TJ Walker says you should spend as much time rehearsing your presentation on video as you do building slides. Finishing slides minutes before you speak tanks your delivery. Set a deadline at least 24 hours before, ideally a week, to stop editing and start practicing out loud.
Chapters
Equal time. That's all that I ask for. So many experts feel that what they do is so much more important. What they do should require everyone's time, attention, financial resources. I don't want to seem like that, but here is my point. For every minute you spend creating a PowerPoint slide, you should spend exactly the same time rehearsing your presentation on video. I'm not saying spend 10 hours of rehearsal for every one hour of presentation. PowerPoint presentation creation. That would be unfair. That would be lopsided. All I'm asking for is equal time. If you spend 10 hours creating slides, rewriting slides, changing fonts, going to legal to make sure they approve it, spend 10 hours rehearsing the PowerPoint presentation where you're speaking it out loud on video. Now, by my estimation, 99.99% of the world never does this. Oh, T.J. we'd love to, but there's no time because we are changing slides Last minute at 3am I'm sorry, but if that's your attitude, you are guaranteed to fail. You are guaranteed to give a garbage presentation. Slides might look okay, but your presentation is going to be awful. Think of it this way. If I told you, spend all of your time rehearsing and put together all of your slides in the 10 minutes before you have to stand up and speak, I think you would rightly be concerned. You would say, dj, that's going to be garbage. That would be our first draft of slides. It would be full of typos.
It would look awful.
You would be right. Well, now you know how I feel when you tell me you don't have time to rehearse or you want to rehearse 10 minutes before you have to get up and speak before the audience. There needs to be some balance at some point. If you aspire to be professional, if you aspire to be good, you have to say, okay. We simply cannot spend any more time in changing the slides and fiddling with the slides and adding to the slides and editing the slides. We now have to go into the mode of rehearsing. If we don't, it's going to be a horrible presentation. And right now, unfortunately, the deadline for most people on slide creation is five minutes before the speech starts. If that is your attitude, you are guaranteed failure. You have to give yourself some deadline. Ideally, it's a week before you want to say, that's impossible, at least 24 hours before. So you have one day or at least one evening or at least several hours where you're not thinking at all about changing slides. You're focusing all of your time on rehearsing your presentation, speaking out loud and watching it on video.
