Transcripts
1. Introduction*: We are living in a world where Steve Jobs was a modern-day hero. His presentations were watched by millions of people around the world. Al Gore won an Oscar, an Academy Award, for the Inconvenient Truth, which was essentially a presentation. The wildly expensive TED conference is a place that everybody wants to be featured. The more and more people are making their livings online, whether teaching courses or using webinar says sell their online products and services. So unless you're going to an academic conference, perhaps, maybe a medical conference, the bar for having engaging, attention-grabbing presentations is quite high. And the truth is, it's really not that hard to get the stellar presentation. This class is designed to help you clear that bar with grace, confidence, and skill. This class is designed to cover the following topics. Audience, understanding them, where they are and what they care about. To stickiness, making sure that you have a message that is clear and sticky so it will remain in people's minds. It's three, authenticity. You have to make sure that you are ascetic and trustworthy so that your audience who listened to your message for tools, using the right tools online and offline. Five, your presentation deck. I'll show you the three steps of preparing the presentation, preparation, Design, and Delivery. And finally, number six, this is the follow-up, sending the right materials as a follow-up. And note, this is not just a copy of here to heck. By the end of this class, you'll be able to make a presentation that is easy to understand, simple, exciting, and visually stimulating. My name is Brooke asked him, I am a marketer, I am a designer, I am a communications professional, and above all else, I am a creative amplifier. I myself have spoken at TED Tenex Bangkok in front of nearly 600 people. I've also been a TED speaker coach for close to a dozen TEDx events all around the world. I hope that you get a lot out of this class and that it helps you to amplify and transform your present experience so that it leaves more of your audience towards your call to action.
2. About Brooke*: My name is Brooke stdin. I am a marketer, I am a designer. I am a communications professional, and above all else, I am a creative amplifier. The better half of my career has been focused on marketing, branding, web design, and user experience. I support individuals, organizations, and businesses in using the power of web, branding, marketing and design to amplify and scale their business and impact. I, myself have spoken at TED Tenex Bangkok in front of nearly 600 people. I've also been a TED speaker coach for close to a dozen TEDx events all around the world. I've worked for organizations, for businesses, for conferences, for event centers. My goal was really focused on helping speakers clarify their idea, get the flow of the presentation together and presented in a way that was thrilling, engaging in an activated their audiences. When my clients needed to give a keynote presentation, to deliver an investor pitch, to build a website, to develop marketing materials, or to just level up their growth strategy. I've been involved at all levels of the process. I hope that you get a lot out of this class and that it helps you to amplify and transform your presentation experience so that it leads more of your audience towards your call to action.
3. Why Less is More*: We have all been there. Whether it was in a classroom, whether it was watching a webinar. But we have seen unbelievably boring, slow, dense slides coming up on the computer where we're trying to read, trying to listen, trying to make sense of what's going on. And we end up really being disengaged board and end up start doing something else at play on our phones, we opened another tablet or computer. We do anything to scape the excruciating pain of watching a boring presentation. I think we can all agree that somewhere between 7595% of presentations suck. Why? This feels so unnecessary. We have been doing presentations for decades. Why are they still so that it's been said that obsessive web browsing can cause attention spans to drop to as little as nine seconds. That's the same as a goldfish. In my experience, sometimes I drop off even before that night. Second, mark, what do we see? We see long, we see boring, you see bad slides, we seek dense tags. We see few images. Do any of these look familiar? Now what do we want to see? We want to see short, simple, elegant, understandable, relatable, and ideally exciting content. So how can we improve? Well, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. We need to be simple, we need to be clear, and we ultimately need to be brief and love this quote by a really famous jazz musician named Dizzy pepsi. It has taken me all of my life to learn what not to play. And the presentation God himself. Mr. Steve Jobs, he says that focus is about saying no.
4. 3-Step Foundation*: So what are the three phases of creating a killer All Star highly engaging presentation? First is doing preparation. Second, you move on to the design, and then third, you focus entirely on the delivery. So let's step into preparation. First is to brainstorm, then to construct your core, core idea, your core message. And the third is to storyboard it out so it can be a visual presentation. So while you're taking this class, I'm going to encourage you to keep your computer open. But normally for a brainstorm, you wanna close your computer, get out of the technological super, super intense headspace and give more into the experience of creating. This is much easier and much more authentic when he can do this analog off your computer. First thing you wanna do is you want to ask the right questions. You need to understand. How much time do you have, what's the venue likes? And online offline in a small intimate space, in a big auditorium. Understand the space. Knowing who your audiences, what do they already know? Why are they there to CEO? What are they looking to get out of the experience? Expectations. Make sure you have clear expectations when you are giving your presentation, as well as from all of the stakeholders that are involved. The person who potentially hired you to speak, the expectations of your audience. All of this matters in the preparation stage, desires. You want to understand what they want to get out of the experience with you. Why have they said yes to listening to you? And ultimately, you need to be crystal clear on what the, the fundamental purpose of your presentation is. Cell first step to brainstorming is you just want to explore ideas, make lists, sketch out different ideas, play around, allow yourself to be creative. I have some exercises for you that you can check out below. Now, moving on to constructing the core of your presentation. What is your core idea? In the words of the famous TED conference, what is your one idea worth spreading? And equally as important, why does it matter? Why does it matter to the group that you're speaking to? This is something that I will often use to help me really in and center with the core essence of my presentation is I ask myself and my clients, if the audience only remember one thing from your presentation. And lucky, they will remember one thing. What is it? What is the one thing that you want them to remember? What is the one thing that you want them to tell their friends? What is the one thing that you want to plant in their minds and then help water and grow. Always keep in mind what you want your audience to know, believe and do. Think about this, what you want your audience to know. This is the intellectual part. This is what you need them to understand, contexts wise, product and service wise, so on and so forth. Then what you want your audience to believe, this is the emotional piece, this is the heart centered piece. Then finally, what do you want your audience to do? What is the call to action? Where are you ultimately trying to drive them to? Once you have your core idea and a basic outline and you clear on who your audience is and what their expectations and contexts is, then you can move on to doing your elevator pitch. So it's just a quick version of your idea, your presentation, the core concepts that you want to share with somebody else to try to hook them, to ask you the question. Oh, yeah. Tell me more. Once you have a few sentences and it's describing your idea, right it out, and keep that central and focused as you build out your presentation. Now, we move on to the storyboard phase. This is where things start to get more visual. I highly encourage you to still stay off your computer. Once you open Keynote or PowerPoint or any, any other program, it's really easy to get distracted by all of the details, the template, the colors, the fonts, what images you want to use. Let that go until you've got the flow of your presentation. You want to create a storyboard that has some type of visual element, even if it's just a big bold sentence. And examples for talking points about what's important about that key message you want to capture frame by frame. What is the main point of this slide? And how do I visually get this across? And don't be afraid to use empty space. It's also helpful to understand the basic grant, which we'll go over a little bit more when we move into the design phase.
5. My Process*: Here's an example of a presentation that I did back in the day when I was working at Kiva. I was asked to bring the message of Kiva around micro lending for small entrepreneurs to a group of elementary school students. Normally, I worked with adults. Normally, I speak at a pretty sophisticated level. So this is an interesting challenge for me. So as I was making notes, I tried to tie in the main points that I wanted to get across about our business Kiva, and how that would fit into the context and minds of an elementary school students. So you can see my notes here. First, I wanted to engage them in playing the guessing game. I wanted to know whether they had heard of the Nobel Peace Prize with the new for Muhammad Yunus, the grandfather of microfinance, was, I wanted to understand whether they had a basic knowledge of what poverty or poor person even Plus, and I played it with a few other guessing games that I use to tie a narrative story together shortly after in the story part, I discuss my own relationship with Muhammad Yunus and how I can become somewhat of a Nobel Peace Prize winning junkie. I would follow him to listen to him speak. I was engaged in almost everything that he was working on and he was a huge source of inspiration for me. So I shared images of me with him to help contextualize it and bring it more home. And then finally, the last part of the presentation, I focused on how it would apply to them in the context of their own lives. So here's an example of a presentation that I once did. And this is a little insight into my process. As you can see, I like to work with sticky notes. Think gives me a lot of flexibility and color coordinate some of my ideas, as you can see here, the green on the left is the core concept of that section. And then the pink or the individual slides that I make to support that core idea. After I've more or less figured out the flow, then I move over to finally returning to my computer. And I'll start creating the slides. And as you'll see at the photo on the right here, as I completed a slide, I folded it over so I always knew exactly where I was in the process and I can feel a sense of I'm almost there.
6. Design Tips + Tricks*: Now here's the fun part, design. I want to go over a few key design concepts with you. You don't have to be a designer to design beautiful presentations. There are plenty of templates and support out there, but it's important to have a few basic design concepts to help you easily create beautiful visuals. The first is empty space. Don't be afraid of it. Empty space is a beautiful and elegant and it is the opposite of clutter dense, overwhelming content. So use it. Next is contrast. You want to play with light and dark. Maybe try a dark background or a dark image and have some text on top of it. You want to create a sense of texture and contrast so that you can really be clear on what you want to emphasize and how you want to tie together what you're ultimately trying to say. Repetition. This is so important by using a similar design style or maybe even having a template with the same color palette, the same font, the same general spacing. You allow your audience to really focus in on what you're saying and not be distracted by having to figure out a whole new visual interpretation every single slide by using some repetitive elements, you can make the information a lot easier to digest. Alignment is so important. If you do it well, then people don't usually notice it. If you do it poorly. It's all some of us can look at. You want to make sure that you have intentional alignment. So your text is an off-balance. You don't have one side significantly bigger than the other. You don't want it to feel random and kind of pasted on there. You wanted to feel professional and well-designed. Alignment is a huge part of this. Proximity is really helpful design tool to help you organize your ideas. If you cluster a lot of ideas together, generally, you're expressing these ideas are related to some concept or some idea. If things are much more sparse and separated into different categories, then you're expressing and focusing on the differences. Here are some examples to help you get a sense of what we're talking about. You can see what they were using a variety of different design tools. We're using empty space to create a feeling of openness, of clean spaciousness. We're using contrast, having a colored background with bright texts and front. We're using alignment. The cow is looking at the empty space so we can focus directly on. Now, let's briefly talk about the rule of thirds. This is a really important, well-known design technique that many of us are not familiar with, even though we are constantly encountering it. If you take out your mobile phone right now and you open the camera app, chances are you're going to see this very fine lined grid. This is the rule of thirds in practice. Essentially, the idea behind this guideline is that by placing visual images in alignment with where these points intersect, you create more and shed more energy, more interests in the composition rather than simply just centering it. These are one of the dead giveaway is between an amateur photographer and somebody who had some experience with design principles.
7. Stock Images*: Now, a presentation, after all, is highly visual. If you're not interested in giving the visual presentation, then maybe you should record a podcast or work on it writing a book. Maybe you should consider a non-visual format. Presentations are a visual. So you really want to honor that. You wanna make it easy on the eyes. You wanna make it engaging for your viewer. This is something that needs to have constant refreshed content to make sure that it continues to grip the intention of your audience. And remember that the more strikingly Visual your presentation is, the more people will remember it. And if people remember it, they will remember you. Now, where do you get all these beautiful imagery? There is no expectation whatsoever that you should go out and shoot your own photos. Not necessary. If you're a photographer and you want to, by all means, go for it, but it is not necessary. Here. I'll share a little bit of my face stock photography sites so you can grab other images and use them to enhance your presentation. Thank you.
8. Delivery*: Ultimately, the goal of a presentation is to move somebody to buy your product and service and to make it really easy for them to talk about GIL, the simpler your core concepts are, the easier it's going to be for your audience to engage. It's okay to not give away everything in your presentation. You want your audience to be hooked, to be engaged, to be inspired, and to be wanting more if you fully satisfy them and give away the keys to the kingdom just in your presentation, then there isn't a need to continue to engage with you. Be mindful about what your goal of the presentation is. Are you giving a webinar and you're trying to drive somebody towards sales. Are you giving a presentation where you'd want to inspire and activate your audience? Or are you pitching an investor and need to make a strong case as to why you deserve their investment. It's critically important and context matters. That's why we started with that. But the thing that remains the same is at the end of the day, you want to make it easy for people to talk about GIL And to help you spread your ideas. One of the best tools to make a memorable impression is to use stories. Use a story that has a clear and exciting and engaging start, has a clear climax and then has a hugely significant resolution. You want people to go with you on the journey. And there's nothing like being able to engage somebody by using a story. Now we move on to the actual presentation. You've learned some basic design skills. You've learned how to get to your core idea. He learned how to put it in context for your audience. Now it's time to learn how to deliver a killer presentation. One of the most important parts of delivering a presentation. He's actually your own body. If your audience can see you, it's really important that you stand up straight, that you take up space, that you're able to use your hands and your voice to guide them through an experience that is exciting and engaging and that shows that you are happy to be giving the presentation. By contrast, if you stand really close, if your voice sounds like you're very insecure, if you put your hands over here or maybe in your pockets, you really get this. And a lot of discomfort that is highly contagious. Both discomfort and enthusiasm are contagious. And the message here is to lean into enthusiasm so that you can inspire your audience to feel the same. And be mindful to the level of complexity that you're presenting to your audience, it's critically important to understand who your audience is, what their level of understanding around the topic is currently, and their capacity for being able to understand and digest complex concepts. You also want to pay attention to your yes, the images that you've chosen to put in your presentation should be easy to digest if you put really complex patterns and colors and charts altogether on the slide while you're simultaneously talking, you're gonna lose your audience. People can't listen and read at the same time. Even though many people think they can, when they try, they do both very poorly to be kind and be generous to your audience. Show a visual that supports what you're saying, not detract or distracts people from what you're saying. Okay.
9. Follow Up*: Finally, what do you want your audience to do? What is the call to action? Where are you ultimately trying to drive them to? You need to make sure that when you're presentation is over, there's a clear, clear opportunity for them to continue to engage with you. Whether that's going to your website, whether that's clicking a special offer or whether or not that's coming up to you and speaking with him during the break. You really want to make it easy for people to engage with you and amplify your ideas.