Over 20+ years of presentation training, I’ve had the pleasure over and over again of watching my training participants “get it.” Those “ah-hah” moments are immensely powerful and help transform presenters from tentative or nervous or insecure to confident, assertive, and powerful. In this year of 2011, I have chosen my top seven favorite ah-hah moments to share. In each of seven communications(in no particular order), I go into some detail and guidelines about each one of these transformative tools… This is the first Ah-hah of my Seven in Eleven…
I Can Do Without PowerPoint!
PowerPoint has become the kudzu of visual aids, infesting our presentations with overdone graphics and walls of words, overtaking our talks. Speakers become totally reliant on them, and the result is a boring presentation, stripped of any humanness, that results in no audience connection or impact. I see it all the time in my clients’ presentations. And as a result, I am always offering feedback about it: “Could you do without the PowerPoint?”
I most definitely have a bias as a trainer and coach: I believe the focus should always be on the speaker. Presentations are an incredible opportunity for exposure. As perhaps the last relational form of communication left in the business world (think email, text messaging, instant messaging, social media), it has the potential to expose your ideas, your knowledge and your character in a personal, face-to-face way. The more you speak, the more people you speak to, the more people who are exposed to you, then the more likely you are to be recognized, remembered and rewarded, to impress people and move up the ladder of success. That recognition, that memorability, that positive impression does not, I repeat, does not come from your PowerPoint slides!
As a public speaking coach and trainer, I offer suggestions for everything from how to improve the quality of your slides to how to use them most effectively as you present. I believe all of them can improve your presentation impact. However, this is my first and foremost—and most common—suggestion: Don’t use ‘em!
Really. Do without. Spend all those hours you sat at your computer trying to create clever (and overdone and distracting) slides and fine tune your presentation. Tighten the organization. Add humanizing elements. Practice several times until the delivery flows. Then speak from the heart and be authentic and connect with your audience (something PowerPoint doesn’t allow you to do very well). If you succeed at that, you definitely won’t need any PowerPoint.
The ah-hah moment occurs when one of my students realizes that his PowerPoint is a crutch. It’s serving no purpose and he can do without it. He discovers that he can communicate his subject clearly and compellingly without relying on a single visual. In fact, he learns (thanks to the power of videotaping) that he’s better—more dynamic, more conversational, more understandable—than when he was so tied to the visual. I love that moment—and the presentation that follows without the PowerPoint proliferation!
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