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

14 Mar 2019 · 2 min

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1:57

Excerpt from a TJ Walker live-stream ("The Habit Influencer", Mar 14, 2019) in which Walker critiques pre-designed PowerPoint slides, arguing most are ineffective because they may not help the specific audience. He urges presenters to empirically test slides with colleagues—show the slide, then ask what they remember—and to discard slides that fail. He recommends single-image slides (one strong picture) as the most effective for dramatizing a point.

Chapters

What are the advantages and disadvantages of a pre designed PowerPoint slide? The first thing that comes to mind is there are about a thousand disadvantages. If it's a slide that already has bullet points aligned and all sorts of logos or images, you have to ask yourself why does this mean anything to my audience? Everything you do when it comes to giving a speech, a presentation, a PowerPoint has to be looked at through the lens of how does this help this audience member sitting there? Understand what I'm saying? Better than me just talking and remembering my key points. Better than me just talking. If you have a pre designed PowerPoint slide that helps you do that, fine. But don't just guess. Test. You're giving an important PowerPoint presentation to 30 clients on Thursday. Get two or three colleagues together Tuesday. Show them your pre designed PowerPoint slide as a part of your presentation. When you're done, ask them what they remember. Ask them what slides they remember. If they don't remember your slide, you now have empirical evidence. It's worthless. Throw it in the trash. If they do remember the slide and they do remember the message, it means it worked. Test your slides. Test, test, test. It's very easy to figure out if it works. If your audience remembers the slide and the message, it worked. The most effective PowerPoint slide for most people in most situations is going to be an image. A single picture. An image image that dramatizes the point you're making. That might be an image you find on Google Images, but it's typically not in a pre designed PowerPoint slide.