Follow these four steps to engage your audience & spark action.

One of the things that I do as a leadership coach and a longtime communications professional, is create and help others to create, powerful and engaging presentations. Over the years I’ve learned that there are four crucial steps you want to follow to engage your audience and create a talk that they will remember.  

1. Be crystal clear about your main message.

 Your first step, before you do anything else, is to answer these questions: 

• What are you presenting and why? 
• What’s the one thing you want this person to walk away from your presentation with?
•  What’s the insight you want them to have, the feeling you want them to experience, and the question you want them to ponder?
• If they were to talk to someone about what they heard, what would you want them to pass on? 
• What do you want them to do after they hear your presentation? Do you want them to write differently, talk differently, vote differently? What do you want to have happen? 

2. Don’t be the expert.

Once you are clear on your message and what you want to convey, then your next step is outlining your content. Remind yourself that while you’re the person presenting, you don’t have to have all the answers. And even if you do have all the answers, you don’t want to tell them everything you know.

When you try to tell people everything, you’re not giving them space to think, to pause, to reflect on what you’re saying and consider what it means to them. You’re not giving them space to bring their own knowing and experience to the conversation. 

It’s especially tempting when you’re teaching people something. How easy it is for us to get into the banking mindset – I have all of this information and I just have to deposit it in these folks. For me, when I’m teaching, I can get caught up in wanting to make sure that people are getting value. I have this voice in the back of my mind saying, “If I tell them a lot then they’re going to have something concrete.”  

But I have been learning through working with a coach focused on instructional design, as well as monitoring my own processes, that we need to take in new information in chunks, and then we need a process for making sense of those chunks and figuring out how we might use the new information. 

3. Remember that questions & comments are just as important as your declarations.

So when presenting or teaching, include questions on your slides. Include pauses in your delivery and let people share what’s coming up for them, what they’re noticing, connections that they’re making and experiences that they’ve had.

4. Create slides with more pictures and less words.

Resist the temptation to fill your slides with text. When you put a ton of words on a slide, people focus more on the slide and trying to read it, rather than paying attention to what you’re saying. The miss your mannerisms, your movements, your tone of voice and all those other delicious bits that folks need to notice if they really want to understand your message. 

And in terms of font size, try not to use fonts smaller than 20 points, unless you’re creating slides that are designed to be hand-outs that people read on their own. 

Here are two great resources on creating presentations: Susan Weinchenk, a psychologist, shares 5 Things Every Presenter Needs to Know About People in this short video: