TJ Walker delivers a short live-stream lesson advising speakers to use many concrete, relevant examples in speeches and presentations. He emphasizes that examples must be directly tied to the message and relatable to the audience, warns against ineffective PowerPoint usage that crowds out examples, and recommends prioritizing examples (even at the expense of other points or by providing handouts).
Chapters
So what's one of the best things you can add to any speech or presentation you're giving? Let me give you an example. There. That's it. That's the magic phrase. For example, you can literally stare at an audience and see their heads come up, eye movement up when speakers say that magic phrase. For example, it's virtually impossible to have too many examples in a speech or presentation. As long as you are giving examples that are completely relevant to your points and examples that the audience can understand and relate to and they see the relevance, it can't just be, well, let me give you an example of something funny to start my speech. So let me tell you about how adorable my kid is. No, that's not the example I'm talking about. The examples need to to be specific to your message. The problem, of course, when people are creating presentations, especially if they're going to start using a whole bunch of bullet points and text on PowerPoint slides, is they leave all the examples out wrong. Every single message that you want to communicate, you had better have a strong, compelling example. Unless you want people to instantly forget the message. Now, now, if you want people to forget your message, why are you talking about it in the first place? I have never once in my 30 plus years of presentation training heard people coming out of a convention, a conference, a speaker session saying, boy, I hated the way that speaker gave us so many interesting, relevant examples. It's never been said. That's not a phrase that anyone has ever said. So that is my lesson for the day. Come up with examples you think you have enough. Come up with more examples you think you don't have enough time for your examples. Eliminate some of your other message points or communicate that through handouts or a PDF that you email to people. By the way, you are going to hear me make disparaging remarks from time to time in this podcast about PowerPoint. I'm not anti PowerPoint. I use it all the time. I use it sometimes every day in a week. I am anti using PowerPoint ineffectively. That's the problem. And unfortunately, what has happened to so many speakers around the world is bad habits creep in and they start doing things with PowerPoint that crowd out so many other good habits. One of them, of course, being use of example. Use lots of examples to make your ideas come alive. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. Stay tuned for next week.
