How to Conquer Nervousness of PowerPoint Presentation in Front of People

The reason why you are nervous is because you have too high an expectation of yourself. Let me take a metaphor as an example. If we see you successfully make the PowerPoint presentation with ease as walking through a board which is 50cm wide and 10m long. So if you look at yourself correctly and you will not feel nervous with the PowerPoint presentation, it’s just like the board is putting on the ground.

Now imagine that we put the board between two buildings and at 10 stories high, can you still walk through it easily. This is why you feel nervous with PowerPoint presentation; because you have set a goal too high and the nervousness is coming from your fear of lose.

There is one story about a professor and a student. The professor asked the student to write an essay and told him don’t matter the essay is good or bad, just write the essay all by himself. The student followed the instruction and finished the essay and finally find out the essay is better than any other essays he had written! This method actually takes off the mental burdens just like we put the board back to the ground. It is a good method to relax yourself especially when a task is too hard or complicated to finish at once.

Some Practical Method to Help You Get Through Nervousness

1. Set a timeline of your PowerPoint Presentation.

To avoid the nervousness when making a PowerPoint presentation, first you can estimate how much time you will need to finish it. And then set the timeline. That means you set time duration between two slides and make the PowerPoint play automatically. When you are facing the audience, your focus will be on the pace and speed you speak to match the set timeline.

2. Convert the PowerPoint to PDF.

This makes your PowerPoint more like a book and thus seems professional and impressing. This unique performance will make you more confident.

3. Present your PowerPoint as a movie.

When watching a movie, people tend to relax and more likely to fix their attention on the screen. In this way, less eyesight will drop on you and you will feel less pressure. Besides, view PowerPoint as movie is very interesting but you’d better add some background music and video clips.