TJ Walker advises presenters to start without an opening slide: stand and speak one clear, interesting idea to show value and grab attention. He warns against using slides as teleprompters and recommends single-image slides that convey one idea rather than text-heavy, bullet-filled slides or complex graphs. The clip ends with social-call-to-action for likes, follows, and reviews.
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Question of the day. What makes an opening slide or first sentence instantly grab attention? That's from my student Brian, who is a student in the complete storytelling course for speaking and presenting. Give life to ideas with your PowerPoint, not death. Okay, the most important thing to do with an opening slide is to realize you shouldn't have an opening slide if you're giving a PowerPoint presentation. What I recommend is have no slide up at all. Stand up in front of your audience and speak. Say something interesting for them. That's the way to grab attention. Everyone is expecting you to kind of stand up, shuffle up there. As you can see on my slide over here behind my back that the name of my company is blah blah blah. That's what people are expecting. Today. The topic of my conversation is going to be blah blah blah. And everyone is expecting you to be boring. Maybe you've got a corporate logo. Maybe you'll have a title with a nice graphic. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If you want to have an effective PowerPoint presentation, you need to introduce one idea. Give true value to your audience by speaking. Doesn't have to be long, could be 30 seconds. Give them one idea to show them you're an interesting, insightful person. You're not just some stooge up reading a PowerPoint deck that maybe someone else created. That is how you get attention. Especially if everybody else in the room is starting off looking at slides. Now, when you do ultimately put up a slide, don't commit the colossal sin of using it as the poor man's poor woman's teleprompter. Don't put a bunch of text up there so you can remember what to say. No. The most effective way to use a PowerPoint is with images. One image at a time that conveys one one idea. That is how you get tension in a good way. If you want attention in a bad way, do what 99% of the world does. Load up your screen, your slide with lots of text, lots of bullet points, lots of clutter, maybe some complex graphs that no one can really read from a distance. And you'll get the attention of this. People will pick up their phones and check the their email. Thanks for joining me today. It's always fun spending time with you. If you got any value out of the show today, please like the show. If you are watching on YouTube, any social media platform. If you are listening on any podcasting platform, Spotify, YouTube, music, iHeartRadio, we're on all of them. We love all of them. Please make sure you are following or subscribing to filtered with TJ Walker on that platform. And please, please leave a review. Thanks. See you tomorrow.
