So, when people come in, I can begin to introduce myself, say hello, and just find out where they've come from. Various bits of small talk, talk about the weather, classic thing we do here in England. And then, introduce yourself. Find out their name. Now, as you begin to find out people's names, you can jot them down on the schema that you've created. Get a sense of where people are sitting. And then, as you go through the session, your presentation, you can just reference some of those people's names that you've discovered. Pretty magical thing here is you can just call back

"Oh yeah, that's a really great point that Chris mentioned just earlier on. " Thanks Thanks, Sue. Great question. All of these things create this really nice magical sense of your audience feels that you care about them. You're creating a presentation for them rather than just lecturing or talking to them. You're making them part of the experience. Also, you can regularly check in, do things like quick raise of hands, show of hands, or anyone agree with this? See some nods of heads, that helps keeping engagement higher and people are constantly asked to just check in and confirm things that you may be talking to about. Ask for thoughts as well at regular points in time. Make sure you move around if you've got a bit of a stage, don't hide up on that stage the whole time. Get down amongst the tables, especially for those at the back where you might not be so apparent all of the time. Can you walk around, get towards the back, maybe do a particular case study or a scenario, or field a question from those tables at the back as well. Always check for understanding. Now, you can do this by way of your content. So, maybe build into your content structured slides that have a recap, and at that point you could take questions. But also just generally as well, as you get a sense as you look around, as you see people, as you see their body language, see their facial expressions, you might hit a particular point in the road where you're thinking I'm not quite sure that really landed that message. I can see some furrowed brows. Well, then you can check for that understanding. Just touch base with a few people, bring back some of those names that you might have remembered from those introductory elements from earlier. All good ways to really one give yourself a bit of confidence, but also let your audience know that you're there with them and for them, and you're not just talking to them as well. And all of that just helps build that natural personality and charisma, too. Okay, so many tips there you just had. For some you started with experience, singing a cappella. Okay, I'm nervous enough presenting in front of audiences, do not make me sing as well. So, kudos for you for being that brave. But I do think there is something about the more that you do it, even if it is nerve-wracking, the easier it gets because having gone through it, the experience previously just gives you confidence that you'll get through it again. You touched on many great points about planning for how it's actually going to occur. So, can you get to the space in advance to see what the room feels like and looks like? I often tell my students practice the way that you're going to deliver. So, if you're going to be in person and stand up, that's how you should be thinking about your communication cuz then you'll have experience in that with that as you practice, which will give you confidence. Or if you're going to be virtual, actually turn on your video camera and see what that looks like. And then I love the idea of breaking the fourth wall as you present and bringing folks into the conversation, especially when you see the visual cues of them either nodding along or puzzling looks, that can be an opportunity to bring them in. You might even I know I have done a couple times brought an ally along and planted someone in the audience when I know that I'm going to be faced with maybe some opposition. Getting somebody else that can support me in the audience that I know who I'm communicating to has some uh weight with. Then that could be a way just for me to get comfortable that I have somebody with me and a way that I can purposely engage someone knowing that they'll be there to help me bring my audience along on the journey. I think this is also something that came up in some of the comments on YouTube. So, even if we're prepared, we sometimes have these audience members that throw us a curveball with say a question, a comment, or even a opposing view. And one of our followers, Yuraliva Aprender, says, "My biggest challenge is the question section. I've got control in my presentation, but when people ask questions, it's unknown territory. How might you deal with that? " I do think that any good presentation should have time for questions. That's actually where the meaningful dialogue occurs. What are we going to do next? How action on this information? But it can make people feel really unsure because you're not entirely aware of what's going to come up and if you will be prepared or be able to control that and that can be uncomfortable feeling, especially if it's paired with expectations that you need to know the answer right away to any question that could come up. How can we deal with this type of situation, Simon? Yeah, because you've practiced, haven't you? You've got everything down pat, as it were, and you've memorized your content and you've gone through it, but then if someone, like you said, throws in that curveball question that you haven't maybe accounted for, then it can really throw you off. And again, back to those nerve-racking times of presenting, it is a nervous time to be doing so and it can be a really difficult or really

challenging moment if you get a question that you're not prepared for. I would say here, if you can prepare, perhaps by maybe thinking about who your audience members are and whether or not they're a types of people that you could practice this presentation with that may have these similar types of questions. May not always be the same questions, but if you can maybe talk to people in the same team as your audience members or that same type of person, maybe more of the inquisitive type or maybe more of a challenging audience member, if you can just get in front of people like that, you might be able to get a better sense of the sorts of things that those audience members may ask and then if you do understand what those questions might be, you can one, get a better sense of preparing for them, you could maybe even build content that helps address those questions as well. And by the way, if you've got a particular structured pathway for your presentation, doesn't mean to say that you can't have additional slides tucked away that you could refer to should those questions come up and that could be a really great thing as well, cuz your audience says, "Oh, hey, I've got a question about X, Y, and Z. " Well, you can say, "Well, okay, we'll finish off in just a second or two, but I do have a slide that talks to that very point. " Makes you feel super prepared and really in a good place to give that information to your audience. If you are looking to give that presentation, I think it's always well worth setting up in advance how you expect that presentation to run so you don't get interrupted with a question during the middle of it, cuz once again, that can really throw you off track if you've got that more preparedness and you're looking at that real structured content you're looking to deliver. So, let's say for example, you have an audience member that wants to interrupt you. Well, you can begin the session with, "All right, everyone, I've got a really detailed presentation that we're going to be going through here. I'd just like to make sure you give me the time to present that, but I do and I will assure you that plenty of time for questions at the end. " So, essentially, just giving people foreshadowing people that you are going to be expecting questions and you are welcoming questions at the end, but just let me speak first. Let me just get through my content because it might change the question that you have to offer as well. And the other aspect that always comes to mind is when you get a question that maybe you're not 100% sure on answering, or maybe you need a little bit of time. It wasn't when you were expecting. You've done all these things to prepare and you do get that real curveball. I think sometimes there's no better way of dealing with a question you're not sure about than throwing it back to your audience for a second or two. You get a question, you say, "Oh, that's a great question. Well, actually, I'm interested. What do you think about this? " And then you buy a little bit of time for yourself. Your audience discusses it, debates it, maybe even comes up with their own answer. And during that period of time, you can one, listen to them, but also secondly, listen in or check in with yourself. See if you can establish what may be a good follow-up answer could be. Amy, you'll probably be doing the same thing with this section. Have you got any other additional thoughts on these questions? — Those are all great tips that you surfaced there, Simon. I like the last one of throwing it back to the audience. I would just further say, "Don't be afraid if you don't know the answer. " It's taken me a while to get comfortable with this myself because we are the analysts. [snorts] We are closest to the data. We feel like we need to know everything. But, if you didn't look at that or you don't have that aspect of the data, you could just be honest and be like, "Actually, we didn't look at that piece, but I'm happy to talk more afterwards about where we might get that information or how that might help us inform where we go next. " And that could just be a great way to acknowledge your audience, validate their concern, and make them feel smart, like they have a good idea, and then you circle back and you can learn more, follow up, and then maybe be more prepared next time you dive into that topic. So, another possible thing if you are concerned about questions, don't be fearful of knowing everything cuz that's just a real unrealistic expectation to put on yourself. Yeah, never going to happen. But, it's also a great thing as well because in some respects, it's quite easy to prepare content and rehearse content. As long as you do and put in the hard effort and hard yards to do it, you can get to a pretty good place. But, something nice about being dynamic and being present in the moment to be able to answer those questions on the fly as well. So, yeah, don't be afraid of questions that come in. It certainly helps build up your reputation and credibility if you can answer them in a good way, too. Brilliant. Thank you, Amy. Well, in a moment, we are going to tackle our third specific challenge, but before we do, let's take a very quick break. Hello, Storytelling with Data fans. On Thursday, May 14th, 2026, the Storytelling with Data team is hosting our popular foundational virtual workshop. This interactive 4-hour session is grounded in strategies from the best-selling book

Storytelling with Data, and designed to help you make better graphs and turn data into clearer, more compelling stories. You'll learn through a mix of instruction, real-world examples, individual practice, and small group exercises, all in a virtual setting. Participants will also receive our latest book, Storytelling with Data before and after, and are invited for an optional 30-minute office hour immediately after the workshop to get additional questions answered. The session runs Thursday, May 14th from 8:00 a. m. to noon Eastern. Use the code podcast10 for 10% off your registration. — Whether you work with data every day or only occasionally, this workshop will help you communicate your hard work in a way that's easier to understand and more likely to make an impact. Learn more and register at storytellingwithdata. com. Okay, welcome back from that break. We've now explored a couple of our things here, but dare I say the hardest part is yet to come. Standing up in front of our audience and presenting. And many of our comments, probably the majority of our comments that came through relate to this, including one from YP, who says, "I'm an introvert, and I find presenting to my audience to be a very overwhelming experience. I become extremely nervous, and I'm really trying to better myself to become more confident. " Amy, is there such a thing as a nervous presenter? I get nervous. You just said you get nervous. Are there people out there that don't? I mean, I can't speak for others, but I can certainly speak for my own experience that I am not a nervous-less presenter. I can empathize with YP. I am also an introvert. I would rather be behind the data in my spreadsheet than up in front of an audience, but I have worked over time to hone this skill because of the value it can have when we can speak to our information and help our audience understand and take action on that. So, it is a worthy skill to develop and so I have worked over time and I am proof that you can develop the skill even if it doesn't feel natural. And the way that I have honed this is through a lot of practice and experience and honestly failures because that's also where you learn what to do differently next time and where you can improve. So, my top tip for practicing is to say the words you are going to present out loud because this gets you comfortable with what you will say. It gives you practice in moving your mouth and how you will speak to the information. It also gives you a fantastic opportunity to revisit your content so that as you're speaking to it as you would, you might find areas where you can further refine your content so it better supports you. And I've found that the more I practice, the more confidence I get. I think not any different than your story at the very beginning, Simon, where you knew you had the dialogue down. Yeah, you may be nervous at the time, but you had spent the time and effort to commit it to memory. And so, practicing, you know, with your content or even without your content. I am known for walking around my neighborhood talking to myself. I work to put earbuds in so I don't look so crazy to my neighbors, but if I say the words out loud without my content when I'm driving or walking the dog around the neighborhood, this is another way for me to get confidence in that I know what I want to say. I understand the order of the content and that way when the time comes to say the words out loud, I will already have that experience behind me and so it helps calm my nerves and I think also helps me come across as a more credible presenter as well. Yeah, I don't necessarily walk around the streets talking to myself, but I do a lot in the car. But even then, I feel like if people see you in the mirrors, you can look a little bit strange. But I think just go for it because we can't all unfortunately always be at home and be able to do it in our offices or our home offices. Uh a lot of the time we are at work in an office, and so you've got to find the right opportunities, the right ways to practice cuz as Amy said, there is no substitute for practice practicing out loud. It is something that can be very easily go through the motions if you just say things in your head. You don't really concentrate on the transitions. timings. You almost have it as a thing on the to-do list. Practice this talk. You go through it. You probably go through it too quickly, and it isn't really going to be that useful at all. So, just spend more time practicing out loud. Even if you do it less than just going through it in your head, it's going to be more worthwhile doing it in that more value-added way, for sure. Yeah, we were talking earlier, Simon, about scripting. I think sometimes people want to script things out or if they're presenting virtually, put everything into the speaker notes section of their presentation. This was something that also came through in one of the YouTube comments. Laura Davenport says, "Preparing a

script ahead of time but wanting to sound natural when speaking. " I think there is this way that even though you practice a script, when it comes time to deliver it, come across as reading or perhaps robotic, maybe inauthentic. What are your thoughts on scripts? My overarching thought is dangerous to have a script. And there's a couple of horror stories that I want to pay reference to demonstrate this. First of all, it's the horror story number one where you just see someone reading the script. So, they're not even looking at the audience or if it's virtual, webcam. They're looking at their slides, they're looking at the script, and they are reciting, they're just reading from that. I saw that happen once, it's terrible experience as an audience member because you not engaged at all. And this person's reading, and the content could have been really good, and the slides but it was completely Well, it just didn't work. Completely suboptimal due to the result of this person reading. The second horror story that I've seen when it comes to scripts is where someone is reading from a script, so already not great in itself, but they then try and be a little bit more dynamic. Maybe they look up to establish eye contact with the audience. They look down to see that they can't find their place in the script again. And so, they're hunting for this place in the script. And you can see visible signs of panic as they can't find the particular place, specific place that they need to start reading from. And because they haven't practiced, because they haven't really spent time doing that, if they don't have their script, they don't know what to say. And they're going red, potentially. They're shaking. They just can't get to grips back with this presentation again. Both horrible situations to be in. And so, when it comes to scripts, I would say avoid them when you are creating a presentation that's going to be delivered in a live environment. One, because you're probably not going to be having to rely on that script anyway. Chances are you'll be presenting to an audience, your slides will be behind you. So, what's the point in writing out a script? What I would do instead is to just make sure that within each of the slides you're looking to present, you have a number of key talking points that you want to hit. Maybe two or three key talking points. Even if you have those, perhaps you can then glance at them very quickly. If you're up on stage, you can see the presenter view of your laptop maybe on the lectern next to you. Quickly glance at those couple of bullet points. If you're presenting virtually, again, quickly glance a couple of those points on the presenter mode of your tool, your PowerPoint tool. Then you can just get a sense much quicker of the things you're going to say. And of course, you have the knowledge, you have the authority to embellish those points and talk about them, and it feels far more natural as well. So, certainly make sure you practice the content, but I would say go or be cautious about writing all of that content down by way of a script. I would agree. I don't use scripts because I tend to rely on them too much. It's just a downfall. I can't discipline myself enough. So, I do what you say, bullet points, almost like a quick outline. And I focus more on the transition, so how I'm going to connect one idea to the next. And this also has helped with some really thoughtful takeaway slide titles. That's another place that can help cue you into your topic. If you put the point in word at the top, it's often a bigger font and the first thing that you see. So, if you do get stuck, you can reference the slide title. And then if you practiced and had kind of those bulleted talking points that you want to hit, you can go through those in a more often authentic, natural way than being hung up on, I forgot this one word. What was that word I'm looking for again? And you've lost your audience, complete line of thought. So, I like the bullet points ideas and just being thoughtful about how you can build some of that into your content by using the slide title as prime real estate. Yeah, the transition point you mentioned, Amy, is a crucial one. I'm surprised I didn't mention it myself, because that really does establish the connectedness of the story that we've been talking about previously as well. If you can introduce almost the next slide before you get to it, it just feels far more natural by way of a flow than if you have to say things like, "And let's turn to this slide. And on this slide" because you've already shown it. So, yeah, think about those transitions and really make sure you get those. Uh because if you can get those, everything's just going to feel a lot more slick from a pacing point of view. And when we talk about slick, another thing that comes up regularly is the use of filler words. Uh we've all got them somewhere lurking, I'm sure. We have a fantastic editor stroke producer that's hopefully going to be

eliminating most of the filler words that I've been saying. There's one that's come to my mind. I've been saying a few times. It's starting to annoy me. And I hope that they manage to eliminate most occurrences of it. Uh but most of us will have some lurking around. And I'm pretty sure that many people don't even know that they're saying them. But to an audience, they can be incredibly distracting. if they persist throughout the presentation. So, Amy, what kind of things can we do to go about reducing filler words? Can we eliminate them completely, perhaps? Perhaps, we should aim to reduce them as much as possible. If colleagues to say filler words are to our presentation like clutter is to our graphs, it's just things that are unnecessary that get in the way of the communication. So, the more we can work to reduce them, the better. And you asked, "How can we do that? " I think you gave a fantastic example of doing so, which is just building awareness. So, first understanding that you have a filler word, what is that filler word is a great first step. And so, if you're not sure what your filler words are, you could certainly ask somebody because somebody else probably could clue you into your filler words. You want to discover them yourself, a fantastic way to do that is to record yourself and watch it back. It's very uncomfortable, but very productive in helping you understand how you look and sound, and so you can work to identify what are your filler words, and more importantly, why and when they're occurring. Is it a case where you're pausing, using um not knowing what to say, uh because you haven't practiced enough, you don't know your content well enough? Or is it a place where perhaps you're nervous, you're worried about forgetting something that could be an opportunity for you to either practice more, think about how you can build some cues into your content to support you more. And so, getting an understanding of why you have them, and then working to curb them based on what the situation is. If it's getting more familiar with what you want to say, or if it's just calming your nerves. I know I am someone who is a nervous presenter, and I just want the whole thing to be over, and so I start talking as fast as I possibly can, so that it's done. And when I start to do that, recognize that, that's a point for me to just tell myself I need to slow down, I need to be more intentional in my pacing, and maybe even introduce some pausing rather than a filler word. So, all of these aspects will help you get more comfortable with what you're saying, and also make you sound more credible, and come across like somebody who folks want to pay attention to and listen to. But it's okay to have a few, isn't it? I mean, we can't strip them out all together. Well, if we did, it would be back to the land of scripts again, wouldn't it? And everything precisely written and documented. And so, I do feel there's an element of a few filler words here and there that can make you sound a little bit more natural. But those repetitive ones that continually appear, yeah, certainly we want to make sure we look to reduce those as much as possible. And Amy, you had great thoughts about how we can do it, listen to ourselves back, find out from those our loved ones which could be the most annoying filler words we often will say. And yeah, I do like the categories of filler words you mentioned there, Amy. The ones where we're looking for a pause, the ones where maybe we're looking for affirmation, confirmation, right at the end of you know, all those various ones that maybe we're just a little bit nervous. We want our audience to like us, to buy into what we're saying, and so we add these words in to try and get that sense of confirmation from them as well. Good stuff. Well, we are coming to the This has gone very quickly, hasn't it? But we are coming to the end of our time together now. Amy, any last thoughts or actually, I'll tell you what, let's share your favorite tip when it comes to presenting. What comes to mind as a golden rule for you always try to apply in this space? Top tip I give myself as well as my university students before a big presentation is to breathe. Slow down your breathing before you begin. So, box breathing is one approach or just taking a four breath in and a four count breath out is a way to just calm your nerves. It helps with your parasympathetic system. And remember that you have put in the hard work and that you will have a stellar presentation. Just give yourself a little bit of a pep talk beforehand and often leads to a much better outcome. We have a tons of tips on developing successful content and delivering it in a stellar manner. In our books, storytelling with you particularly focuses on the path to planning, creating, and delivering a stellar presentation. But if you're a fan of the podcast, there is other episodes you can certainly reference as well. Speak So

Others Listen is episode 86. We talked a little bit about questions. We have a whole podcast on questions, episode 46 Cole and Alex talk about the questions of questions. So, certainly more to revisit in that regard as well. Simon, what is your favorite tip? I consider myself to be quite organized, and I hate being late or even anything approaching late. And everyone on the team will know that I think pretty much any time we've ever met together, I've always been the first one there and probably a lot earlier than I needed to be. But, my top tip is just to get there early, make yourself comfortable. If it's a nerve-wracking experience presenting, best thing you can do is get yourself familiar with your surroundings, work out where things are. And some of these are silly things like the coffee machine, the toilets. Understanding all of those aspects just take that sense of unknown around and out. And that really allow you to focus in on what you're going to be there to do, which is delivering this presentation. Maybe walk around the stage, get yourself a sense of some of the key things you might be saying, who you might look at when you're saying them. Maybe if you're sitting down, it's a boardroom style, pick your seat. Make sure it's not the uh CEO's seat, like I did in that previous time. Pick yourself a seat, make sure it's got a good sense where you can plug in your laptop and people can see the screen. All of these factors will just make you feel or make me feel, and hopefully you as well, a little bit more comfortable. So, when it does come to that time and you've been introduced by the facilitator, you're standing up and you're just giving yourself your introduction to your audience, you can really make sure you deliver that stellar presentation. Cuz that's what we're hoping to achieve, all of us. So, thanks to everyone, first of all, to uh who shared their comments on YouTube. It's fantastic to read through them all. Hopefully, we've done a good job in answering some of these challenges. Hopefully, for those who listened to the podcast, you've got some good tips on how you can overcome some of these presentation challenges as well. Thank you very much to you, Amy, for your insights. — And thank you to everyone for listening. Hope you all took away a good tip or two that will help with your presentations in the future. Until next time, thank you very much once again and goodbye. Thanks everyone.