There is an old Finnish saying, “Fire is a great slave but a horrible master.” The same is true of PowerPoint slides. The problem, of course, is that most people become slaves to their PowerPoint slides. They really, truly, do not want to be slaves to the PowerPoint, but, well, the slides are there, there’s not much time before the speech, and nothing can be done at this point.

Stop! It doesn’t have to be that way.

My best piece of advice on how to stop becoming a slave to your PowerPoint slides is to just not start your whole speech creation process by creating slides. I know, that’s how you probably do it now, and that’s the problem. If you start your speech process by writing bullet point after bullet point, and complex graph after complex graph, you are slowly but surely putting the shackles around your angles and wrists that will never come off.

Here’s a better way of creating a speech ensuring that you will be the master and the PowerPoint slides will be your servants:

1. Brainstorm on all the important ideas you’d like to cover in your speech, in no particular order.
2. Narrow your points down to the top five.
3. Put your top five points on a sheet of paper, or computer screen.
4. Think of a case study, story and example for each point.
5. Now (and not until now) think of a visual way you can make each message point more memorable and more understandable than simply talking about it. Turn that visual image, picture or graph into a PowerPoint slide.