Lessons

Lesson Info

Recap of Presentation Scenarios

When you create the entire experience of a deck in a very short period of time, you are doing something that's almost very cathartic because you're doing something that is not very typical. The idea of having a lot of pressure when you're building these decks and you're designing things it takes a lot of practice. And again, as you're practicing throughout these decks, you're gonna want to remember some really, really key things. And I'm gonna review them for you right now. I'm practicing what I preach so remember how I said we're going to say what we're going to talk about, we're going to say what we're talking about, and then we're gonna say what we just talked about. So let's go ahead and review some of these ideas and I'll boil them down to some simple concepts that you can take home and build some habits with. So the first one is the concept of preparation, produce, and present. Dividing something into these three sections is the first step to calming yourself down in a sticky sit...

uation. All you have to do is get through the preparation phase. Don't worry about the produce yet. Don't worry about the present yet. Just start by preparing the documents that you need to, by talking to the people that you need to, and by gathering the information. And we're gonna prepare in two ways. We're gonna prepare logistics and we're gonna prepare our content. Use that form. Go ahead and go through every single step of it. Make sure that you think about, even if you don't fill in a field, that you think about every single part of that form. It takes no more than 15 minutes to go through it. And then in addition to the logistics, to make sure you're where you need to be, when you need to be, and you have all of the things in order to present. I'll tell you there's nothing worse than showing up to the wrong conference call, and then dialing in 10 minutes late. It does not start you off on the right foot. Especially if you did not have a lot of time to create this presentation. You're already starting from a negative point. You wanna make sure that the more you prepare, the more you fill out that logistical form, the better you're gonna start from. Even if you don't have a lot of time to prepare these documents. And the next thing you're gonna do is you're gonna prepare your content. So this is where you're going to identify, where's the content coming from? Who's the content going to? Who's gonna be the master of the deck? Who are gonna be the one's working on it? What systems are you gonna use to control this content? Now these are things that you may have already decided, either through presentation creation that you've done currently, or maybe it's something that your company, or office, or coworkers already do due to the systems they have in place. If you don't have them in place, now is the time to decide them. Even if you don't have a presentation that you're working on. Sitting down for a while and actually mapping this stuff out will prepare you for those red level presentations and make you get through them a lot quicker. It's really gonna help, the more pre-work that you do. Inside of our content we're gonna prepare three types. We're gonna prepare our written content. We're gonna prepare our visual assets. And we're gonna prepare our templates. For the written content that's deciding who are gonna be the authors, who's gonna be the controller of the written content, and identifying when that cutoff date is gonna be for the new content. For the visual assets we're going to prepare by deciding where the visual assets can come from. Is it okay to use google? Is it okay to use stock photography? Does your client, or your office, or your business, or your audience, do they have some photography, or some images, or some graphics that your gonna wanna use and source? It's important to identify that upfront because there could be a treasure trove of designs and ideas that could come from looking at those sources. And then the last thing you're gonna do is decide on your templates. This is something that you should do very early on, is decide what slide programs are you gonna use, if you use any of them. If you are using slide programs, what is the look and feel gonna come from? Are you gonna be combining templates? Often times I find myself in situations where I have to put two decks together. This is the place where you're gonna decide what deck is gonna be your core deck and which one are you gonna import into it. How are you gonna address discrepancies in the visual look and feel? What's your aspect ratio gonna be? Again, the more you fill out that form, the easier this section's gonna be. And the more that you look at the preparation of your content, the less likely you are to encounter some of the big issues that could happen down the road from lack of preparation. So that's our prepare section. The next section here is the Produce section. We went over some great techniques on how to create your outline. When you get that content in, or if you're creating it yourself, try to create it in the slide program that you're actually going to be using. If it comes from another source, try to get it into a slide program because that's how presentations naturally flow. They go from this idea of one visual to the next, one idea to the next, with pauses in between. Look for your natural pauses and divisions inside of your content. As you're going through your outline, now is the point where you're going to organize things properly, split things that need to be split. If there's more than one idea on a slide, try to separate them. Or if two slides are really identical and it's duplicate, put them together. This is where you're also going to decide what kinds of slides you're gonna be making. This is where we were talking about vocabulary. So this is gonna be a hero slide. This is gonna be an arrow slide. This is gonna be a single image slide. Your outline is the place where you wanna do that. It's where you can format your content in a way where you have a natural visual rhythm. And it's really, really easy and quick to do. It should be something that you get into habit of doing very early on. So after we have that outline, it's going to evolve naturally into our deck and our notes. They could be on in the same. Now's a great place to decide whether it should be, or whether you're going to do separate notes. And inside of the deck we looked at some great design tips for repeating, different elemental slides. Go ahead and take away that template if you feel like you're getting slide bloat. Make it as simple as possible. There are some things that we know we absolutely have to have on there. Sometimes we'll need just to put three logos on every single page, that's fine. If there's a way to make a handout instead of, or alongside your slides, go ahead and do that. Make sure you don't do that for a red-level presentation, because you're not going to have enough time to be editing both sets of content. You're just gonna want one content set. And then along with the deck we looked at some different kinds of notes. If you are talking about a red-level deck, you'll want to use the deck itself. Like I'm doing here today as your note structure. I've designed it in a way where everything is a prompt for me. It leads naturally into each next section. And I don't really need anything else other than the words and the images that are on the screen. If you have a yellow-level deck, they you want to do some other things, like maybe some cards if you feel more comfortable with that. Again, I always encourage an open dialogue with nothing in between you and the audience, but sometimes we may not be as comfortable doing that. In which case cards or in-app note tools are great. And if you have the time, and you really feel uncomfortable, I recommend you go ahead and create a script. But watch out for creating a script in a yellow or red-level presentation. And that's because if you do that, you're going to be trying to edit two documents at the same time. You have your slides on one hand, your visuals whatever they may be, and your script. And if you make changes to one, you're gonna have to make changes to the other. And then the last section that we looked at, the Present section. So I'll review some of those tips. We have the pre-presentation notes. What you're going to do in the presentation. And then your Jedi Mind Tricks. For the pre-presentation, go ahead and rehearse as much as possible. Again just don't do design passes on your deck, or those distraction triage passes, but go ahead and actually say the words that you're gonna be saying to your audience. You'll be very surprised at the things that you come up with. And the things that you think about that you may not have prepared for. Just in looking at some words in your notes. Or just in looking at the slides. The other thing that we talked about is bringing some stickies or writing or physical. Whatever it may be, it has a lot of different uses. It can be your backup for when things go wrong, and trust me in your presentation lifespan, things will go wrong. And that's how you're gonna prepare for it. And it can also be useful for our Jedi Mind Trick techniques where we're gonna actually write down the things that people say, and the notes that they give us live in our discussions and then come back to them later. And then we also talked about when we're presenting some tips for actually going through your presentation. Again, do not skip your intro. It's really important to get your audience familiar with who you are, what your voice sounds like, what your pace is. Because if you're the only speaker, they may be listening to you for a little bit of time. The next thing you're gonna wanna do when you're presenting is make sure that you tell people what they are going to see with an outline. Going through step by step. Your divisions that you made all the way back in your outline phase. And then you're going to talk about what they're looking at, by again going through all the divisions you made in your outline. And then tell them what they saw in order to increase their retention. Finally, what you're gonna do in your presentation, is set up some reveals. So make sure that as you're telling your story, as you're working, even I'd say back in the Prepare section, working on what you want the goal of this presentation to be, find a place in the middle of your presentation, to set up that goal as the reveal. And then you're going to rise up to it with your presentation and then fall back into discussion and review. Finally, we talked about some Jedi Mind Tricks are three phases. So the first phrase being, "Good idea and." Where we're gonna take something that an audience says because, as a note, if an audience member is willing enough to raise their voice and say something to you, it's because they've thought about what they wanna say, and you need to respect that, so we're gonna take what they say and write it down verbatim, put it up so that we can talk about it later. The next Jedi Mind principle that we talked about is, "Let's come back to that." Where if there's something that either you mess up on or if it's something you want to skip or something that someone says where it's valid but it's interrupting kind of the flow of your presentation then you can stop and say, "Let's come back to that." When you say that you should probably do it. This all comes back to becoming more confident with really high-level, high-risk presentations. And the reason that you wanna become good at these presentations and practice them, is because you wanna be the person who says, "Yeah, I'll take this on." When you have something that's high pressure, that's causing your office mates, your coworkers stress, or it's something that's a big opportunity but no one's stepping forward, it's because presenting can be incredibly scary. It makes it even more scary when your content is you don't have a lot of time to prepare it, or it's something that you may not be used to, but if you practice these techniques, put these habits into use on a very regular basis, then you're gonna be the person that people rely on to present, and that gets you even more practice, and it bumps you up in the minds of your audience and your coworkers and everyone that you interact with because it increases your ability to get other people out of tight situations. So it's not just you who's gonna be in this tough spot of having to present something on a whim, but it's also gonna help other people out. I love being the guy where my boss can turn to me and say, "You know what Matt, we need to do something and, "it's gotta be done in the next four hours, "I have to hop in this meeting. Can you help me?" I say, "You know what, yes I can. "I got this. Don't worry about it." So with that, that's our class from CreativeLive on how to present under pressure. Thank you guys very much. Man I hope all your presentations are critical successes. Put some of these tools into practice and I'm sure everything's gonna be great. Don't worry, you got this.