Image: jimmiehomeschoolmom (Flickr)
You’ve practiced until you can recite the speech backwards, you know everything, you’re totally relaxed and you can imagine yourself giving a energetic, exciting presentation.
There is one final preparation step – notecards.
Notecards are not there to be your whole script, instead they’re there as a prompt and an emergency backup.
There should be a notecard for each section or paragraph of your presentation. This keeps it simple.
You will always know which section you’re on so that if you have a moment of uncertainty you only need to check that one card not search through a whole script – it’s simple and efficient.
What should you put on your notecards?
As little as possible. It shouldn’t be the whole speech, instead it should really just be the main points and maybe a few difficult to remember facts or statistics.
Where do you put the cards? That’s up to you, but they need to be easily accessible. One of the best places is in your shirt or jacket pocket, so that they are comfortingly “close to your heart”. When you need to use them then take them out and slide them across the lectern/table in front of you, allowing easy selection of the right notecard.
Alternatively you could fan them across the lectern/table at the start of the meeting and then refer to them discretely if required.