Here’s how to give feedback for somebody else’s presentations

Hi - I’m Lauren Ansley. I’m a corporate entertainer and presentation skills trainer with a background in stand-up comedy. I help people to become more comfortable and confident presenting in front of groups.

Every time when I teach a presentation skills course, we are giving each other feedback. Everyone is presenting in front of the group, everyone is working together. And we want to give each other honest and helpful and constructive feedback.

So here are my guidelines:

When you are giving feedback, you always want to be thoughtful, kind, careful, and thorough. This means you are considering the other person’s feelings at all times. You are not being overly critical. You are wanting to share information to make them better. This means when you point out something that they are doing, you offer a solution or a way for them to get better to improve upon their presentation.

When you are receiving feedback - and this is more challenging - you do not interrupt the person giving you the feedback. Feedback is a gift. You can decide if you want to use it or not. It is not up to them to decide whether you use it, it is up to you. So you simply receive the feedback, you do not get defensive, you do not interrupt them, you listen. If you have questions, you wait until they’re done and then you ask them to clarify. You can simply say, “thank you for your feedback,” and then you can decide later if you want to do anything with that feedback or not. It is your choice.

I can tell you that personally, I can get offended a little bit with feedback. This is why I set up these guardrails and boundaries in my training. But what happens at the end of the day is yes, I might be a little sensitive, yes it might bother me a little bit, but I ultimately realize there is some part of that feedback that I can use. Even if I don’t agree with it, their perception - I have to question, “Ok, how can I use that feedback to make myself get better and to thoroughly communicate better in the future?”

Feedback is a gift. Treat it as such. Say, “thank you so much,” and then you decide if you’re going to use it or not. And those are the guidelines that I use for feedback in my training courses. Hope that’s helpful for you. You can use this in other applications as well. That’s how we use it in presentation skills training.

Hope you found this video helpful. Thanks so much for watching!