Four New Year’s Resolutions To Make Your Presentations Sparkle In The New Year!

One of the most popular New Year's Resolutions is Dry January in which people commit to abstaining from alcohol for one month. What makes the resolution so popular is that the constricted time frame acknowledges how difficult it is to make changes in behavior that has been practiced over time. That is human nature.

Throughout the business world, presentations are developed and delivered using a deeply embedded legacy practice made even more difficult to change because it is reinforced by everybody else who uses the same practice.

The legacy starts with a begged, borrowed, or stolen set of slides mandated by the company’s marketing department or designed by an outsourced third party that has no domain expertise. The resulting slides are then shuffled into an arbitrary sequence. Presenters take the deck, send it ahead to the audience and then proceed to read the slides verbatim during the pitch, thus patronizing the audience. At the end of the presentation, presenters open the floor to questions and proceed to respond with a set of canned answers that may or may not be what the audience asked.

Sound familiar?

It’s as if a Broadway musical were to be performed by actors in street clothes reading from the playwright’s first draft.

Buried within the process above are four essential elements that need a new approach to disrupt the inefficient legacy:

1. Develop the narrative
2. Design the slides
3. Deliver with assurance
4. Respond to questions

Here are four simple resolutions that will enable you to deliver your presentations efficiently and effectively in 2023:

1. Resolve to start with the story, not the slides. Spend time brainstorming ideas that you want to include and then distill them into a maximum of six (four or five is better) main themes. Then, with only a handful of such main themes, order them into a logical sequence. This new practice will result in a clear, continuous story that is easy for you to tell and easy for your audience to follow.
2. Resolve to create a slide deck that you use exclusively for the presentation and not as a handout. Design the text slides as headlines. Provide the discussion details in your narrative. Rather than force your audience to read your slides, let them focus on you.
3. Resolve to practice your presentation aloud just as you will be doing it front of your in-person or virtual audience. Do it at least three times, not to the point of memorization, but to where you are fluent in telling your story. This will reduce your stress and make you appear confident to your audience.
4. Resolve not to answer a question until you fully understand it. If you do not understand the question, ask the questioner to clarify. Listening and understanding the question will help you align your answer with the question.

Practice these four resolutions to make your presentations sparkle.

Happy New Year!