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

23 Mar 2017 · 2 min

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2:14

TJ Walker (from a live stream titled "THE HABIT INFLUENCER") warns that asking someone to produce a PowerPoint draft without context guarantees poor results. He argues the slide-creator must first know (1) the concrete goal(s) of the speech (what the audience should do next), (2) the handful of most important ideas to convey, and (3) the real stories (problems, solutions, customers) to illustrate them. Only after these are clear should anyone begin assembling slides.

Chapters

I'm busy this month. I've got to give that presentation in six weeks. Go ahead and give me a rough draft of a PowerPoint so I can get started on that. Conversations like that happen millions of times a day all over the world in major corporations, organizations, government entities. Unfortunately, that pretty much guarantees the presentation will be a disaster. Nobody can create a PowerPoint presentation for someone out of thin air unless they know the following Number one what are your goals from this speech? What exactly is it that you want the audience members to do? Sometimes it's just approve your budget the same next year as you had for this year. Sometimes it's not to fire you. Sometimes you want a direct sale. Sometimes you just want them to feel good about you so that when you're calling them in a month, they'll take a meeting with you. You can have very, very concrete goals, but they can have varying levels of abstraction, too. But that's the first thing Whoever's creating slides for you needs to know what is the actual goal you're trying to accomplish next? They've got to know what are the handful of most important ideas you're trying to convey in this presentation that will motivate your audience to do what you want next? They need to know what stories you're going to tell, involving real problems, real solutions, with real customers, clients, prospects. Then, and only then, in my professional opinion, can they even attempt to start creating a PowerPoint presentation for you. Or can you attempt to rationally start the process of creating slides for yourself? So please keep this in mind. You can't just start accumulating data, creating slides, and creating a slide deck for someone. If you want to be helpful.