Lessons
Class Introduction
04:44 2Course Walkthrough and Philosophy
03:59 3Preparing Logistics
14:49 4Preparing Content
15:11 5Ready, Set, Go! (Green, Yellow, & Red Scenarios)
07:00 6The Outline
16:45 7The Deck
22:01 8Presenter Notes
05:15Lesson Info
Showtime Tips
But there are some things that we can do to deal with those bumps that I want you to make habits. Because we are doing high-risk presentations, that means that the ability to create these habits is gonna become more and more important. One of the most important habits that you want to get into is skipping content that you don't think either applies, or you're looking at your audience and you're realizing that they may not be following, or it's content that you realize that you're not really prepared to talk about, even though it was included in the deck, you know that you're not gonna do it justice. So what I encourage is skipping something, or if you make a mistake and you say something wrong or you do something that may not be in the best interest of the presentation, you're gonna do a little trick where you say, "We'll get back to that." And that's important, we'll talk about that a little bit later, when we get into sort of the Jedi mind tricks, because that does something interest...
ing. And when your deck is designed in the proper way, it's okay to just go right on through something else if you can always come back to it later. And that's the other thing that I wanna talk about. If you're talking to an audience, and you're having more of a dialogue with them about the content than you've prepared in your short amount of time, oftentimes you will realize that you've either gone past something that may be a little bit more pertinent to them than you realized or they're going to ask you about something that's a little bit off topic. I definitely recommend: go ahead and jump back to any point in that presentation that you feel like you wanna talk about, because what you're doing is you're acknowledging the audience and you're saying, "Okay, they're actually in charge here, so let's go ahead and review the content that we wanted to talk about." It also gives you a chance to go back and review it yourself in case there's anything more that you want to say about it. The last part that I wanna talk about here is the idea of a reveal. So, in telling our story throughout our presentations, it's always a good idea to structure it like you would a typical story. So, a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like we've shown here. It's pretty natural as you're building your outline that way, but sometimes you need to be specific and include that beginning and end, sometimes it gets a little muddy as to what is what, and in addition to the beginning and middle and end, there's a part in the middle that we'll call the reveal. Now, this is a great presentation technique that you can build into just about any deck, and it can be done really quickly. So, as you're reviewing content in these yellow and red scenarios, and you're going through, and you're seeing that some of these things are interesting, but there's one core goal to this deck. See if you can find a point to tease that goal in the beginning of the deck and then treat it as a reveal. For those of you in the creative field, you're very familiar with this, because we do this all the time when we're presenting concepts and logos and designs and things of a visual nature, where we'll start talking about it in the beginning, and we'll start referencing it, and saying why we came up with these ideas, and what the point of them are. But what we haven't done yet is actually shown the design and the graphic. This is a great way to build suspense. It also lets you control a little bit about what your audience is going to think about this design because you can caveat it, you can say why you thought of certain things about it. And this doesn't have to just be something for the creative field. You can do this in any scenario. A great example would be a business proposal. One way to include a reveal in a business proposal is to set up a case where you talk about a very specific element of a communication plan or a business at the beginning of your talk, and then you're talking about why you're getting to it, but you haven't actually said what that thing is. Now, what you don't wanna do is put this reveal too far into your deck. And that's because after a while, your audience is gonna get pretty fed up with the fact that you haven't told them the one goal of what of why you want it to matter to them. So you're gonna wanna make sure that you keep that somewhere around the middle, and that is going to be a climax of your presentation. So think about it like a bell curve: as you're going from the beginning, you're reaching a point where you're teasing what your reveal's going to be, you're deciding how that reveal is gonna be seen by your audience, so you're going up, and then at the climax you do the reveal and then you allow the discussion to continue and you keep talking about it more. This is a little bit different in a teaching situation, where it's not really about one single goal and idea; the idea is attention and retention. The reveals may be a little bit sparse and throughout, what you're gonna be doing is more topic-based, but this works for just about every other kind of presentation. And then the last thing you're gonna wanna do is say "thank you". Just like we had those tips for the beginning of the presentation where we had these rote, habitual things that we say in order to introduce ourselves and to introduce the topic. We wanna do the same thing at the end, whether this is your master of ceremonies or you have ways to hand this off from the person who's talking to the person who's going to do the final goodbyes, it's always great to have this sort of wrap-up and ending. This is where you're gonna discuss next steps. This is where you're going to say "thank you" to your audience, and it's where you're also going to do that recap of everything that you've talked about. And that's really, really important for retention. Again, the less time that you have to create these high-pressure decks and presentations, the more you're gonna wanna refresh your audience's notions of where the dividers are, and what the parts of the topic are.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Tomas Verver
As a presentator designer I think Matt has an interesting approach on how to create and deliver impactful presentations. Presentations are important part of you career. Presentations can change the company's future, your own future and the world. Making them impactful is very important. At the moment we have still many presentations but many can improve big time. And we have more presentations online (at) the moment.
Jude Temianka
Great course with lots of handy tips. I often find myself having to prepare and give presentations at short notice, and a lot of the preparatory advice that Matt gives falls by the wayside as I frantically jump straight into production mode. I often have the feeling to overwhelm my audience with too much information because I don't take the time to step back and determine what content matters most. Super tangible advice that I will be implementing!
Rebecca
Found this course concise and informative. Would recommend to all who have to do presentations.