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Top 5 Tips for Engaging Presentations
Facts Are Only Support Material
Start with a narrative, ideal outcome or problem. Set the tone of where you are leading the audience. Once signed up to your message, supporting facts are a great reinforcement.
Facts do not sway, convince or even impress an audience unless they already agree with your message. Remember a trial is won by who sells a set of facts best.
(In fact) Research shows that people are just as likely to find reasons not to buy into your perspective when presented with just facts, making them even more resistant to your message.
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Be Vulnerable, Be Yourself
Be authentic and let the audience experience the things that make you human, which will make you relatable.
You will build connection, empathy (or even better compassionate) from those listening and have them wanting more, because, you are like them, real.
Offer anecdotes (related to the intent of the presentation) that demonstrate who you really are, even better if it is something you have struggled with or have found difficult.
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Understand How You Stand And Move
It gets thrown around that communication is 80 or 90% non-verbal and whatever the real numbers are the point is - how you appear while presenting has an impact.
Body language and gestures can help you sell your point. If the auditory and visual ain’t matching up, dissonance is starting to flare up in the audiences’ heads.
Know thyself, this is hard but film yourself and watch it back. Brutal direct feedback but informative.
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You Talk. The Powerpoint Doesn’t
Limit the amount of words on any slide in your powerpoint presentation. In fact no words is optimal. Your slides are there to support you not the other way round.
It is impossible to simultaneously multi-task. Fact. You maybe able to switch between stimuli fast but humans cannot do more than one thing at a time.
Words on a screen and different ones coming out of your mouth are taxing on the audience. Use only when necessary. The same ones…. reading the slides is just boring.
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It’s A Narrative Journey
This single point is the most powerful and important to master.
Think storytelling and structure it like one. Does it have conflict? It should. Fail to get the content right and end correctly is a missed opportunity.
What’s the point? What do you want the audience to remember or do? How you get to that point and reinforce it is the spine of your presentation.
Structure a presentation in a simplified way. Think about it as just being a story, beginning, middle and end with problem and resolution.