The Introverted Presenter

The introvert is a personality type that draws energy from the outside inward. According to standard personality testing assessments, most people are introverts and no group is more introverted than technical professionals. Introverts are congenitally programmed to recoil from the prospect of public speaking with fear and loathing, yet making presentations to expert and non-expert audiences is an inescapable requirement for career advancement in any technical field. Presentation coach Richard Tierney rides to the rescue of fellow introverts in the IT and engineering sectors with The Introverted Presenter—his fail-safe guide to delivering competent presentations, no matter how unsuited by nature you might be to the performing arts.

This short book lays out the complete process guaranteed to raise you from a debilitating state of terror and aversion to a comfortable place of clarity, calm, and competence—perhaps even brilliance, if you can train yourself to convert the free energy of your fear into controlled performance. Tierney repeatedly warns his introvert readers that they risk presentation fiasco if they skip, skimp, or change the order of any of the ten steps he prescribes for thoroughly and efficiently preparing their presentations.

The surefire sequence of steps for The Introverted Presenter begins with defining your presentation’s audience and objective. The next step is to write the script of your speech in stages, constructing it on the basis of proven structural rules, cognitive laws, and dramatic tricks. Then you incrementally refine and tighten your script by delivering it iteratively, first in front of a mirror and then in front of increasingly critical test audiences, progressing from your cat to your boss. When you have a well-constructed and sound-tested script in hand and only then, you may create some slides to graft into your script in support of your opening action call and your concluding takeaways, which you commit to memory. Your slides should be limited to the smallest number possible (even zero) and the fewest possible words.

Richard Tierney is a presentation consultant who has worked with more than 60 of the Fortune 100. He is also a coach at SupporTED, which provides coaching to the TED Fellows community. He has 30 years of experience in 30 countries as a business coach, innovation consultant, creative director, conference organizer, and media producer in the IT, automotive, and consumer electronics sectors. Despite being a congenital introvert, Tierney presents regularly at industry conferences in Europe and Asia. He is a council member of the Association for Conferences and Events (ACE) and a member the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA). Tierney has extensive experience in theater and television and holds professional accreditations from the Royal College of Art and London Business School, the University of London.