Why Your Presentations Aren’t Landing and How to Fix It. Stop thinking about your slides, and start thinking about your audience.

When you need to deliver a formal presentation at work, you usually have an unstated emotional reaction toward the moment.

You might be fatalistic: “I just need to get through this.” Perhaps, you’re excited: “I’m going to leverage my theatre background and make this fun for everyone!” You could be petrified: “I’m going to bomb, lose my job, and starve to death.”

Attitude drives how you prepare for the event. If you’re eager to strut your stuff, you focus on being creative in your presentation design and delivery. Nervous? Lean into your content and usually overwhelm people with details. If giving presentations is routine in your role, you might recycle your go-to format and delivery approach, which might come across as if you’re “phoning it in.”

Shift the focus from yourself to your audience.

The next time you are asked to give a presentation, consider adopting a different attitude. Ask yourself, “What do I owe this group of people?” Thinking about meeting the audience’s needs and goals as your goal will help you decide not only what information to share and what depth of detail, but also what level of energy you need to use in your delivery.

You’ll have shifted your focus from yourself to the audience. Ironically, thinking of your obligation to your audience will likely decrease rather than increase your stress as you prepare since you will have sharpened your focus.

Define what your audience needs from you.

Your “debt” to the audience will vary. Do you owe them any of the following?

• Insight into the details of a new project
• Encouragement to meet their goals
• Enthusiasm for a new initiative?
• Empathy regarding their struggles
• Conviction that they can accomplish the task
• Confidence that you can do the job

In all cases, you own your audience a valuable use of their time. You need to articulate a clear message, prepare materials that are easily understood, and consider the likely next steps based on how they hink the discussion will evolve.

Make one clear message the goal of every presentation.

Regarding your message, ask yourself, “After this meeting, if my audience remembers only one sentence about my topic, what is that sentence?” Keep that message short. It should be no more than 10 words if possible.

Use simple language. Your content might be complex and full of necessary jargon, but the key message should be easy to remember.  Repeat your message often to highlight it for your listeners. You should not only tell them the message but tell them that it is the message. Use lines like: “The most important thing for you to know is….,” “If you only take away one thing from this discussion, know…,” and “The key idea is….”

If they all have the same clear, succinct message resonating in their head, you’ve accomplished your goal. If they all leave with a lot of information to ponder and to craft their own conclusions, you have lost control of the message. In that case, you haven’t made an impact, and you’ve wasted their time and yours.

Clarity, structure, and next steps create real impact.

Your supporting materials for the meeting will be effective if you again think about what you owe your audience. If you are speaking to a regulator about your risk controls, you’ll need to go into much more detail than if you are speaking to an internal audience about something more benign.

Think about your audience’s knowledge base and what jargon they will and won’t understand. On any slide that includes a graph or chart, explain the parameters of the visual before sharing your main point. In short, tell them what they are looking at, before you tell them why they are looking at it. Doing so will increase their comprehension of the data and create better buy-in for your recommendation.

Showing a complex graph and starting with, “As you can clearly see,” confuses your audience since they are busy trying to understand your visuals. Instead, starting with, “On this pie chart, the blue represents X, the red represents Y, and the yellow represents Z,” acclimates your audience to the content. Then you can share, “We’re here today to discuss how to these elements have shifted relative to each other over the last year.”

At the end of a meeting, people need to know where they’re headed. Accountability for executing on next steps is vital to move a project forward. Everyone in the room should know who is responsible for what and when. Without that clarity, you’ll likely be revisiting the same conversation in your next meeting, which again, sounds like a waste of time.

By focusing on what the audience needs from you, you’ll automatically relax and focus less on yourself and more on the needs of the group to whom you are speaking.

Originally published on Inc. Magazine.