Ep 25 What Are the Best Templates and Cheat Sheets to Use for Presentations?

What are the best templates and cheat sheets to use when preparing your presentation?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Okay folks, I'm going to ruffle some feathers today. This is a question I get frequently. I occasionally get negative feedback criticism in my online courses. One just the other day said, you know tj, I wanted more from your course. I want to have better templates, better cheat sheets to use when preparing my presentation. Here's what's really going on, folks. I believe that many people have an erroneous assumption about what a presentation is. Many people assume that a presentation is a whole body of text. That that is in fact the starting point. It's a bunch of text on a document, a PowerPoint slide, a handout that first and foremost, it's about text, data and information. Let me tell you right now, if that is your assumption, you are basically destined for presentation failure. It's simply not what a presentation is, folks. I don't hate text. I'm not anti text. My goodness, I've written a half a dozen books. I like to read. I'm actually more of a reader than I am someone who consumes podcasts and videos. So I cannot be criticized as someone who's just unfairly anti text. But if you go into a presentation thinking that it's simply about text and you need better structure for your text, you are doomed. You're absolutely doomed. For starters, because of this little thing.

Body language.

That's right, folks. If your preoccupation is with text, then that typically destroys your body language. Now the worst of all possible scenarios is someone who just has head down reading the whole time. Destroyed eye contact, flat, boring, monotone. The second worst is someone who is ignoring his or her audience most of the time, but has his back to them and is staring at the PowerPoint slides and God forbid, actually reading bullet points in reading text because they want to get it just right. And that is a huge, huge, huge problem. So there's a mindset change you've got to make if you want to be a great presenter. First and foremost you have to focus on what are the ideas you have that you have to have this audience understanding so that they will do what you want. What are the ideas that you have and then how can you express those ideas in a way that it's really understandable and really, really memorable to them? That's what you have to focus on. And I'm going to show you exactly how I do it. Where people are paying me, you know, if it's a couple days training they're spending with travel and everything, they're spending $20,000 for this advice. I'm going to give it to you at DOE Charge right now.

Inside doe the craft of media and presentation training.

So here's the $20,000 worth of advice. Just get a sheet of paper. These are my notes. This is in fact my template for, and forgive me for those of you listening only, I'm holding up a on the podcast, I'm holding up a sheet of paper with bullet points, no full sentences in bold. And that's my template for a 15 to 20 minute podcast, TV show, radio show. That's also exactly what I'm going to use if I'm giving a speech for 45 minutes, an hour, even two hours. That is my template and that's what people get if they pay a lot of money to spend a day or two with me. It's also what I recommend to people in my online courses on presentation training. Again, I am frequently criticized for this. People want more of a rigid structure, big Roman numeral, a little Roman numeral 1. All these things that they think will help them have a much better presentation, they want to be told, okay, your slides have to have no more than three bullet points and the font size must be 18 points. And I'm here to tell you, I think that is horrible, horrible advice. In fact, my advice regarding PowerPoint slides, and I'm not anti PowerPoint, do not use a single word of text on a PowerPoint slide that you're projecting. Use simply images, one image, one idea per slide. That is my template because it actually works now perfectly fine for you to have a PowerPoint slide that you email to people or hand out. Then frankly, I don't care what font size you use, just make it so that people can read it. If they're holding up their computer, their iPad, or they've printed it out, it's far more important to convey the information in a way that's understandable and interesting and memorable. And that is the key template. Now, the problem is, from a business standpoint, I can't now sell these templates because really all it is is a piece of paper. Again, my template that I recommend for all of my clients is start with what is it you really want this audience to do? Then brainstorm on all the ideas that would motivate them to want to do that. Then narrow it down to the top five and have five bullet points on a slide, on a sheet of paper. I Should say not a slide. Then come up with examples, stories. If you have to have a particular fact or number to make it come alive, put that down and put it on a single sheet of paper. If your handwriting is really, really great, then write it by hand if you want. My handwriting is horrible. I can't read my handwriting so I type it out and I print it out. That is in fact the template that is going to get you the most success because it basically solves all other problems. When you have a single sheet of paper, you're not tempted to destroy your eye contact because you're not now staring at a sheet of paper. You're not ignoring your audience and looking up there. So that's really the problem. And I don't mean to pick on my competitors. I have a lot of great competitors out there. But I do have a contrarian, a contrarian point of view on this. So I do want to draw attention to it from time to time.

Bad advice.

Folks. There is bad advice out there on presentations and presentation templates. You will see. I mean, all you have to do is Google PowerPoint or get PowerPoint presentations or presentations and you are going to be bombarded with so called experts who will sell you fancy templates, sell you expensive by the hour consulting advice that they're going to do from their home office. And nothing wrong with home offices, I have a home office. But they're going to sell you a lot of advice on how to change this font and add this image and add this animation to your presentation. Now here's a question I'd like you to ask some of these so called experts. What? When is the last time you gave a presentation and show me a video of how it went. Now in about 95% of the situations of people like that, if you ask them that, you'll never hear from them again because they don't actually give presentations. Oftentimes they don't even know anything about presentations. What they know about is how to configure images on a slide deck. Now there may be times when you need that. I had to hire an expert to come up with this image. You see, for those of you watching on the video podcast, there is a graphic that says speaking with T.J. walker. I hired someone to create that because I don't know how to do it. And it's a very simple graphic. But you know what? That's not going to make this podcast. Whether you're watching it on YouTube or Facebook or listening to it on itunes, this graphic here isn't actually going to make this podcast helpful to you or interesting or memorable. It's my ideas that's what is going to make this either work or not work. And that's my recommendation to you. You've got to really, really focus your energies on what you say. This is what scares people because it's just much easier to sort of sit back and type and click with a mouse, because that's what increasingly we do all the time. And, hey, I do that too. We all have to write. We all have to participate in social media. We all have to text. That's what is different about speaking. When you are giving a presentation for a moment, and it may be only a moment, because if you're boring, people are going to whip out their cell phone and start reading it right in front of you if you don't watch out. But for a brief moment, you actually have people's attention to listen to what you say. You've got to be jealous about that attention because it's hard to get people's attention. And the way to really preserve that, to protect that, is to say something interesting and to say it in an interesting way. So your template has to gear everything you do towards that specific goal, not the other way around. Your activities, your energies can't be focused on a template. Well, but, tj, in our corporate culture, we have a set template to follow. And, you know, I'll be honest, I don't care about your corporate culture, folks. I work with a lot of big banks and big mutual funds and oil companies. And yes, they have a corporate culture. And they may have an image logo that they want for a slide. And they may even have a policy that when you're giving a presentation to the board of directors, you have to have no more than 10 slides. But I don't believe you should care about your corporate culture. First and foremost, you should care about communicating with your audience, because audiences, by and large, don't care about your corporate culture. They care about one thing is this person up here standing, talking to me, saying something interesting, relevant that I should pay attention to. Or should I ignore this clown tj because he's just boring me? And let me check my email. That's the only culture I care about is what is going on in the mind of your audience, each individual audience member. That's what you've got to focus on because they're not going to give you any brownie points because your logo is on the same position of the slide of the last three presenters. It just doesn't matter to your Audience members. Remember, your audience is not graphic arts experts who've never given a speech, unless, of course, you're going to a graphics arts convention. Your audience is made up of the individual, your clients, your customers, your colleagues, your board of directors. So everything you do has to be geared towards really connecting with them. And now it's time for this. Actually, before we get to the question of the day, we've got to take care of a little housekeeping. Business.

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Okay, and now it's time to really hop into the questions.

A question for you.

Okay, here is my very specific question for you, and I want to hear from you on this. I want you to think of the best three speakers you've ever heard, could be in your industry, your business, could be anywhere in life. And I want you to tell me what you remember about any sort of awareness you had about a template they used, whether it was how they structured their speech, their PowerPoint slides. What was the actual template? Please send me your comments. You can post it on Twitter jwalker. You can go to our Facebook page, which is TJ Walker Interactive. You can go to the blog at mediatrainingworldwide.com share with us at LinkedIn any place where you find this show, whether you're listening to it on itunes or there's about 30 other online places where you can listen to this show or YouTube or Facebook. Tell me exactly what you remember about the template. Because here's my theory. My theory is the best speakers you've seen in your life. You're not aware of any template. You're not thinking, oh, wow, I really like the way this slide has the same color scheme on every single slide. That's not what you're remembering. Now. I'm going to use a political example here for a moment, folks. I'm not endorsing anyone's politics, but for example, by many accounts, the most successful PowerPoint presentation of all time was Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, which was made into a movie, and it won Oscars and all sorts of awards, but it really was just a PowerPoint slide. It had an image on every slide for the most part. Here's a picture of a glacier 20 years ago, and it's giant ice. Here it is today, and you see a lot of green trees. It was the power of the image. So I want to know, and you can use examples from Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, all across the spectrum. I don't care who it is, but I want to know from you who is the best speaker you've seen or the top three speakers? And what templates were you aware of? Because again, my theory, and I could be wrong. My theory is you're not going to notice the templates and in many cases the person probably didn't even use any slides. I'm not against slides, but that can't guide the show and it steers us all back to my central thesis, which is for starters, make sure you have interesting ideas and explain it with passion and flesh it out with stories. That is really the best topic in the entire world. If your goal is to communicate, which I have to assume it is, and that's really the biggest problem with the whole template. The presentation template industry is their goal isn't necessarily to help you communicate, their goal is to help you or help themselves sell templates and never confuse the two. I have a lot of respect for some people in that industry, but you have to really focus on what your main goals are. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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