Less Screen, More You

Good slides are important, but nobody will ever walk into a room to see your slides. An audience—be it your sales team, your clients or a conference audience is there to see and to hear YOU. Your presentation, like it or not, should be all about YOU.

Your slides are your backup singers. And nobody ever pays to hear the backup singers.

Here are a few ways to make your presentation more about YOU...

Wait to Turn on the Projector

If you begin your presentation with information on the screen, you're already training your audience to focus on the screen and not you. A presentation that starts with an empty screen sets the expectation that your slides merely support the presentation, rather than being the presentation itself.

I keep a title slide up while my audiences are filing in (so they know they're in the right room), but then put up a black slide just before I'm about to start. The first slide appears about 60 seconds into my presentation, but if you don't need a slide for 10 minutes, there's no reason to have one until then.

Let Your Slides Make No Sense

If you design your slides so that they make no sense without your narration and presence, then they serve as questions to your audience—questions that they will focus their attention on you to have answered. Like this slide to the right that comes from a seminar I give. The Twinkies serve as a visual metaphor for making the point that you should use stories to communicate your ideas. Still doesn't make any sense? Good. That's why my presentation needs me in the room.

No See-Say Slides

Don't read your slides. If you put entire sentences on the screen it is nearly impossible not to read them. You can't paraphrase sentences. But you can easily expound upon short phrases and words.

Use the "B" Key

When presenting in PowerPoint or Keynote, pressing the "B" key at any point will black out the screen for your audience. Since humans are naturally drawn to change, putting up a black screen during your presentation immediately refocuses their attention (especially if they've just seen 10 slides of bar charts.) A black screen is an awesome way of changing the pace and guiding your audience's attention: to a prop, a handout, another speaker, to an asked question, etc. But mostly, a black screen brings attention back to YOU. Instantly, you will have all eyes back on you for a crucial point or message that you need to give. A black screen says, "Pay attention. I'm the presentation."

Note that you can also press "W" for a white screen.

Be a Better Public Speaker

Okay, this one can be daunting: "Public Speaking Training" returns 11 million hits in Google and "Public Speaking" returns 7,326 entries on Amazon. Toastmasters is even still around.

There are a lot of corporate speech coaches and trainers out there and even more books on the subject, but I want to point out two particular resources that I love. Six Minutes is a fantastic website dedicated to speaking and presentation skills. There's so much on the site (+ an email newsletter), that you should just browse around it when you can.

The second resource is a book I recently read. Scott Berkun's Confessions of a Public Speaker uses sticky stories from the author's own time on the speaking circuit to impart everything from larger general lessons to smaller tips and tricks. It a fun, quick read.

I'm starting to do more and reading and research specifically on public speaking. If you've got recommendations, send 'em on...