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

14 Mar 2019 · 2 min

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2:21

TJ Walker (speaker) argues that reading text from PowerPoint slides is a common but highly flawed practice. He claims people read slides out of insecurity and a mistaken belief that it reduces risk, but in reality it destroys eye contact, prevents audience engagement, encourages distractions, and signals poor leadership and communication skills. He strongly advises never to read slide text and instead to provide any needed text separately (handouts, email, PDFs, links).

Chapters

Question. If having someone read text from PowerPoint slides to you in the audience is as interesting as watching paint dry, then why does anyone read PowerPoint slides? You got me. I don't know. I think it's crazy. I think it's insane. It's not something I would ever do. But, yes, you see. You see people every single day. The corporate world, government world, nonprofit world, everywhere around the globe, reading bullet points. And it's because of several erroneous beliefs. The first is this idea that, oh, it's less risky to read bullet points off of a PowerPoint. That way I won't forget anything. The problem is, it's actually the riskiest thing you can do because the second you read, you destroy eye contact, you destroy your ability to read an audience, to interact with them. And you're practically begging your audience to do this. Pull out their cell phones, check email, Facebook, and ignore you. So it's actually highly risky to read bullet points. People do it because they're insecure. They think, oh, I'm not a good speaker. I'll just sort of go through the slides and no one will hold me accountable and judge me as a speaker. Wrong. People are judging you every single time you give a PowerPoint presentation, a speech, a talk, people are judging your competence, your abilities, your potential. So if you stand up and just read bullet points, you're telling people you have very little potential, no leadership potential, no ability to communicate, no ability to express the ideals of your organization to the rest of the world. So my recommendation, never, ever, ever read text off of a slide because it's insulting to people. You're implying they don't know how to read. If you want to give text to people, hand it out, email them, publish a book, give them a PDF, give them a link to our website, but do not stand up and read bullet points off of a PowerPoint if you want to be an effective speaker.