You have the best of intentions. You give speech after speech using strong visuals, compelling examples and riveting stories to make your points come alive. But then, slowly, your speaking skills start to dissolve. The next thing you know, you’ve become a boring hack, just like everyone else.
How did it happen?
Here is the usual suspect. You are supposed to speak at a conference in 3 weeks. The conference coordinator calls your office urgently and says “Can you email your presentation today? We promised all of the attendees that we would send them in advance!”
But you are on the road, or busy. So you ask a staffer to put together a rough draft PowerPoint slide. Since the assistant isn’t a mind reader, all he/she can do is list bullet points of concepts that you have discussed before on this subject, or take out facts and numbers from your website and previous presentations. So far, no harm, because this is just a draft.
But now the speech is tomorrow and you haven’t had time to think about it. And all you have is the “draft” prepared by your assistant. There’s still time to prepare a great speech on the plane. But things come up, as they always do, and you are preoccupied.
Now you have to give the speech in five minutes. And you are left with one option: you will kinda, sorta read the bullet points on the PowerPoint slide to your audience. You know it was awful, compared to your normal way of speaking. But nobody came up to complain afterwards. In fact, several people still complemented you, though they were vendors looking to do business with you.
The next thing you know, you’ve gone six months and a dozen speeches using this technique of reading bullet points off of a screen. You have a new habit.
Stop! You are destroying your reputation! And no one has the guts to tell you!
Throw away your slides and start from scratch. For your next speech, you need to come up with five major points, and then an example and a story for each point. Then, come up with a visual slide for each point that contains no words. Finally, prepare a one-page outline that reminds you of your key points, examples, stories and slides. Finally, rehearse.
Now you are ready to re-enter the society of interesting speakers and presenters. Welcome back.
