STOP Doing This During Your Presentations!!!

From hundreds of hours watching (and giving) online presentations this past year thanks to Covid, from webinars to online conferences, I have encapsulated my tips, tricks, and pet peeves to avoid. Below are the 3 tips (actually 6 but most people retain and will be more interested if there are only 3) for you to stop doing on virtual or any professional presentation. Hope this helps you in your next webinar or virtual conference and you are empowered to go from boring to BAMM!! 

Stop beginning your presentation with your name, rank, and title of your presentation followed by “okay, let’s get started” – this is not an interrogation but hopefully should be entertaining and insightful. We live in an era of high entertainment, and when you sit people in front of a computer screen to watch a presentation, you need your presentations to start with a bang. The key is to get people's attention first! Then you can introduce yourself and your topic. You may only have 30 seconds to gain someone’s attention and set the tone for the entire presentation, so anything that would not encourage you to listen may have the audience tune out as well. Don’t be the status quo and instead shake things up and start a little different. Wow your audience straight off the bat by sharing something they would not expect to hear. Consider:

• Open with a provocative statement
• Ask a rhetorical, thought-provoking question
• Create empathy
• Do a call to arms
• Spark curiosity
•  Give a shocking statistic or fact

Stop giving a detailed agenda for a 30-minute presentation about what you are going to talk about – instead just start talking and give the audience credit they know why they are there. Consider you start watching a new movie; it does not start with timestamps of all the scenes coming up. It starts by grabbing your attention with a scene that sets the mood and begins to tell the story of what you are getting ready to watch. The audience knows what the movie is about and do not need 5-minutes of a 30-minute presentation for an agenda telling them it is going to be 20-minutes with 10-minutes at the end for Q&A. Try instead working on the flow of your story, the wow factor we discussed above in your opening, and making the presentation a performance rather than instruction manual dissertation. For another great LinkedIn article on this topic check out Jeffery Oddo article on why agenda slides should be banished: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/why-agenda-slides-should-banished-from-your-jeffery-oddo/

Stop giving the audience your complete biography of your life and work along with a in depth documentary on your company or organization – no body really cares. Yes, I get it that you are there because you are a subject matter expert and that you are proud of the organization you work for, but ask yourself honestly does this provide any more insights into your topic. Of course, you do need to introduce yourself to the audience and clarify who you are and your relevant expertise. But this does not need to be long or incredibly detailed though. The same goes for the information about your company and number of employees and how many factorys and where they are located around the world. Try to put yourself in the audience place and really consider if they will remember this part of your presentation, if it makes your presentation better, and if you would care. Like all of the first three don’ts – you have limited time and attention spam with the audience so think about all parts of your presentation and consider if it does not advance the story or main idea, should it be there. 

Stop reading a paragraph you have written and posted in your presentation. Wait, just stop posting paragraphs in your presentations in the first place – you are to tell a story, not write one or read one. Your slides aren't the main attraction; you and your story are! When building your slideshow, focus on the information and visuals that will best communicate and highlight your amazing ideas. Paragraphs are great for essays, but not for slideshows. Avoid large blocks of text and break sentences into smaller, more visually digestible pieces. Avoid even more reading these texts or most texts inside your presentations. Give your audience more credit and if you do not have more to add than what the slides say, then just forget the Zoom call and send everyone your slides instead. Slides shouldn't be the primary way you share the information. Instead, they should illustrate the point you're making. If the words you speak are the primary emphasis, whatever is on the screen should simply back it up and bring it to life.

Stop showing me a chart that a first grader cannot understand or table with 20 rows and 15 columns – I am not reading it anyway and I don’t have time to decipher what you are showing me. Presenting data is confusing—especially if you project it for five seconds and then move on. And even if you leave it up for five minutes while you talk, anyone who’s struggling to derive meaning from it won’t be paying much attention to what you have to say. If you are showing charts or numbers highlight or focus the audience on what you want them to take away or even better try to find a way to display the data visually with images. Remember your data slides are not about data but should be about the meaning behind the data and contributes to the story you are telling

Stop telling me everything you know and have ever learned in a short 20-minute presentation – truth is I will only remember a couple of things and most everything else is distracting. The last thing you want to do is unwittingly sabotage yourself by distracting your audience from your message. While not intentional to be distracting, the truth is people tend to retain only three things before becoming overwhelmed. What are the three or even one thing you’d wish the audience to take away from your presentation? Having something worth telling is only part of the job. You also need to make sure that your entire presentation is woven around those key ideas. From beginning to end, your core message should be your guiding light. Each slide should move the audience closer to it, and by the end of the presentation, leave them with a sense of illumination.

Remember - you have limited time and attention spam with the audience so think about all parts of your presentation and consider if it does not advance the story or main idea, should it be there!!