Have you considered audience perception?
It is rare to see presentations with flawless slides, perfect English, and airtight arguments. The reason is not only skill level. One essential ingredient is often missing: audience perception.
In other words, empathy.
Most presentations are designed as one-way outputs of information. The presenter focuses on covering the content or proving expertise. The priority becomes their own need to look competent, to get through the material, and to impress. What gets lost is the audience’s need to understand, absorb, and take away value. A presentation only works when the audience is truly taken into consideration.
Empathy in presentations means:
Thinking ahead: who is in the room, where they are from, and what they care about.
Reading the moment: whether people are engaged, confused, curious, or bored.
Shaping the delivery: choosing words, tone of voice, volume, visuals, and examples that actually connect.
When this process is ignored, slides become cluttered, language turns complicated and unrelatable, and arguments feel heavy. The focus stays on the presenter’s needs rather than the audience’s needs. Unfortunately, that produces a predictable result: the audience disconnects, forgets what they have just seen, and leaves with nothing new. This dynamic almost always goes hand in hand with nerves and insecurity.
Yes, I am referring to confidence. That famous word that society loves to throw around and advises you to have, as if people simply forget to have it.
Here’s the hidden part no one tells you: empathy doesn’t just improve slides and arguments, it also benefits the speaker. Once the focus is on the audience’s needs instead of your own, confidence shows up. Tah dah!
If you learn to adopt empathy into your presentations, your slides will naturally become more engaging, your arguments will be sharper, and you will make yourself relatable, understandable, and memorable. Work on empathy along with everything else, and the magic will happen.
I promise.
— Emilia