Nate Clark's Musings

Giving great presentations is a superpower. I vividly remember reaching this epiphany during a workshop in grad school, where a decent idea well-presented grabbed significantly more mindshare than what I felt was a great idea poorly presented. Indeed, there is a fair amount of academic evidence that presenting well leads to improved perception of competence and leadership abilities, not to mention persuasion.

This hopefully motivates why one might care about giving good presentations. Now to actually get good at them you can read a bunch of books and join Toastmasters like I did. Or just follow this highly condensed version of that info, which is the process I use these days when I need to present.

1. Pick out 1-3 points you want to get across. People have a limit of about 3-5 pieces of information that can fit in their short-term memory. No one will remember any more than that. If you need people to walk away from your presentation with more than three ideas, you will fail. When that’s the case, try a different form of communication or trim your list down to three ideas at most.
   
2. Create a story about your ideas. People love stories. People remember stories. Character-driven stories stimulate oxytocin synthesis in the brain which drives both recall and cooperative behavior in humans. You Want That.
   
   Stories have characters (ideally human ones, since those are most relatable), a plot with conflict, and a resolution. If you’re presenting something technical this can sometimes be tricky, but the tried-and-true method is inventing a hypothetical user and explaining how their life is improved by the technology.
   
3. Tell the story in an engaging way. There are many facets to making a story engaging, but here are a few of the most important ones:
   • Focus on “what’s in it for you,” meaning be sure to get across why the audience should care. Relate the character(s) in the story to something they personally care about. People are naturally self-interested, so this is critical for maintaining attention.
     
   • Try to use anecdotes. Think of anecdotes as stories-within-the-story, i.e., vignettes that help illustrate points within the broader story arc. Anecdotes are more persuasive than data on issues that are personal, and given the previous point, this presentation will definitely be personal, right?
     
   • Use body language and voice modulation. A tremendous fraction of human communication is non-verbal. Be sure to leverage body language and changes in vocal emphasis to get across key points. People are very quick to tune out monotonous speech. Similarly, speakers that are clearly ill at ease or nervously gripping a podium put people off and cause them to tune into you as opposed to the message.
     
   • If you have slides, put very few words on them. The words on the slides should be prompts for you to ensure you remember to get certain points across. Four lines of text with six words/line is the maximum. If there are too many words on your slides people will be reading, not listening to you, and reading is not an engaging behavior.
     
   • Use simple, consistent graphic elements. Pictures are fantastic for getting points across. Just make sure that they’re not overly complex and that they’re easy to grasp. Use similar colors and shapes for the same concepts for example. This is the graphical equivalent of the previous point on verbosity: if images are complex people will stop listening to you and start trying to figure out what the pictures mean.
     
4. Rehearse! This is so, so important. People sometimes think rehearsing will cause them to lose the “spontaneity” of the talk. Quite the contrary, unrehearsed talks just come across as poorly planned and often chaotic. You message will almost certainly be muddled. When rehearsing your focus should be on the key points you want to make at each point in the presentation and the transitions between those points. Do NOT memorize the entire talk. Two reasons for this: 1. if you forget what comes next you will be lost, which looks awful, and 2. most presentations in corporate settings are interactive (this helps with engagement), and if people are interrupting you, it is difficult to remember where you are in the talk and to adjust for points that were brought up via questions earlier than you had planned.

Hope this is helpful to someone out there!