5 Powerfully Simple Presentation Tips

I get asked for presentation advice all the time, so here are five tips that will help make your presentations more engaging & effective.

1. Get Rid of Pleasantries

– There is no need to talk about the weather, how grateful you are to be there, to apologize, or reintroduce yourself. You only have a few seconds to grab their attention so start with a question or jump into your content.

2. Make it Conversational

– Act like you are speaking to one person. Make it conversational. Ask questions. If it is a small group you might create dialogue, with a large audience ask questions and give a pause for people to think about the question. Keep them engaged in the conversation.

3. Tell Stories

– People love stories. Stories inspire, stories motivate—stories evoke emotion in people that causes them to respond, to take action, to adopt your ideas, and buy your products. Robert McKee put it well when he said, “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”

4. Use the Rule of Three

– People remember things in threes. We grew up watching the three amigos, the three musketeers, and now watch NBC, ABC, CBS, or the NFL, NBA, or MLB. Get the point? We are trained to learn in threes. So if you have three points, three features to your products, three reasons to implement this new policy – people will remember.

5. Rehearse

– Too many people try to wing it and it never comes across as powerful as it should. A little bit of rehearsal is not for you to memorize a script and sound robotic – it is so that it naturally comes out and you say things in the way that you want to.