TJ Walker (from his livestream "The Habit Influencer") argues that the most memorable element of professional presentations is storytelling about real people and situations rather than slides filled with bullet points or images. He criticizes poor PowerPoint habits and shows—via a short anecdote about forgetting to plug in his laptop—how brief stories illustrate principles and aid audience memory.
Chapters
When I ask people to tell me about the best PowerPoint presentation they've seen in any professional environment, what they remember from that speaker, best they've seen in the last year, last five years, maybe ever, you know what the number one thing is? People tell me they remember the stories from the speaker about how this individual had a problem with a specific client, customer, colleague, even family member, how. How it was resolved, where they were, how they felt, and the lesson learned from it. A lot of people like to bash PowerPoint. I'm not a PowerPoint basher. I am against bad PowerPoint. Unfortunately. I think about 99.9% of all PowerPoint presentations are awful. But perhaps the biggest problem with PowerPoint is once people start typing up bullet points and typing up words and columns and putting complex charts together, they tell themselves, oh, now there's no room for stories. Oh, now there's no time for stories. Huge, huge mistake. The number one thing that triggers the memory process in most audience members isn't slide. Certainly not a slide with bullet points or text. It's often not even a slide with a great picture image. The number one way to trigger the memory of your audience is by telling a relevant story with relevant details about a real problem with a real person. What that person said to you, what you said back, how it was resolved.
And how you felt about it. The. Those are the elements of a story. I had some elements of a story in the previous episode where I talked to you about the time when I.
Was giving a speech and I'd forgotten.
To plug in my laptop and the power went down and what I did to recover from that. Is it a wildly funny story, creative story? No. No.
Is it going to win prizes? No.
But it's a way of fleshing out the principle of how you're supposed to react if you have a technical problem.
With your PowerPoint presentation in a short, abbreviated story format. Makes it easier to remember.
It's easier for me to remember, even though it happened more than a decade ago, because I'm reliving what actually happened to me. That's the best way of telling a story. It's not being creative, it's not being funny, necessarily. Although if there is humor, that's fine. It's you reliving real things that happen to you, experiences that are relevant to your audience, that make a greater point. So, please, I beg you, for every picture you have on your slide, for every slide you have, for every message you have, you need to have a story involving a real conversation with a real client, customer, colleague, about a real problem and how it was resolved. If you can't think of a single story, chances are it's not a very important message. It's not a very important slide. Delete the message and delete the slide. Otherwise, come up with that story.
