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The pause is a powerful, though underutilized presentation tool.

There are several reasons why pauses are effective in presentations. First, pauses give your audience a chance to think about and absorb what you just said. Pausing also gives you a chance to breathe properly.

Pauses can also help you eliminate “ums” and “ahs” that tend to creep into your presentation when you are not sure what’s coming next. If you replace your “ums” and “ahs” with a pause while you think of what to say next, you will sound more confident and the audience won’t be distracted.

Additionally, pauses convey confidence – powerful people pause. They have so engaged the audience that people are waiting eagerly for their next words.

How long should you pause? Enough that you can catch your breath and the audience can absorb what you’ve just said, but not so long that they will think you’ve forgotten what to say next. Keep in mind that it will feel longer to you than it does to the audience – record yourself so you hear long it sounds.

And if you smile confidently when pausing for a few seconds, the audience will see that it’s just a pause and that you didn’t lose your place. If you do it well, they won’t even be conscious that you’re pausing and it will just be a natural part of your presentation.

The next time that you have to give a presentation, try pausing rather than rushing from one sentence to the next – you’ll become a more powerful and effective presenter.

When giving a presentation props are usually a good idea. They grab the audience’s attention, give a visual representation and they add life to what could be yet another dreaded mandatory meeting. When are they not a good idea… when they are not rehearsed.

Using supportive material and visual aids during a presentation often proves awkward for speakers who lack practice in coordinating what they do at the podium with what they say. Rehearsal is the only solution for this. To arrive at a podium without ever having pressed the projector on cue is taking a foolish chance.

Rehearsal with visual aids should include thorough familiarization with the content of each individual aid, and actual practice in the use of equipment or performance of an action. If a blackboard illustration is to be drawn, it should be practiced at least once on the blackboard to be used in the actual presentation. If a movie or film strip is to be shown, preview it before presenting it.

Many presenters may also overlook what use to be the most commonly found prop, the microphone. However, you would be surprised at the amount of people that are unduly influenced by the presence of a microphone. With the modern equipment and techniques available today, it is often unnecessary to use one. Sound engineers, when present, give all of the necessary instructions and signals, and monitor and adjust the equipment to fit the individual. With public address systems, trainers will hear their own voices and be able to adjust position for optimal speaking distance. However, not all situations offer these modern conveniences. If the trainer feels uncomfortable using a microphone, it is doubly critical that the rehearsal include it, or a model if a real one is not available.

Metrics are essential management tools designed to provide specific measures of effectiveness of company programs and activities relative to stated goals, objectives, and plans. They describe what needs to be done, how things should be done, and who should be doing such courses of action. The answers to these questions determine the programs, activities, strategies, resources, as well as expected outputs that are specific and measurable. There are many kinds of metrics in the arena. You can draw up metrics for almost all kinds of company programs, from personnel development programs, marketing and sales campaigns to resource management, planning processes, and many others. However, these metrics will be useless unless they are disseminated and properly explained to the concerned people. One easy way of making people understand company metrics is through the use of metrics PowerPoint.

PowerPoint presentations have many advantages over other kinds of presentations when it comes to driving a point across. Presentations can be concise and brief, yet effective and persuasive with the use of diagrams, graphs, and texts. Naturally, all these things can also be done through printed documents, but PowerPoint presentations can be manipulated more easily to highlight or stress a point. You can enlarge or focus particular parts of the presentation that will help you convey the message more effectively. In addition, there are less distractions to your audience since they do not have to look down to read printed materials in order to follow your discussion. Power point presentations are easier to digest and you can stimulate interest by adding thought-provoking images.

All these advantages are available to you when you make you metric presentation. But it must be remembered that all these conveniences are just aids, and the most important ingredient still that will hold the interest of you audience is the relevance of the contents of your presentation.

Presentation of metrics must follow an orderly pattern. If you are presenting a marketing campaign metrics, it would be best to highlight the goals of such a campaign, perhaps by placing it in the first slide in bold and big letters and accompanying it with representative images of what the accomplishment of the goals will do for the company as a whole. Next will be the objectives, which, of course, must be achievable, measurable, specific, time bound, and the like. Those objectives must have the aforementioned qualities is very important since it establishes the measures with which accomplishments can be evaluated on their effectiveness. Do not forget also what many managers often forget – the mechanisms to be used in monitoring the implementation and evaluation of results.

The planned activities envisioned to achieve the objectives follows. This is the most interesting part because now, your audience will know what their roles in the campaigns will be, with whom they will work with, what resources are needed to operationalize the campaign, and most importantly, what particular activities are to be conducted and their specific outputs.

The metrics PowerPoint presentation must be simple and straight to the point. You can make a few digressions to amuse, arouse, and sustain interest to, but nothing will hold the interest of your audience better than relevant content.