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So what is the best way to combine words with images when giving a presentation?

Speaking the show about Effective Speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Welcome to this special edition of Speaking. This is one of our periodic co Productions with InDesign, the fabulous online publication that gives you all the tips information you need on every aspect of PowerPoint. So these are questions that have come from InDesign's editors and readers. This one from their editor Geetish. He writes in TJ spoken words and visual images do go hand in hand, and the sum of both in a presentation scenario is often larger than their individual scores. Do you have any thoughts about how presenters can best combine words and images? This is an issue that comes up a great deal in my practice of training corporate executives and government officials all over the world. Here's the big confusion. People have read this study that says some people learn by hearing, some by doing, some by watching their visual. So they'll interpret that as, oh, I know if I say it and I put the words up on a screen, that's a visual and that will increase the odds of my audience remembering it. And there are studies that purport to show this is true. Guess what? I test audiences all over the world. I don't have any evidence that that works if your visual consists of text. Now it is true if you put a bunch of words up on a slide, people can see it. It is therefore visual. But letters are simply abstractions. And I find that when I test audiences all over the world, no matter how smart they are, how educated they are, no matter how much they are insiders within that industry, simply putting text up your traditional PowerPoint slide. With text, it doesn't matter how beautiful the fonts are, the colors, or the logo. Putting up text on a big screen behind you, in front of you when you're giving a presentation is not the sort of visual that actually increases the audience's ability to remember what you're saying. I understand most people do it that way. Not effective. But gites to your question, what is really most effective? Here's an example, and some of you may find it comical that I've mentioned this because earlier this week I did a whole show criticizing this particular speaker. But Amy Cuddy, the second most popular and successful speaker of all time on TED, with 31 0.5 million views as of today, does use a visual. Her most striking visual is a picture of Wonder Woman with her hands on her hips striking a powerful pose. Now, Amy's message is that if you want to be confident before a speech, a presentation, a talk, a job interview, just spend a couple minutes going into this power pose. Your body will feel more confident and you'll do a better job. Now, I devoted a whole other show as to why I think that's actually a ridiculous sideshow attraction. It isn't what people should be doing before a speech, but that's a previous episode. I will give tremendous credit to Amy Cuddy for actually using visuals in a way that's effective. She didn't put up on a slide that says strike power pose first. Step one Ball up fist. Step two Place on hips. Step three stand erect. She didn't put it out there in a text format. If she did, people might have read it, they might not. All my research shows they would have instantly forgotten it. By putting that picture of Wonder Woman up, you instantly see it, you recognize it, you, you can remember evokes all sorts of. I mean, I remember as a kid in the 70s watching Wonder Woman TV show regularly. Everyone around, I won't say everyone around the world, but a huge percentage of people around the world, if they haven't seen a Wonder Woman TV show or movie, they've certainly seen comic books or pictures of it. So it's a well known image. But here it is in a new context as it relates to her message of trying to improve your body language and to stand in a way that conveys strength and confidence as opposed to curled up and hunched up. So it's a perfect use of a visual. That's my recommendation, Geetish, to all of your customers, clients and people. So the question is, well, dj, I can't think of a visual. If you can't think of a visual, then don't use a visual. If you want text. If all you can think of is text. My recommendation, and I know a lot of the PowerPoint experts watching this program don't like this, my recommendation is have two separate distinct PowerPoint decks. One of them you show to your audience. Project it while you're speaking. That is literally devoid of text. Please note, I didn't say less text, fewer words. I didn't say only three bullet points. I didn't say three words per bullet point. I said use slides with no text. Then have a second PowerPoint deck that has lots and lots of words, lots of text. Email it to people, hand it out. In fact, since you're using it as a written document, I don't really think you need to even put it in a PowerPoint program. It can be in a simple Word program, because people can read it that way too. But if you want to put it in a PowerPoint deck, by all means do that. So that is my recommendation on how to combine your words with. With visuals. Now, the problem so many people have is they're greedy and they're trying to convey so many ideas. So they start off a presentation with, well, here's a slide and there's 10 bullet points on it and each one has a sub point. And then they're like, well, how do I make that more visual? Step one is you've got to isolate the most important point from that slide. If you really want to use visuals in a powerful way that's effective and actually gets people to remember, you need to focus on one idea at a time. And Gitish, you were asking about effective examples. Steve Jobs did a pretty effective job when he wanted to introduce the iPhone. What did he do? He put up a picture of an ipod, said, alright folks, you know what this is? And then he put up another picture of a traditional cell phone. You know what this is, right? And then he had the two pictures come together into the iPhone. Introducing the iPhone. Now here it is, what, a decade later and it's burned into my memory. And folks, that was a technical presentation and yet he used images. So the hard part for most people is not that it's hard to do images. The hard part is making fundamental decisions of what ideas are most important. Because the easy thing is to dump out 50, 100, 200 ideas in a speech. The hard part is to sort of look at 100 ideas, put them in priority, figure out here are the handful that are the most important. And now that I've isolated the first one, what's an actual image that will drive that point home to make people understand it better and remember it better? You do that and you'll be in much better shape. More questions from Indazine in just a moment.

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Next question from Geetish over at Indozine dj, what's the best thing to do after a mistake, maybe even a pronunciation mistake that you are immediately aware of? Should we correct ourselves or move on? Here's the thing about mistakes. Most of the time there are exceptions. Most of the time when you are speaking in front of an audience and you make a mistake, your audience doesn't notice it. It's not the same thing as turning in a report, a book filled with typos that's easy to spot for the naked eye. But when someone is hearing you speak and you don't get a word quite right, you've now gone on to the next word. They're now listening to the next word. So in my opinion, most of the time there are exceptions. Just ignore your mistake and keep going. Don't let it bother you, don't let it chip away at your confidence. Don't dwell on it. I was conducting a training session with a client via Skype just yesterday, client in Ethiopia. And she stumbled over a word. I didn't even notice it. But she said later, yeah, I couldn't stop beating myself up over that one mistake in the first 30 seconds. And I told her, you know what, I was scrutinizing it a lot more carefully than your audience when you said it. I watched it again on video, I still didn't notice it. So you got to realize most of the time you stumble over a word, you don't use the correct word, just keep going. It's the overall context of all your meaning, your expression, your words are important. It's not just your body language and your voice. But when everything is in sync, overall, you have a good message. Overall, most of your words work. You seem confident, relaxed, there's nothing distracting. People are probably going to get your main message and understand you. The big problem many people have is when they correct themselves, they look embarrassed. Oh, I messed that up. Their face will show emotion. Oh, I'm just an idiot. They'll be expressive and unfortunately that becomes the most memorable moment of the entire speech. And that's a big problem. That's not what you want. You want your main ideas to be what's most memorable. If you are going to correct yourself, my recommendation is try to be expressionless on your face for a second and then clarify in a straightforward, factual way whatever it is you're correcting. Now, if you said a billion and you really meant a million, just say, actually the correct number is 1 million. If you could please make a note of that and keep going. Don't say, oh my God, I said a billion and I really meant a million. I'm an idiot. And wow, that's going to be fraud if the SEC sees it. Oh my God, again, that becomes the most memorable moment of the speech. You don't want your screw ups, your mistakes, your blunders to overwhelm everything else in your presentation. So please, please keep that in mind. You got to use some judgment if you really think people are going to be confused by a mistake. By all means, clarify. If you botched a word just the pronunciation a little bit, chances are one of two things happen. Number one, a lot of people didn't notice or might assume that's a different pronunciation. But here's the second option people forget about. The second option is people heard you. They heard you mispronounced the word and they instantly forgot it. So they heard it and they noticed that you mispronounced it. But because you kept on going, you kept on saying interesting things, helpful things, useful things, they instantly forgot that you mispronounced the word. By the way, in the last 30 seconds I've mispronounced a word. Did you spot it? My guess is no. And going back rewinding the audio or the video won't help. I only point out that I did. I'm not going to say which one to make the case that most people don't notice. As long as you're delivering some value saying something of interest. That in fact is really what's more important.

Do you have a speaking related question for number one USA Today best selling author TJ Walker. For more than 30 years Walker has been a public speaking coach and media trainer to presidents of Countries, Prime Ministers, CEOs, Nobel Peace Prize winners, professional athletes and Ms. Universes. Send your questions to infoediatrainingworldwide.com or on Twitter J. Walker.

Folks, as always, you just saw and heard that I am looking for your questions. This show is about you. I am here to share with you my advice, my daily practice. What I do is I work one on one with a lot of CEOs, sometimes presidents of countries, prime ministers. And frankly they do have to pay a lot of money for me to fly to them and spend a day or two days. This show is a way for you to get access to someone who does this for a living. Do I have every single answer? Am I always right? Maybe not. But any question you have about public speaking, speaking to the media, giving a presentation, I can tell you this. I will take it seriously, I will listen carefully and the advice I give you is based on real world experience. Having first of all given thousands of speeches, having appeared as a guest on thousands of TV programs and radio programs, having produced at this point more than 10,000 training videos and how to videos and podcasts. So I'm giving you experience or answers based on real world experience in part by having made mistakes, by having screwed up. So that's the whole. And trying to learn from mistakes and also seeing my own clients make mistakes. But hey, I'VE made plenty of blunders. Those of you who've seen me train in person or read any of my books know that I've been booed off stages before. Not recently, thankfully. I once lost my job for getting a bad sound bite in a newspaper when I was a spokesperson for a member of Congress a quarter of a century ago. So the expertise I'm giving you here is not because I was a born genius. It's simply because I've immersed myself in this world. I try to read every single book and read every article on the subject and in Google every day I get Google alerts for anything to do with public speaking. And by the fact that I train hundreds sometimes if you account online training, I train thousands of people a year on how to speak more effectively. So this is your opportunity to ask questions. You can post them on any of the blogs or social media where you're listening to or seeing this show. The best place, my preferred place, frankly, would be if you go to My main website, mediatrainingworldwide.com hit the news section. That's where this show is stored and you can comment on it. You can leave questions comments there and I guarantee you I'll see that and those go to the head of the list. As far as getting answered, I'm TJ Walker. On behalf of our partner Indazine and Media Training Worldwide, I want to thank you for joining me today. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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