Break Out Of The PowerPoint Prison
"Oh my God! It's like being trapped on Alcatraz!"
Be the first to break out of the PowerPointPrison
Think about the millions of corporate presenters who turn their audience into brain-dead PowerPointZombies by showing slide after slide filled up with data, bullet points, graphs and text fields.
Their colleagues, customers, and anyone else unfortunate enough to come to their meeting fight to stay awake.
Virtually or in-person, after the fifth slide, the brain gives up and tunes out.
The iPhones come out, the texting begins:
"OMG!! I'm trapped in the meeting from Hell! All the slides look the same and the stupid presenter is reading them to me aaaaaa!"
Think about how much you would hate to be trapped in that kind of presentation.
In-person or virtual, the same basics apply.
Ask yourself if what it would be like to break out of the PowerPoint Prison.
While you may not be able to stop others from using PowerPoint as an instrument of Evil, you can make sure your own presentations catch and keep your audience's attention by following three simple, yet radical, rules:
1. Make sure your content is useful for your audience. If you can't answer the simple questions: "Why should they care? What concrete benefits do they get? Would I want to listen to me if I were in their shoes?", chances are your audience will never tune in.
Make sure your content is relevant to their needs, priorities and problems. In other words, if it's not about them, they don't really care.
2. Make sure your presentation slides are visual and text-lite (Powerful headlines and key words are fine...lots of text is not).
The best slides are easy to understand and easy to present. One message per slide. The basic rule for your presentation deck is Less is More. Your job as a presenter is to let your slides help you sell your message and tell your story, not the other way around.
Your hand-out slide deck can and should be designed as a reference pack that your audience can refer to any time after your presentation.
3. The most radical rule is this: Don't Use PowerPoint. Simply not using PowerPoint will grab their attention and make you stand out because corporate presentatin audiences so rarely see anything but PowerPoint.
Use a flip chart, whiteboard or other medium to help you tell your story and sketch out your key ideas, numbers, etc.
By the way, presenters who don't use PowerPoint get to the point faster and are more memorable because they have much more direct contact with their audience. This is because not using slides makes the presenter the center of attention, not the slides.
(Yes, you can and perhaps should have your PowerPoint slides ready to go in case someone really needs you to show them, but that can be done in the Q&A.)
Think about it. If you are well-prepared, you give your audience content they really can use, you address their needs, and you can break yourself and audience out of the PowerPoint Prison.
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