I recently put together an improv for presentation skills curriculum for a client looking for an interactive workshop to focus on presentation skills (public speaking skills) for their small team of 8 professionals. I thought the conversations we had leading up to the event (still in the near future) were interesting and worth sharing with others. As you might imagine, strategies for presenting effectively vary from company to company and my client was particularly interested in aspects of improv’s approach to public speaking that I thought were unique.

In our initial call, four ideas resonated greatly:
Confidence is an act of generosity when presenting.
Worrying about your performance is selfish, worry about your listeners instead.
Each group of listeners (or audience) is different, and each group varies day by day, so a set presentation that can’t adjust to where they are is not going to cut it.
By believing in yourself and sharing your ideas you will come across as creative and in the moment… a dynamic speaker.
I’m going to break each of these four points down and share exercises that address these ideas as I do.
CONFIDENCE IS AN ACT OF GENEROSITY WHEN PRESENTING
It is a somewhat counterintuitive truth that the first big laugh in an improv show often comes from a moment that isn’t funny per se, but is instead very confident. This is because audiences are often nervous for the performers, so when someone steps forward and confidently bellows, “Welcome to my barber shop!” people laugh out of relief. They know the performers feel good about what they are doing so now they feel they have permission to feel good too.
The same dynamic is at play when making a professional presentation.
People know that public speaking conjures up very negative feelings among many professionals. I think there is even a saying, something like the number one thing people are scared of is death and the number two thing is public speaking. So people are understandably nervous for the speaker when watching a professional presentation.
Confidence can set them at ease. If the presenter seems happy to be making the presentation and appears to feel good about how it is going, even if it is going badly, listeners will feel more comfortable. The worst presentation is the one that asks listeners to feel bad for the presenter.
While true, this can be hard for speakers to accept because projecting confidence can feel arrogant or self aggrandizing. The opposite is true. By adopting an air of self assured confidence you are taking care of your listener’s feelings.
A big part of being able to adopt such an attitude is being okay with mistakes or (even better) believing that there are no such things as mistakes. You are simply giving a presentation. If you stumble over your words or mistakenly say the wrong thing, well that is quite common during presentations.
If stumbling over a word or saying the wrong thing is common and to be expected, how can it be a mistake? Why it is no more a mistake than someone selling peanuts at a baseball game. It is commonplace.
A good exercise to use to drive home this point is Badada.
You can read more about the exercise by following the link, but here is what you need to know for this post. All Badada asks players to do is say a word every so often. Could be any word in any language.
It is amazingly easy and yet people tie themselves up in knots when playing it because they are trying to be great at something easy. They judge anything not great as a mistake they should be embarrassed about.
Play this game to help people adjust their attention away from finding their own mistakes to projecting confidence.
WORRYING ABOUT YOUR PERFORMANCE IS SELFISH, WORRY ABOUT YOUR LISTENERS INSTEAD
The point of a presentation is to communicate ideas. The point is not for you to look or seem amazing. Any presentation you give is not about you, it is about your listeners.
Sometimes improvisers freeze on stage, like a deer in headlights. This happens when improvisers are focused on themselves and whether they think their contributions are any good. Improv teaches performers to focus on their scene partner instead by asking themselves questions, such as, “How can I support Becky more in this scene?”
The difference in worrying about your scene partner instead of yourself is tremendous. It frees performers up to take risks, stay in the moment and play loose.
Guess what?
The same thing will happen for you as a speaker if you focus your attention on your listeners by asking yourself questions like:
Is my audience understanding what I’m saying?
Is there anything I can do to make this clearer for them?
What does my audience, in particular, need from me in order to understand my message more clearly?
Instead of questions like:
Do people think I know what I am talking about?
I wonder if I look as bad in my pants as I think I do?
Am I qualified to be giving this presentation?
There are many improv exercises that help us focus on our scene partners, but one I like a lot is Made Up Story Hotspot. This exercise has players take joint responsibility for telling a made up story. One person starts and others take over by simply tapping the speaking player on the shoulder and picking up the story wherever it left off.
People find this exercise terrifying, because no one wants to ruin the story and no one knows what happens next. People also don’t know how long they will be talking before someone else takes over, as they are not in control of that decision. So there is a natural fear to tag in and put yourself in the hot seat.
For the same reason, it is extremely caretaking to tag another player out, relieving them of the weight of telling the story and taking on that weight yourself. Players worried about how they seem (ie worried about themselves) won’t tag in, while players trying to help their teammates will.
I’d run the game at least two times and probably three if playing it at a work event, celebrating acts of bravery and silly moments in between exercises. It is also a good game to use to point out that mistakes are no big deal and that the funniest moments often come from contributions which, looked at from a certain angle, could be considered errors.
EACH GROUP OF LISTENERS IS DIFFERENT
It seems obvious right? But we can forget that every group is different, so no one presentation can be equally successful for every group.
Some differences are obvious. People may speak different languages, come from different cultures or walk into an event with different expectations. The day after a national election will probably find groups of Republicans feeling very differently than groups of Democrats.
Other differences are more nuanced. The mood of a room, the time of day and its proximity to the end of business or lunch, local cultural or business events that may be impacting your listeners on a conscious or subconscious level.
Obvious or subtle, these differences are all important and a skilled presenter works to adjust to the audience in front of them.
I’ll give you an example from improv history.
When Second City opened its doors in 1959 it sought to maintain a certain decorum. Yes, it spotlighted coarse comedians like John Belushi and Bill Murray, but a hard rule was no cursing onstage. Audiences appreciated it and the institution may have faltered without this rule.
But almost 14 years later, on the evening after JFK had been assassinated, a performer took to the Second City stage and dropped (or more roared out) an F Bomb.
The audience was in full agreement. And it never would have been a mere 24 hours earlier.
The Clapping Game (which you can read a lot about at the link) is a great game to play when practicing going to your audience. It teaches you to value successful collaboration over doing things the right way. And what else is communication except for collaboration between a speaker and a listener?
BELIEVING IN YOURSELF WILL HELP YOU STAY IN THE MOMENT AND BE MORE CREATIVE
Improvisers know a secret. There is no difference between creative people and uncreative people, except that creative people share their ideas freely and uncreative people censor themselves. All people have, roughly, the same number of ideas. (Robin Williams excluded, obviously.)
Uncreative people often censor themselves out of a fear of making a mistake. But this fear will hurt your ability to respond to your listeners' verbal and nonverbal cues. You must be able to adjust to what you find in front of you in order to be a skilled presenter. You cannot do that if you do not trust that your ideas are good enough.
The very good news is that your ideas are indeed, good enough.
You just need to share them with confidence.
I like using a modified version of Yes And Conversations to illustrate this point. Normally used for team building or collaboration, the exercise can be tweaked as an examination of how you and your scene partner feel when hearing Yes to your ideas instead of hearing No to the same.
Other exercises you might use include Seven Things, Expert Witness or Guest Panel.
I hope you've found this post on improv for presentation skills as interesting as the conversation I had with my client. I'll update this post in a few weeks once the workshop applying these values and exercises has been completed.
..."need to get over the fear of making a mistake"....that's a biggie, when doing a presentation. Once over that, someone can just be who-they-are and get on with the job at hand, and be interesting. I've done [probably a hundred] corporate or training presentations, and any time I was worried about MYSELF, it stopped being interesting. For sure, improv will improve self reliance for anyone!
I love the part when you say as a speaker you're selfish for worrying about your speech performance, instead of worrying about the audience. When you think about the audience that is empathy. If the audience knows you care about them that make them feel it's not I or they but it's we, us. We are in this together.