Do you give Power Point presentations or do you present, using Power Point slides as an aid? There's a huge difference to the audience and ultimately to yourself as well.
A Power Point presentation reduces all the impact and meaning of your ideas to a one-dimensional piece of software. Since the slides are non-living, non-breathing and non-feeling, every time you equate 'presentation' with 'Power Point', you've just reduced everything you know and care about to this digital cypher.
When, instead, you deliberately use slide software as an aid to YOU in your presentation, you retain the power, the connection and the expertise. You are the source of the wisdom and yes, the emotion.
Can you imagine being the survivor of a wartime casualty; going to gathering with other families, seeking understanding and empathy; and being in the audience where a purportedly caring person delivers a Power Point presentation about improvised explosive devices and other horrors of war?
That's the news report from the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS) gathering this Memorial Day weekend.
If the reporter could write that the speaker "went through a Power Point presentation about..." then you know very well that the speaker stood next to his slides and read bullets and described facts.
Where's compassion, where's empathy, where's human-ness? These families need a presentation that is powerful because the speaker makes it so, with stories and evocative language and emotion.
When you are asked to speak to an audience, even if someone calls it a Power Point presentation, please do not go to your software and begin filling in slides. Think about the audience and how you are going to reach them. Know the direction you're going and how you're going to get there. Fill in the path with your leading materials--a few facts, plus quotations, exercises, props, pop culture, stories and visuals. Then decide where a slide will serve as an aid to an idea and create only those slides.
Your presentation should be a personally powerful one with a few slides as opposed to a Power Point presentation lacking in personal power. You will affect your audience--and even heal them--in ways that slides will never, never do.
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