Effective Use of Props and Visual Aids

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmeads. Welcome to the Unforgettable podcast.

Effective Use of Props and Visual Aids. All right, this is a very important subject, and the first thing I'm going to say to you is that your very best visual aid is your own imagination and your capacity for telling stories that are so vivid that you require no visual aids. That is the very best version of it. If you've been to one of my talks, you've probably found yourself at times in this world with me. Maybe I took you to Africa, to the top of Kilimanjaro, or maybe I took you behind the scenes at an event that I was preparing to speak for. My goal is to tell that story so effectively that your imagination is my visual aid. Now, on top of that, there is a time and a place for using visual aid. So I want to address the two most popular ones. 1. Props. Props can be amazing. They can be absolutely amazing. I was speaking at a big event at Mindvalley many years ago, and we'd had a super cool glitter party the night before. So of course, some people are tired from heavy partying and so on. And what did I do? I walked on stage wearing my glitter gown. It was super fun. It broke the pattern, woke everybody up. I took it off and delivered my talk. But I used that prop to create the specific attention that it was meant to create in that moment. So props can be fabulous. They can absolutely help you a great deal. In another example, I tell a great story about managing road rage. I tell a great story about managing road rage by using the red and yellow cards from a football game. For those of you who don't know how that works, if you do something wrong, the referee is going to show you a yellow card for a small infraction and a red card for an ejection because you did something terrible. Well, I started using them in my car. When somebody cut me off, I think, red or yellow card. And so when I do that talk, which is really, really fun and funny and it uses their imagination as the visual aid. But then I add in a prop. Sometimes doing that talk, when somebody does something wrong, I'll take out one of the red or yellow cards and it always gets a laugh. And so props can be really valuable. Now let's talk about Slides. Let me just say this about slides. You should never need them. You should never, ever need slides. If you need your slides, well, it means you probably haven't been to my speaking academy or you haven't been around speaker nation long enough. You should never need your slides, and I'll prove it to you right here, right now, in this episode. If you have five speakers speaking at a massive conference, 10,000 people in the audience, and all five of them are planning to use slides, but only one of them needs their slides, for which speaker is the projector going to die? I mean, you know, right? You should never need your slides. You should only ever use slides for either evidence. For example, you're showing a graph with sources that you really want to lend credibility to your talk with or to evoke an emotional response to show a picture that's going to create an emotional response. But you should never be using your slide as a crutch to guide the course of your presentation. One more time, I want to say this. The very best visual aid in your armory as a speaker is your audience's imagination.

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