Back when I was an undergrad at the University of Bridgeport, I took a class that changed my perception of how I thought about presentations.

The class? Russian history. Not inherently scintillating material to me, but I couldn’t earn a degree with computer science classes alone. I signed up expecting a dry, painful slog through the epochs, and dreaded memorizing dull factoids from the Mongol invasions through the post-Soviet era.

But the class stunned me. The professor didn’t just click through text-heavy slides or recite tired material. I can’t think of a better way to say it: he made history come alive.

I understand how hokey this sounds. But it’s not that he came to class dressed as Peter the Great or had us stand on desks a la “Dead Poets Society.” He wore a regular button-down and jeans, and used PowerPoints like any other professor in universities worldwide.

This professor’s magic came from his ability to weave a narrative; to make his presentations tell a story that had the whole lecture hall on the edge of their seats.

As a CEO, giving presentations—and listening to them—is a big part of my life. The best ones always share a few of the same qualities, none of which require a gift for theater. They're just choices anyone can make.

Steve Jobs will go down in history as one of the tech world’s best public speakers. Part of that may have been thanks to natural charisma, but he was also famously well-prepared. In the month leading up to the 2003 MacWorld keynote, Jobs began meticulously arranging his presentation, writes Ken Kocienda in his book, Creative Selection.

“Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it as he wanted to present it at the keynote. This was one of Steve’s great secrets of success as a presenter,” Kocienda writes. “He practiced. A lot. He went over and over the material until he had the presentation honed, and he knew it cold.”

There’s a reason Malcolm Gladwell put his famous benchmark for expertise at 10,000 hours. Being successful at something requires practice—and many public speakers don’t put in the time they should. Knowing your material through and through gives you the flexibility to really read the room and alter course as needed.

When’s the last time you heard a great presentation delivered in a dry monotone? You probably don’t remember, because you were, in all likelihood, asleep.

Research has found that using a varied speaking style—adjusting your volume and pitch, and using well-timed pauses—can dramatically impact how persuasive an audience finds you. While using filler words like “um” or “you know” may dull your impact, Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger suggests that an intentional, well-timed pause can actually lead a speaker to be perceived more positively. “It not only gives the audience time to process what is said, it encourages them to respond with short verbal indicators of agreement, which leads them to like the speaker more overall,” he explains.

These can be tough habits to learn. I know that when I first started trying to introduce pauses into my presentations, it felt uncomfortable and alien. You worry it sounds like a mistake. But done right, it conveys confidence.

Dropping filler words can also be tough at first. English is my second language, and it’s true that I still sometimes catch myself searching for the right word. A practice I’ve found helpful is recording myself and watching where I stumble in the playback. It can feel uncomfortable to watch yourself on screen, but it’s also one of the most instructive ways I’ve found to figure out where your problem areas are.

Of course, all the preparation and stylish delivery in the world won’t matter if what you’re saying isn’t interesting or important.

Your goal should be to take your audience on a journey . It doesn’t matter whether you’re delivering a lecture on the Bolshevik Revolution or a quarterly earnings update—it should still be framed to hold people’s attention. “We all know that humans are wired to listen to stories, and metaphors abound for the narrative structures that work best to engage people,” writes TED curator Chris Anderson in Harvard Business Review. “A successful talk is a little miracle—people see the world differently afterward.”

Granted, not every project postmortem or investor meeting is going to be a life-altering experience. That doesn’t mean it can’t still be framed as a story. For example, one of our teams recently released an update to fix a bug in one of our integrations. Rather than simply saying they resolved it, they wove a narrative about how they noticed the bug in the first place—three different support tickets in one afternoon, all with the same strange complaint. It transformed what could have been a routine update into a mystery that the audience became invested in solving.

Even the most fascinating story can be made dull when the presentation is dry. And even the most workaday presentations can be made more interesting with a little time and effort. Why not choose the latter?