Through virtual and in-person workshops around the globe, we have taught tens of thousands of people how to communicate effectively with data. This series captures some of the noteworthy questions we hear during those sessions—and our answers.

In my role supporting our corporate leadership team, I often need to build one presentation, and then deliver it over and over again as I bring it to various local and regional offices. How do I keep myself from getting bored when I have to tell essentially the same story 5, 10, or 20 times in a row?

A woman sitting in front of her open laptop is bored, possibly because this is the 100th time she's had to deliver the same presentation.

Anyone who has to share the same communication multiple times is going to struggle with this challenge. For a presentation to be effective and compelling, we as storytellers have to be engaged with it, and it’s natural to find that an easier task when the story is fresh to us, versus when we’ve delivered it dozens of times.

There are a few techniques to use that we’ve found effective in keeping us present, focused, and compelling to an audience, even when telling a story that we’ve told many times before.

1. Since every audience is unique, every presentation will be unique as well.

If you are delivering a communication to a dozen different local or regional offices, each one of those offices is going to have a different set of local competitors, a different set of circumstances, or a unique composition of team members. Because of this, even if 80–90% of your presentation is the same every time, there will still be 10–20% that is distinctly, specifically relevant for each specific audience. (Ideally, you would have a few slides in every presentation that are customized for that day’s session.) That custom content will keep you engaged as you prepare the presentation, and will help to make the overall story more meaningful to your audience as you deliver it.

But even if the slide deck, for whatever reason, stayed exactly the same, it’s unlikely (if not impossible) that any two presentations would ever be exactly the same. How the content is framed, what parts of the story are more meaningful, the nature and volume of questions the audience will have, and the level of detail you share are all dependent on the specific group with which you’ll be speaking. Staying attuned to what your audience is telling you—verbally and nonverbally—while you’re presenting will help keep you from going on autopilot.

2. For the audience, this is Opening Night.

You might have delivered this same message 100 times before to 100 different offices; but for the people in front of you, it is their first time hearing the presentation. Stage actors might be called on to do 9 shows a week for months on end, but they can’t just phone it in or not give their best every time; their job is to provide a great experience for the theatergoers in the crowd who will only ever see one performance.

If anything, your past experience of giving a similar presentation will make you even more prepared to adjust to your audiences’ specific needs and interests on the fly. Your command of the prepared material will make you more confident and capable to handle whatever questions they might have; by the 20th presentation, it’s likely that you have heard (and answered) most of the common inquiries before, and you’ll have more headspace and enthusiasm to handle the unusual or challenging ones.

3. You are not the audience.

Resist the temptation to make changes just to keep yourself entertained. Your slides don’t need new graphics, or a new template, or different graphs, just because you’re tired of looking at them over and over again.

Revising your work is certainly justifiable in some cases: if you see that certain sections of the presentation aren’t resonating well with most audiences, and you know you can improve them, then you’d be remiss not to iterate.

However, making changes just for the sake of making changes is ill-advised. I found that when I would go down that path, it rarely made the communication better…at best, it would simply make it different, at the cost of a lot more effort. It was usually a warning sign that I was losing sight of the audience, and instead focusing on keeping myself entertained. It’s a clear case of misplaced priorities when we start to value the presenter’s amusement over the audience’s engagement.

How do you keep your presentations from getting stale if you have to deliver them multiple times? Join the discussion in the SWD community, and let us know your tips and tricks!