Useful Feedback On Your Presentation or Speech – Talking in Public

Useful Feedback On Your Presentation or Speech

Do you really want feedback on your speech or presentation?

Could you just analyse how you feel about it yourself and not have to put yourself under the scrutiny of another person?

How would they assess your performance anyway?

How much help would feedback be for you to fine tune your skills?

These are valid questions – ones I have asked myself in the past, ones I hear often from those with whom I am working, ones that are worth asking. So let’s take them one by one.

Do you really want feedback on your speech or presentation?
You might not really want it but you should get it anyway! Feedback based on a set criteria that you determine yourself can be a powerful base for making your skills the best they can be. You enlist the assistance of someone who is in the place of hearing and/or seeing you so you can get the audience perspective on your presentation skills.

This is not about the content of your presentation unless that affects the presentation itself (e.g using too many statistics talked about elsewhere). It is about the style and method of information transfer you use and how effective it was for someone in the audience.


Without this feedback, you will not be able to measure how much you are improving your skills.

no more um

Could you just analyse how you feel about it yourself and not have to put yourself under the scrutiny of another person?
Yes, but this would only be half the feedback that can help you improve your skills. Think of it as getting to a destination – you could go the same way every time and feel that it was a satisfactory trip but if you talk to someone else about the same trip they may have a faster, more scenic, less traffic route that you could try.


Every presentation or speech you make is putting you under the scrutiny of others. Make it help you to improve.

Writing a Speech

How would they assess your performance anyway?
This is the best part. You get to choose. I keep a list of areas where those I coach will most commonly find room to improve. When we have a group session, each person has a different area of feedback on which to concentrate – one will look at voice tone, one at the number of connector words (and, umm, you know etc), one will look at repetitive gestures.

The important issue to keep in mind that this feedback is about your presentation style not about the content. You will know from audience feedback at the time whether the content was right.

good news bad news

How much help would feedback be for you to fine tune your skills?
As you have probably gathered by now, I believe this type of feedback is vital for you to be able to improve your skills. We can all tell ourselves we need to be better. The hard part is knowing what to do in a practical sense.

This type of feedback will help you determine what part of your presentation style needs more work – voice, stance, gestures, pacing of presentation etc.