Don’t Overdo It With Your Slides

Melanoma Cancer Speech

This week’s tip is for all of you who give presentations, and use PowerPoint. While PowerPoint can certainly enhance the quality of your speech, it can also be a crutch that prevents you from truly connecting with the audience. Here are four things to consider.

Remember that YOU are the star of the show. The PowerPoint deck is there to reinforce what you’re saying. Think of it as added value. People connect with people. Ultimately your performance as a speaker will be what your audience remembers most (not to put any pressure on you). 🙂

Keep the content manageable. The term “Death By PowerPoint” essentially means that you present slide after slide of charts, graphs, stats and texts. That is overwhelming and intimidating and can lead to your audience zoning out. You don’t want that to happen, because it becomes very hard to get them regain their focus.

If you do have a lot of important content like stats and charts, perhaps you can email all of that to the audience before or after the speech. This works well in a business setting, when you’re presenting to colleagues and you have their email addresses. This way, you can give them the highlights during your speech and they can read all the fine print on their own.

Finally, this one sounds obvious but it’s a common problem: make sure to proofread your PowerPoint. One grammar mistake, or misspelling, or typo can destroy your credibility, especially if it’s on a giant screen. So proofread it, and have somebody else proofread it as well. Four eyes are better than two!

If you’d like to talk about giving a speech, incorporating PowerPoint or any other aspect of Media Coaching, just contact me here.

Have a great day!

Dave