TJ Walker says stop thinking of your talk as a PowerPoint presentation. Instead, brainstorm all your messages, narrow to five core ideas, use examples and pictures to bring them alive, and treat slides as support tools, not the main event.
Chapters
Same for the public speaking. Tip of the day on PowerPoint presentations. What's the best way for me to give my PowerPoint presentation? I have to give a PowerPoint presentation. How should I start my PowerPoint presentation? Time out. Time out. The second you start referring to your talk, your speech or presentation as quote, your PowerPoint presentation, you've already failed. You've already set yourself up for complete, unmitigated failure. Now, I'm not suggesting you can't use PowerPoint. I use PowerPoint sometimes every day of the week. I'm not anti PowerPoint. But here's the tip. I never give a PowerPoint presentation. I give a presentation that focuses on the ideas I have that I want to share with this audience so they understand it and remember it and can act upon it. I may or may not have slides. The slides are there to help them understand remember it. But it's not a PowerPoint presentation any more than this is a TV light presentation. I'm using TV lights now. Any more than this is a TV camera presentation. I'm using a camera now, but it's just a tool. It's not about the TV camera. So it's an important mindset. Change. The second you tell yourself I'm giving a PowerPoint presentation, then all your focus goes on the slides. The slides. Let me rearrange the slide. How about the slide first? This one. Second, let me change this font. If your focus is on your slides, you've already failed. You're no longer focusing on a handful of ideas that are important to you to make them come alive for your audience. Here's what I believe you should do. This is the advice I give my clients. You have to give a presentation. Get a blank sheet of paper or a blank computer screen. Brainstorm on every message you want to communicate to that audience. Narrow it down to the top five, even if it's a financial presentation or a technical presentation. Once you've done that, now try to think of all the different ways you can to make these ideas come alive. Examples, case studies, pictures. And yes, if you have a PowerPoint slide to put in there, use that too. Now, if you have 30 or 40 slides with lots of numbers, complex graphs, charts, that's fine. Email it to people in advance. Give it as a handout. But whatever you do, don't show that and sort of stand and reading it the whole time, because that's not your presentation. Your ideas are your presentation. If you give that power over to a slide deck, you're committed to failure.
