Larry Weidel breaks down live presentations into five core rules: keep one main point, use big images with minimal text, ditch the script, tell stories, and make your audience watch you, not your slides.
Let's talk about great presentations and let's see if we can get it done real quick. Because in great presentations you want to be simple. The simpler the message, the more powerful. Now, most people will use PowerPoint for their presentation. PowerPoints are okay if you know how to use them. Basically, they stink for detailed things because people read them. Anybody with a brain is going to be reading ahead and they're not going to be listening to you. So if you do PowerPoints, look back at Steve Jobs presentation. He had usually one big image to get people to keep focusing on that. On an individual slide, he usually never had more than seven words, which is a great thing to go by. Don't have a lot of words because people are going to be buried into the words. You're supposed to come up with the words, not the PowerPoint. A lot too many people use PowerPoint as their outline for their talk and they put it up there and they just diffuse their whole presentation because people are reading ahead of them and the people that can't keep up are confused because they're behind. The smart people read ahead and then they're bored waiting for the next slide. So you just don't do yourself any favors. But when you write it out, you're writing it down in front of them. They've got to watch you. It becomes like a story. And if they're not paying attention, they're going to miss it. Another reason is I try and write neatly, but I don't worry about it so much because if people are paying attention, they'll know that that is story. So I don't try and make it ugly to look at, but I don't. I'm more concerned about the content, which is where I want them to be, than I am about a pretty presentation that I can show somebody, say, look at the great presentation I made. Go for effectiveness instead of, you know, versus pretty. Oh, look how pretty. Nice background. I just love the background. Dum dum. The thing is, are you connecting? Now, when you get in with a presentation, you want to be simple and brief and facts you want to have always have one main point of the thing. Now, how you get that across is the basic who, what. You want to make sure they've got the facts down. The who, what, the where, the when, the why. You see, you see these things, the how cover the stuff so they can understand the facts about your one main point. It's a meeting coming up. It's important. It's a product that's coming out. It's important you know there's a next step you need to take that's important. There's a course you need to sign up, something like that. There's one main thing. You want to get them excited about it and you want for that to stick in their mind. You got to give them the basics. We might get this thing done inside of five minutes. Nobody would complain about that, would they? So to review, keep it simple. Don't use PowerPoints much. If you do, use them to keep people's attention with big images, one big image, very few words where they're having to listen to you rather than read ahead on the presentation. Realize if you're writing things down like a teacher in school, they're more likely to pay with pay attention to you because they have to follow you. Their mind can't wander and it becomes like you're unveiling a story to them. And you're going to go for effectiveness versus pretty being patted on the back because you did a pretty presentation. And you're going to not forget that you're after one main point, the and you're going to keep the who, what, when, where, how, why all as the main content of the presentation. That's Great. Presentations in 5 minutes. Learn how to do that.
