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

9 Feb 2017 · 2 min

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2:04

A short live-stream monologue by TJ Walker advising presenters not to remain chained to their laptop or one spot during PowerPoint presentations. He urges speakers to speak to the audience, tell stories, move around the room to create variety and stage presence, and only advance slides after making a point (using keyboard keys if no remote is available).

Chapters

One of the worst aspects of PowerPoint presentations is people feel that they're somehow chained to their computer or they're chained to one spot in the room. So it completely robs their ability to move around the room or move around the stage in a way that's more interesting to the audience. Now, you may say, well, tj, I don't have a remote control, so I sort of have to stay in one spot right next to the laptop where I'm manually changing the slides. Well, no, you don't. You absolutely do not have to stand there. For starters, you should not be speaking to slides the whole time. You should speak, make a point, introduce your concept, tell a story to make the concept alive, and be walking around the room the whole time you do this, I then and only then, you should bring up a slide. At that point, you can walk over to your laptop, hit Enter, or hit the space bar or page down, because there's a lot of ways of advancing a PowerPoint to get the slide up. You do not, I repeat, you do not have to stand in one spot. By standing in one spot, you instantly remind people, all the boring hack speakers they see who kind of stand and read head down and have absolutely no showmanship and no stage presence. You don't want to remind people that of those folks of boring, awful speakers, by moving around, you create variety. You force the audience to move their head, move their face, their body, their eyes, just to see you. You sound a little different, too. So remember, regardless of how many slides you have, regardless of whether you have a remote control, you do not have to stand with your feet planted. You can move when speaking.