How to Deliver a PowerPoint Presentation | Media Training
The second you tell yourself “I’m giving a PowerPoint Presentation” or start referring to your PowerPoint slide deck as your “presentation” you are finished.
You have basically destroyed any chances you had of delivering an effective presentation.
Great communicators focus primarily on the ideas they have they want to audience to understand and remember. Then, they think of examples, stories, pictures and other visual tools for making those ideas come alive for the audience.
PowerPoint slides can be a part of this process, but only a part. The second you focus your energies on slides, as the speaker, you are losing sight of the real goal: communicating ides.
I say this as someone who likes PowerPoint and uses PowerPoint slides frequently. The problem is not the technology of PowerPoint; the problem is fixating on a peripheral tool when the central element of a presentation is the speaker communicating ideas while speaking.
My advice to all clients is this: never start your presentation preparation with creating slides. Instead, get a blank sheet of paper or a computer screen and then brainstorm on ideas you want to communicate during your presentation. Come up with an outline on paper for yourself. Add notes to remind you of stories and examples for each point. Then and only then create slides to further flesh out your ideas from your presentation. And if you have 40 slides filled with charts, data and other complex graphs, email it to people in advance or hand it out, but don’t call it your “presentation” or try to go through each slide while standing in front of people.
TJ Walker is a media training expert. Call him at 212.,764.4955