Digital Coach – For High Stakes Presentations

Water runs downhill and presenters find it much easier to layout presentations in slide after slide of bullets. We know they suck.  We know everyone hates to sit through presentations like that.  Yet, the vast majority of presenters snuggle up to them like a comfortable blanket because it’s just easier.

The answer to “why” is actually pretty simple.  The act of conceptualizing what we want to put into a presentation is often a very intellectual exercise. With the left side of the brain fully engaged for the task, the intellect is very comfortable with the use of bullets and sub-bullets to chart a course. There’s just one major problem.  That approach all but guarantees the lowest level of recall and internalization of a message by our audiences.  For the presentation to be meaningful & remembered, it must transition from text (left-brain) to more simplified visually-rich ideas (right-brain).    Sadly… 80-90% of the time that critical transition never occurs and we all know the mind-numbing result.

One way we can make that transition is through the use of metaphor.  In this example, you can see the initial slide identifies 8 sales training categories in bullet form.  In the second example, that same concept is illustrated as categories on a bookshelf.  In the beginning of the presentation, they are all identified and then the individual icons are used in the corner of each section to help the audience track along.  Find your metaphor and your audience will remember longer!