Introverts Guide to Presentations - For Data Analysts
This guide is designed to help you get from a place of zero presentation experience and overwhelming anxiety to being able to present with ease. While there is no magic pill solution, this will help to provide you with a path forward.
Learning proper presentation skills was a catalyst for the upward trajectory of my own career. I wrote this guide to make these skills accessible, in the hopes of helping others do the same. This is a skill that is often overlooked but is regularly a top factor that propels you to advance your career quickly. Additionally, more data professionals with good presentation skills ultimately leads to more data being accessible to others where it previously wasn’t. Data-driven decision-making is the inspiration behind my career as a data analyst and I believe this is an important topic to discuss. Now, onto the actual advice.
While presentations are scary for everyone, they can be especially challenging for introverts who prefer listening over talking, and process information internally. I was one of these introverts myself, up until I had to make a decision: do I continue to avoid presentations and stunt my career, OR do I embrace them and thrive? Clearly, I chose the latter.
This is not to say it was an easy task. Luckily for me, I faced this challenge with the help and support of an amazing manager. You may not be in the same situation, but that doesn’t mean you’re stuck facing this alone. My intent is that you use this guide as a tool to support your journey towards becoming a confident presenter. However, this will not only help you with presentations, but it will also build your confidence for any other public speaking in your life - it’s all related.
This is not a guide to becoming the world’s best public speaker. This is a guide to becoming comfortable enough to talk in front of groups of people when needed. While this will reduce some anxiety around public speaking, it won’t fully remove it. Even after giving hundreds of presentations, live demonstrations, speeches, and everything in between, I still get nervous before each one. This has reduced drastically over the years but it hasn’t gone away and I doubt it ever will.
Why is presenting an important skill for data analysts?
This is a question I had in my first year as a data analyst. I was under the impression that my job was to surface actionable insights and give my client guidance to grow in one way or another. In the beginning, this meant creating a report or dashboard and sending it off with a few comments over email.
That all changed when I surfaced something truly impactful and was asked to present it to a group of 15 people. They were impressed with the insights I had discovered and had questions about how to best take action. They also wanted to know what other gaps might exist, as well as my thoughts on how to discover them.
As I mentioned, I had a top-notch manager. She didn’t just throw me into the deep end and watch me drown. Instead, she presented my findings and had me there to answer questions and back up any aspects that she wasn’t as well versed in. That alone was terrifying for me, so we started working on a plan to get me comfortable with presenting to any group, by myself. What follows is a combination of our plan and all of the additional pieces that I’ve learned and improved upon over the 6+ years since that day.
Presenting is important because data analysis is much more than just pulling data and turning it into charts and dashboards, it’s also communicating about and with data. This is a spectrum that goes from communicating via email to your manager all the way to communicating with large groups in public. This is a crucial part of the job, and not taking the time to work on this skill will stunt your career growth eventually. Improving upon it early will do the opposite and accelerate you forward.
It’s also important because presenting allows you to show that you know your stuff. Having someone else present your work can be functional, but it sells you short. You don’t get to go into detail on all of the information that you worked for weeks or months to dig through. Presenting shifts you into view and is how you start to be seen as an expert in a niche. It also means you don’t need support from someone else for this skill and you can command a higher salary. Who doesn’t love a higher salary?
How do I start presenting if I’m terrified?
You start with low stakes and low formality
For me, this was a mixture of discussing my findings with my manager and a senior coworker. It didn’t feel like presenting because I didn’t have a specific desired outcome and I didn’t have any visuals. This was simply a discussion at my desk (or over a video call). (As an aside, the best presentations that I’ve ever done have felt much more like a discussion, but more on that later).
After doing this 10-20 times, I was ready to move forward. The next step looked more like a typical presentation, but it was only with my manager and this same coworker. Because I had trust with them, I felt less anxious. This was still low stakes, but the formality was increased. I stood in front of them but only in a small office with slides to assist me. It was still mostly a discussion but the expectation was for me to lead it. Presenting via video to a manager and a coworker is a good starting point if you’re a remote worker.
After each session, we did a debrief. One of the ground rules we laid out at the beginning of this process was that we would always look for ways to improve. This didn’t only go for my own presentations - my manager would also insist on constructive feedback after her presentations. I learned to see feedback as my way to improve, and it was delivered in that sense. It didn’t feel like criticism but instead learning - an important mental distinction even if they look the same. I highly suggest that you do this. While uncomfortable at first, it will drastically reduce the number of times you need to present to become proficient. A trade-off that I feel is easily worth it.
We increased the stakes of my presentations by taking two different paths. The first was to present to a more senior person - my manager’s manager who also happened to head our broader 20-person team. I knew that this wasn’t quite as intense as presenting to a client, but that this was also a time to prove myself. He was included in the debrief after as well, adding to the learning. This brought back my initial feelings of anxiety but after a few times, it was normalized.
The second route that we went down was presenting to a group of my peers. When an opportunity arose that made sense for me to speak to them all as a group, I took it. After the first one, we realized that my findings would be important for them all to know so this became a regular occurrence. This was also when I started to see that I was being perceived differently in my role. I was starting to be recognized as an expert in a very narrow area, which felt incredibly rewarding.
We continued this process until I was in front of the biggest or most senior groups that I could present to. I was still anxious before each one, but I had some other tricks up my sleeve that I was able to employ.
Ways to reduce stress when presenting
Become well-versed in the topic you’re presenting
The first thing I did to ease my stress and anxiety was to become very familiar with the topic I was presenting. I would read over my findings along with the data that got me there. I looked to ensure my conclusions were logical and, where they weren’t, I made sure to have additional evidence on hand. This also meant doing a significant amount of rehearsing as well as taking the time to write down potential questions that I might get from the audience. These tactics enabled me to focus more on how I was communicating versus having to remember all the details, which leads me to my next point.
Have a script of sorts to go off of
How in-depth you go with this is up to you, though I don’t recommend writing it out word for word. My personal preference is to have my main points written down and a few sub-points that I want to hit within each. This is enough to keep me on track but not so much that I need to remember exactly how I’m going to say something. It can also fit on one sheet of paper or your screen without scrolling - a nice trick that allows you to read without it being obvious to an audience. Though your audience knowing that you have some notes is perfectly acceptable, especially early on in your presenting journey.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, when I hear of someone winging it, I’ve found 1 of 2 things to be true. If they do a great job, they know the subject matter inside and out or they’ve done a very similar presentation many times before. I eventually reached this point when I was doing the same demo twice a week for a year. My script was eventually in my head. I knew the main questions that would be asked. I knew where I would need more clarification, and I knew how to get the audience back if I started to lose their attention.
In the opposite case, they genuinely do wing it and it's obvious. They ramble and seem to zig-zag their way to their points. It’s painful for everyone involved and easily avoidable - don’t be this person!
Have someone else introduce you
Another aspect that I’ve found helpful with a group that I’m not familiar with is being introduced by someone they know. Even a few quick words to say why I’m there and why they should care can go a long way. We trust people we know and being vouched for can soften up a room considerably.
For heavy or important presentations, and especially with demos, I’ve taken this a step further and had a second person there with me as a ‘colour commentator’ of sorts. They add interesting details, point things out that would seem unnatural in my train of thought, and drive home any important points that I may have been lighter on. I’ve found this to work best with someone that I’ve presented around before. It is also crucial to decide on the points where their input might be most important - this can go downhill quickly if you’re cutting one another off, so use it wisely!
Thriving as a presenter
After a while, you’ll start focusing on how to go from simply being able to present to figuring out how to enjoy doing it. One determinant of joy that I’ve found is the amount of interaction that you have with those you’re presenting to. When it’s a one-way conversation, you often leave feeling that they didn’t absorb what you said. On the other hand, when they spend as much time talking as you do, it feels like they’re getting a lot out of it.
A good strategy to kick things off on the right foot is to engage with the audience early and have moments where you meaningfully engage. Some easy ways to do this are:
Asking them to throw out guesses for a big or surprising number (10 million ice cream cones sold every summer?!)
Presenting a finding and asking if anyone has thoughts as to why this came to be
If you’re running a demo, ask them to pick where you’ll go (within reason - binary choices might make your life easier on this one)
This can take extra effort but it pays off when your audience absorbs more information and engages with you.
Speaking of absorbing more information, learning a bit about how to convey information best is useful.
Humans naturally remember stories better than facts
This doesn’t mean that you can’t include facts, but that it can be useful to turn them into a story of sorts. Even something as simple as the difference between saying “100 ice cream cones are bought per day” and “Every day, ice cream craving customers buy 100 ice cream cones and enjoy them as a way to stave off the summer heat” can help. In the second version, an image comes to mind of people enjoying their ice cream on a hot day. You could go a step further and include the highest-selling flavour and bring a bit more detail to that as well.
Stories also have the added bonus of being easier for you, the presenter, to tell. They follow a flow and your brain doesn’t need to remember each individual part. Like singing the lyrics to a song, once you start you can remember pieces that you struggle with individually. It’s also easier to sound natural telling a story - it’s something we all do on a regular basis.
Lastly, analogies are your friend. I like to use ice cream sales for almost everything. They’re light, fun, and easy to relate to. They can also be a great way to transform a potentially hard-to-understand topic. For example, I have used them to turn something complicated, like the metrics that Software as a Service (SaaS) companies use, into something that we all understand (buying an ice cream cone). I recommend having a go-to analogy for when your audience is struggling to wrap their head around what you’re saying. I’ve commonly found that simply changing the data to ice cream sales helps me a lot. The audience can understand this intuitively so they don’t need to exert mental energy on the data. They can instead focus on what you’re trying to explain which ensures that they leave with a clear picture of the information that you’re trying to convey. It also hopefully shows everyone that you’re a capable presenter who should be given a raise immediately!
