7 Ways To Keep The Passion Alive In Your Presentations

Giving a talk can be an exhilarating or soul-destroying experience or somewhere in between. The connection created with the audience is everything. And, presentation slides can either enhance or destroy that engagement.

Imagine you're fired-up to give your presentation. You want to win people's hearts and minds with a big idea, a pitch for resources, giving an update on business performance or selling a product or service.

You're a tad nervous but know what you want to say and you're clutching a memory stick with those precious slides you've worked on for ages.

But stop a moment - here's a question:

Did you create your presentation slides as an aide memoir for yourself or for the benefit of your audience?

Many people might say – BOTH. But, speaker prompting and audience engagement are different objectives.

Recently, I was talking with a client who showed me a presentation he was preparing to give to a group of colleagues. His slides comprised small images, bullet points, tables and the odd graph.

Sadly, it was obvious that these slides weren't created with the audience in mind.

We create a lot of story-based presentations for our clients and every slide matters. If a slide doesn't play hard at engaging and moving the audience, it gets fired from the presentation. 

Here are five presentation passion killers;

Bullet Points:

If a slide has words it’s an invitation to the audience to read them. One of two things happens.

1.    The speaker reads the bullet points out. I'm sure you've come across this classic case of people ‘talking to their slides’. It's hard to engage an audience when you're reading bullet points rather than connecting with the people in front of you.

2.    The speaker says something other than what’s on the slide, albeit in the same vein. So the audience is trying to listen to the spoken words and also read words on a slide. People's attention is split. They're partially listening and partially reading, so the bullet points are distracting and confusing.

It's like trying to write a report, email, essay or story while the lyrics of a song playing on the radio are competing for attention from your brain's language processing centre. Most people say they find this war of words tricky so it doesn't make sense in a talk.

Bullet points rarely add value in a presentation (unless you're sending it to people as reading material).

Graphs:

How many times have you been shown a graph with no real conclusions? Here’s a graph and this is what it shows. Make of it what you will. 

It’s like being shown a picture of a clock with the speaker pointing out that the big hand is at twelve and the little one at four and saying it's four o'clock. But so what? There’s no insight to help listeners appreciate what the data means so they can make a decision or take an action.

Graphs are only valuable in a presentation when they support a meaningful insight.

Graphical Illustrations and Diagrams:

Graphical illustrations can be useful explainers provided they’re simple. But often they're not. Instead, the speaker shows a complex map of their clever thinking. People are squinting to see it clearly and trying desperately to wrap their brains around the maze before them.

Even if people do manage to decipher the maze they're unlikely to remember it.

Research shows that people can remember 7 (+ or – 2) pieces of information (e.g. digits, words, letters).

Keeping graphics simple makes it easier to engage people and have them remember your message.

Tables:

Tables often appear in business presentations that compare data. They rarely wow people and like graphs and graphics, tables appeal to the head rather than the heart.

Simple tables delivered with insights can add value to certain types of business presentations. But, the ultimate passion killer is when the speaker cuts and pastes a massive table from Excel and caveats their message with, "I'm not expecting you to be able to see all the details on here."

Busy tables have no useful place in a presentation. There's always a better way to deliver the message.

Imagery:

A visual anchor that backs-up your words is a powerful way to engage people's hearts as well as their minds. The old saying 'a picture is worth a 1000 words' so so true.

The story-based presentations we create for our clients are aeons away from the traditional approach to slides. Evocative imagery is one of our favourite tools because in most business presentations there’s an overemphasis on talking to people’s intellects. 

Research shows that people generally make decisions emotionally and then back them up with logic afterwards. That means you must win people's hearts first and provide rational argument second.

Storytelling is a powerful way to keep your talks alive.

A story is a journey so it makes your talk easier to remember for the audience and for the speaker. With a story, the speaker is less likely to need an aide memoir. (By story-based presentation I don't mean information in a logical flow like e.g. traditional sales presentations or strategic plans - it's different - a story is about the experience of a character.)

Stories well crafted and told capture emotions and paint pictures in the minds of your audience, which enhances their engagement with the story and makes it more likely they'll remember your message.

Stories connect the speaker with the audience. Poorly executed slides can break the connection whereas well designed slides can enhance the speaker-audience rapport.

Bringing it all together - here seven ways to keep the passion alive in your presentations; 

1. Only show slides that add-value for your audience (not as an aide memoir for the speaker).

2. Limit the number of slides to the minimum needed to support your message.

3. Keep words on slides to a minimum or even zero! 

4. Always share a meaningful insight when showing a graph.

5. Keep graphical illustration and diagrams simple.

6. Use visual imagery to evoke feelings.

7. Use narrative structures over logical flows to engage and make your message stick.

We'd love to hear how you keep the passion alive in your presentations?

If you held on for the ride and got to here - thank you. Please COMMENT and SHARE on LINKEDIN, FACEBOOK & TWITTER. 

About the Author:

Claire Taylor is a co-founder of The Story Mill and author of The Tao of Storytelling.

About The Story Mill:

At The Story Mill, we believe that every business problem can be resolved by connecting people. We help organisations to build better chemistry, be that in leadership, within teams or selling to your customers. We work with live, written, visual and video storytelling.

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