TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

So what is the number one trick that will dramatically improve your PowerPoint presentations?

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

So folks, here is my life. I'm called into major corporations, government agencies, nonprofits around the world. People come and they're ready for a day of presentation training, learning how to improve their PowerPoints. They have prepared, they've thought about it, they've read some of my books, they've gone through my online training. They've been asked to Prepare a new PowerPoint. They do all that. They stand up, they deliver their speech, we record it, watch it. And their first reaction invariably is T.J. it's still boring. It's still way too much data. It's too many points. It's too many bullet points. It's too many slides. It's just too, too, too much. And you know what? They're absolutely right. So how do so many smart people keep making the same mistake? The problem, I believe, is the starting point. The starting point is thinking. The presentation is the slide deck. Writing and rewriting and rewriting and wanting to add more and add more. Here's one simple trick that I guarantee you will dramatically improve your PowerPoint presentations. Now, a lot of people in my audience who make PowerPoint slides for a living aren't going to like this. And no, I'm not going to suggest that you don't use slides. I'm all in favor of slides. I use slides. There's nothing inherently wrong with PowerPoint slides, but here is the number one tip. Speak out your entire presentation on video before creating your first slide. That's it. If you do that, one thing I guarantee you your presentation will be demonstrably better. Speak out your presentation, say what you want to say, and if you need to use a single sheet of notes, do that then and only then go back and create slides to amplify the points that you are actually talking about. I'll tell you in a moment why that solves most problems with PowerPoint slides.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

So the problem with Most so called PowerPoint presentations is someone is stuck doing something highly artificial. Trying to cram shoehorn something that works in one medium into another medium. When you start off by creating slides at a computer screen where you're sitting down and it's quiet, that's an environment for reading. And it's frankly a perfectly fine, fine environment for reading. Lots of text, for studying and analyzing complex graphics, for studying charts, for turning things around, for looking at the color code. It's a perfectly fine environment for that. The problem is that when you're standing up speaking in front of people, some of them 15, 20, 30, 50, maybe 100ft away from the slide, you're projecting, that is not particularly a good mode or a good medium for someone reading. It is an avenue for someone to listen to you speak. So my advice is figure out what's most important to you. Give your whole presentation saying it out loud as if you had no PowerPoint slides. Watch your video, make sure you're covering the points you want. Then go back and figure out of the points you're covering in your presentation, which ones could come alive. More could be more understandable to your audience and more memorable if you created slides. Now you've heard me. Those of you who are not coming to this podcast or this video for the very first time know my theory is that it's frankly a complete waste of time to put text on a PowerPoint slide that you are projecting. But if you want to ignore that, fine. If you want to put text up, fine. But my point is, make sure that text is now following what you say, not having you, and what you say follow the text. You've got to get that relationship right. Too many people walk into a presentation, a PowerPoint presentation, with the attitude that they are the assistant, they are the low level staffer, steward, and the boss is this slide deck. No, that is really profoundly mixing up the relationship. You need to go into every presentation with the idea that you're the expert, you're in charge. This is your show. The PowerPoint slides are there simply to help the audience to enhance the presentation. Now, what you'll find if you actually use my technique is a radically, radically streamlined PowerPoint deck. And you can say, well, TJ, but I have to give people every single number of what's happened every single week and 2700 stores around the world. It has to be there in the chart. It has to be in the graph. It's always been there. People will complain and cry and scream if I don't have that on the slide. Okay, My recommendation would be pick the one or two numbers of that slide that are the most important. Have a slide just for that. And then at the end of your presentation, the traditional slide with all the complexity, hand it out to people, email it, someone has a question, you can forward to it on your slide deck and show it. But don't stand up there. And put up that wildly complex graph. Because once you start putting up slides that have lots and lots and lots and lots of data, what happens is you feel compelled to go through all the data, perhaps turn your back to the audience and look at all the bullet points, and it creates a downward spiral of negativity and frankly, sleep in a part of the audience. And, yeah, I understand it's not that common to see someone literally sleeping at a business meeting, but how often do we see someone pulling out a cell phone right in front of you? They could be at a table, and right in front of you, they're pulling out their cell phone, checking email because you're so darn boring. And frankly, because they see you looking at a slide deck, looking at a projection more than you're looking at them, and because you're droning on and on and on, and you're not getting to the answer to the question of so what. Anytime you're giving a presentation, whether it's a PowerPoint presentation or any other presentation, you need to put yourself in the shoes of the audience. And about every 30 seconds or so, you need to ask yourself, so what? Why should I care about what this person is saying right now? And if you don't have a good answer for that, it's a problem. Your speech, your presentation should continually have an answer to that question of a skeptical audience member saying so what? And that's the problem with most PowerPoint presentations, the way they are constructed. They are constructed on the assumption that more data is better data, more data is a better presentation. The more the merrier. So it's more, it's more, it's more, it's more. And when everything is important, nothing is important. So much of the challenge of going from an awful speaker to a good speaker or even a great speaker has nothing to do with your hand gestures or your voice or your eye contact. It really comes down to simple judgment. Great speakers use great judgment on what is truly important to their audience, and they focus on those points, and they make those points come alive. Bad speakers, average speakers, mediocre speakers don't use judgment. So they try to cover everything. And that's why their starting point is, let's gather all the slides we used on that topic last month and gather them up and add a few more things and we'll be good to go. They're not using judgment. They are going into a presentation with a profoundly defensive mentality, with the idea that if I just throw everything out there, no one can accuse me of leaving anything out. Huge Huge problem.

Speaking is brought to you by Media Training Worldwide. For all of your media training and public speaking training needs, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com.

So my challenge to you before your next so called PowerPoint presentation do not put a single word, a single bullet point, a single piece of text within the PowerPoint program. Instead, I recommend using old fashioned sheet of paper. Get a pen or pencil. Or you can use your cell phone if you prefer writing text or a laptop or iPad. But I want you to forget about the blue color background or your logo and all that stuff that frankly nobody else cares about other than you, and just focus on ideas. What are the ideas you want to communicate to this audience? And then for every idea fact number message you have come up with an example. Preferably you have a story where you can recount an actual conversation about that point. But flesh it out, tease it out, paint a picture with words, and then I'm going to ask you to do something. You've heard me say this before. Most of you don't like this advice. Most of you aren't going to do it. Unfortunately, it's the only thing that's going to dramatically help you. Pull out your cell phone from your pocket. Practice your speech on video again. Practice your PowerPoint speech on video. Record it, watch it, make sure it stands on its own, even if people can't see a single slide. Then and only then, go back to the drawing board, whether it's you or someone on your team, and create the slides to amplify the key points you already have. I guarantee you it will have a profound impact on your presentation, on the effectiveness, because you won't be doing a massive data dump. Your slides can project 50 ideas at once. Your mouth is really not capable of saying 50 things at once. You might be able to speak a little faster. Not a good idea. But you can really only say one thing at a time. People can really only hear one thing at a time. And that's the beauty of my method. If you filter everything through your mouth first, one idea at a time, and then through the back end, put your images up, you'll end up with a profoundly different PowerPoint presentation. One that is simpler, easier to understand, has more focus on what's most important. And then if you've got tons and tons and tons of complex slides that your corporation spent a lot of money on, stick them all in the back, email them to people, print it out, hand it out, put it on your webpage, but for goodness sakes, don't project it in front of everyone and try to go through it all. So please, I beg you. From now on, when you're doing a PowerPoint, start by talking it out and the final big principle Remember, there actually is no such thing as a PowerPoint presentation. There's only two types of presentations in the entire world. From the standpoint of the audience, it's either good or it's bad. It's either interesting and useful to listen to, or it's boring and uninteresting and people are going to tune out and check email. As long as you never Forget that your PowerPoint presentations will be much, much better. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life, PowerPoint or otherwise, be a success. See you next time.

Speaking With TJ Walker is the number one rated daily streaming TV and radio show devoted to all aspects of speaking and communication. If you received value from this show, then please subscribe to it@mediatrainingworldwide.com Please review the show, leave comments and share it with your friends and colleagues today.