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Regular
readers of this column have no doubt ascertained by now that we
take the rules of proper presentation design pretty seriously.
We have developed our strong feelings about design
because we’ve been privileged to train thousands of business
people in the art of presentation delivery, and have thus had a
unique perspective on the inextricable relationship between
successful delivery and proper design.
Every
year, we meet and train people who have come to us because of
the difficulty they’ve had in either feeling comfortable or
persuasive while standing up before a group.
Few things are more rewarding for us than to see their
epiphany when they finally understand that so many of their
problems centered around trying to translate what they had on
the screen to the bewildered gaze of their audience.
As is true about many tasks we’re required to perform
in the course of business, when we don’t do things well we
think it’s our fault.
Everyone
who comes to our training room admits to being nervous when
presenting, and most think that their anxiety reflects a
weakness in them.
So when they leave our training armed with the ability to
finally perform this special skill well, we both feel great.
In every case, though, they realize that none of the
skills that we train such as eye contact, gestures, inflection,
timing and so forth will really be of help without the ability
to design slides that work.
The
Simple Way
: Edit
Even if
you don't think you're enough of a design whiz to create a truly
compelling on-screen program, the simplest way to improve
whatever set of slides you've come up with is to take some of
them away.
At the
risk of making a sweeping generalization that might not pertain
to your last presentation, your slides could probably lose 50%
of your verbiage, and your talk could lose 50% of its content,
without losing ANY of its impact.
In other words, edit, edit, edit.
Like this article, which took much longer to edit than it
did to write, documents usually get better with every pass,
especially if you have the discipline to cut anything that looks
or sounds the slightest bit unnecessary.
The key
is to never fall in love. That
is, never fall so deeply in love with one of your creations, be
it a graph or a phrase or a graphic, that you can't admit to
yourself that no matter how good it is, it might not be good for
this presentation.
Perhaps everyone would be better served if you kept your
"perfect" slide on file and pulled it out when it
really was essential to making your point.
We see this a lot, slides that look great but don't
belong, and when we challenge a student on a particular slide's
applicability to the argument they're trying to make, we often
hear, "Well, I spent so much time putting this one together
I just had to use
it".
So it is true of words as it is with sunbeams.
The more concentrated,
the deeper the burn.
-
Unknown
Give me your answer in the morning…
If you can “sleep” on your presentation, or anything
you write, so much the better – bullets and charts that you
deemed absolutely essential two days ago often lose their
importance once you’ve stepped away from them for a while.
And while you’re trimming away those branches, ask
yourself if your audience might not be able to see more of your
real story if you chopped down a tree or two in the way.
Remember: How well you look and sound when you deliver,
the parts that carry almost all the impact of the presentation,
depends mostly on how deeply you understand and how strongly you
feel about the subject. You
can’t be expressive, you can’t be passionate, about 12
different streams of information.
You can be about maybe 3.
Wherever you go, there you are!
Finally, always remember that the presentation does not
take place on the screen, nor does it form at the presenter’s
mouth. Presentations
only ever occur in one place: in the mind of the individual
audience member. Depending
on what their left-brain filters allow to pass through, each
member therefore experiences a slightly different presentation.
Your job is to make sure that what they really need to
see and hear not just gets through, but gets remembered
as well.
People can’t remember a lot of new things that they hear
for the first time. They
can remember a few things that they hear several times,
especially if they feel some emotion behind the arguments.
Keep it simple, keep it short, show how much you care.
Hey – maybe that’s all we ever needed to say!
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