Engaging Presentations: Beyond Slides

So how do you keep from being overly reliant on slides if you're giving a presentation, a PowerPoint? What if you really want people to focus on your message, but you find yourself looking at the slides too much? Well, timeout. The solution to this is before you ever start giving your presentation, it's before you start preparing. If you start preparing your presentation, sitting in front of a computer, crafting slides, crafting bullet points, you've already lost the game. You've already failed. That's not how you want to start a PowerPoint presentation. Because guess what? It's not a PowerPoint presentation. It's your presentation for your audience. The PowerPoint is just an extra. It's an enhancement. Now, I love PowerPoint. I use it, but I don't give PowerPoint presentations. I give a TJ presentation. You give your presentation. There may or may not be slides. The slide slides may or may not help the audience, but it's still you speaking. So let's start at the very beginning. You have to give a presentation. Sure. You think you may be using slides, Fine. Don't think about the slides yet. Instead, ask yourself, what is the one thing I want my audience to do after hearing my presentation? That's got to be your starting point. Write it down in one sentence. Is it to invest in you? Is it to approve a budget for next quarter? Is it to vote for you? Is it to hire you? What's the one thing you want your audience to do? Write it down in one sentence. Now, I'd recommend that you brainstorm on every possible idea number fact that could motivate your audience to do the thing you want. You might spend five minutes doing this, you might spend five hours doing it. I don't care how long, you just do it. Brainstorm on all of these ideas. Look at them on paper or a computer screen. Now comes the hard part. Now comes where you use the intellect. This is not about dumbing things down. Oh, no. This is about using your intellect to figure out how to put these messages in priority. Because what you want to do is eliminate any message back number that isn't in your top five. Because human beings simply do not have the capacity to remember more than a handful of ideas. Unless it's an academic environment and they're writing down everything you say for a test. That's different, but for what I'm talking about here, using a PowerPoint presentation. In the business world, the civic world, the adult world, the outside of the academic world, people are not writing down everything you said. They're listening Ideally, and not just spending time on their cell phone. They're listening to you. They're trying to understand it. They're trying to remember key points that are important to them. Chances are slim they're going to remember more than a handful. So why not figure out in advance which handful you want them to really focus on and to remember? So that needs to be the next step you do is truly narrowing down your message to a handful of points. How many fingers are on this hand? That's right. I don't mean the old joke four fingers in the thumb. I mean there are five fingers here. You should have five ideas messages for your presentation, even if it's an hour long. Believe it or not, now we're still not to the point where we even start creating a side deck. Now you've got to figure out what is an example that makes each one of your messages come alive. What is a story? I don't mean a funny story or a generic motivational story like oh, there was a starfish or I looked down and there were only three steps. No, I mean actual story that involves you having a real conversation about a real problem with a real person who was a client, customer, colleague, or someone. You deal with what the problem was, how you felt about it, how it was resolved. And it has to be 100% relevant to the message and your audience. You need a story for each one of your messages. Now, if you simply saying the message once doesn't resonate with people, they don't remember it. You telling the story once doesn't stick in their memory. We want to increase the odds that that one idea actually sticks. Now is when we come up with a PowerPoint slide. And the most effective way to trigger memory is not by putting abstract letters and words and bullet points in text. It's by putting an image up. My firm recommendation to you when you are using PowerPoint slides is to put images on your slides. Specifically one image per slide. The image should be something people can look at it instantly, understand what the idea is based on, what you've been talking about and what the point is. I do not mean put up six images right after look around. I don't mean an image with three bullet points underneath. I mean just an image. The single most effective way to use PowerPoint slides is to not use PowerPoint text at all. Wait a minute. He couldn't really have just said that. Did TJ really say you shouldn't use text on PowerPoint? That's preposterous. Everyone in our organization uses text on Path. I didn't tell you what's the most common way to use PowerPoint. I told you what the most effective way is to use PowerPoint. It's to use one image at a time on a slide. If it's just text, you don't add anything. You don't help yourself by putting it on the slide. Well, but tj, how will I know what to say? Use a simple outline for yourself. Use a simple paper outline. So if I'm giving an hour long speech, here's an outline I have. It's focused, it's narrow, it's easy to read. It's a single page with big font. No one ever sees me pick it up other than just now for you. No one sees me turning the pages. I'm able to speak in a conversational way. When you want people to look at your slides and it's one image, you put it up and then stop talking. Let them look at your slide after you've given them time to look at it, and it shouldn't really take more than a few seconds. If it's truly one image, take the slide down and put up a black screen or a blank screen. Then start talking again. If you follow these techniques, I guarantee you people are going to say, wow, great presentation, interesting presentation. Not the typical boring PowerPoint. You could say, well, TJ, people are expecting all this data and all. Fine, create a traditional PowerPoint with lots and lots of data points and columns and numbers and graphs and email it to people in advance. Hand it out to them in advance or afterwards, but do not show it to them while you're presenting. You get to decide who's boss here. Are you the boss? Are you the expert sharing your expertise with your audience? Or is the PowerPoint slide the expert and you're the little assistant there, pushing buttons and acting meekly like the wizard of Oz? No. When you have an opportunity to speak in front of people, it is a unique opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, your authority, your knowledge, your confidence. In order to do that, the vast majority of the time, you need to be looking at someone in the audience speaking in a conversational way. And by all means, you should not be reading PowerPoint slides. And you definitely don't want to be turning your back reading to people because that is a surefire recipe for them ignoring you and reading something else, namely their cell phone.