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

2 Mar 2017 · 2 min

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2:18

This is a short podcast/live-stream segment by TJ Walker offering recurring weekly tips to improve PowerPoint presentations and delivery. The host reframes the common critique of PowerPoint as misuse rather than a faulty tool, then enumerates frequent mistakes—excessive data and slides, unreadable text, removal of stories, slide-reading, monotone delivery—and urges reassessment and adoption of better practices.

Chapters

In this weekly podcast, I give you tips every single week on how to be more effective with your PowerPoint presentations, with your delivery, with slide creation. But let's take a step back for just a moment and look at the big picture of things, of why things go wrong with most PowerPoint. Because let's face it, PowerPoint presentations have a lousy reputation. You say PowerPoint to someone, their first response is often, oh, death by PowerPoint. Oh, I hate PowerPoint. Well, there's nothing inherently wrong with PowerPoint. Saying that PowerPoint is bad is like saying television is bad. Well, the Jerry Springer show is bad. If you don't like Jerry Springer, certain public access channels that just scroll the lunchroom menu at the local school might be bad. But if you love watching World cup soccer and you can't get to the game, then watching World cup soccer on a big high definition TV is great. So no, there's no such thing. It doesn't make sense to say TV is bad. It doesn't make sense to say that PowerPoint is bad. It depends on how you use it. The problem, of course, is most people horribly abuse PowerPoint. Here are the main reasons. They put in way too much data. They used text that most people can't read or don't want to read. They they strip their presentation of stories, interesting examples, interesting anecdotes. They are staring at their slides and reading it and boring people to death. They're doing it in a monotone way. And the whole thing is a tedious, horrible excuse of a boring data dump. And people just use it as an excuse to open their email and catch up on email. That is the reality of most PowerPoint. So I'm certainly hoping you follow the advanced tips that are recommended each week on this podcast. But if not, at least step back and ask yourself, are you committing the biggest, the most common blunders of PowerPoint? Way too much detail, way too many slides, bullet points, text reading and stripping out stories. If so, it's time to really reassess what you're doing.