It's not too late to Stop...

Are you guilty of racing through your presentations and speeding from one sentence to the next without hitting the breaks?

Do you lose track of your thoughts and have to stop and find your place? Or worse, do you correct yourself if you get a fact wrong and apologize to your audience?

These snafus are all side effects of memorizing a presentation. It comes off canned at best and it's hard to connect with your audience when you are focussed on remembering what you are supposed to say next.

We coach our TALLsmall clients to break presentations of any length into three key bullets. Each bullet is a word or two. If you can't fit the information on the back of a business card, it's too much. Each bullet point is there to trigger a different story or topic in your presentation. The bullet points become your gps system to keep you on topic and from going off on tangents. It works no matter the length of your presentation.

The bullet points also become a weapon in fighting off filler words. You only have a few seconds to grab your audience's attention or you will lose them. All too often, people start their presentations with something to the tune of "I um uh going to um talk to you about a few a key points..." Instead, throw out your first bullet point as a headline and pause for a moment. It builds anticipation from the audience and keeps the filler words away.

This afternoon, we worked with a doctor to help her create a short presentation to deliver next month about building her practice. Her first bullet is the word "Counter intuitive." It's not what you would expect to hear someone say at the beginning of a presentation. We can't wait to watch how the audience reacts to her stories about strategy. Anytime you build in a surprise element, it gets people engaged.

Imagine if you memorized your side of the conversation before going out on date or having coffee with a friend. It would come off as fake. The same holds true for presentations. The three bullets are there to keep you on course and the presentation will never come off exactly the same when you give it again.

Using a three bullet strategy also buys you back hours of time that you would have spent agonizing over every word of a script and on memorizing it.

Are you ready to ditch the memorized script? Leave a comment below.