That Time I Walked In Slow Motion
I couldn’t see him because he was on the phone. Even though I couldn’t see him, I could hear his voice trembling. He had to present in front of 600 company leaders, and he wasn’t sure if he was ready. He had sent me his Powerpoint, but his mind kept telling him all of the messages he knew he shouldn’t believe.
“You’re not ready.”
“You’re not good enough.”
“You need more time.”
“You’re not important enough to speak to these people.”
“You’re not a legit public speaker.”
He had replayed these messages daily for the last few weeks. So, by the time we spoke, he was a wreck.
I took a look at the slide deck he’d sent and noticed a few things:
1. It was boring to look at. Sure, there was a design in the background of the slide, but there was nothing to make me pay attention to it. He was talking to them about how the company strategy would affect people, but there were no people in his presentation. Charts? Yes. Bullet points? Check. Paragraphs? OH yeah! He’d even scattered in a few images of computers. But, there was nothing to elicit the emotion he wanted.
2. It was jam-packed with info. Wow! It was like he copied an entire doctoral thesis and just pasted it on the slides. He was going to kill his audience…literally.
3. It didn’t break any rules. You know, the standard ‘Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m going to talk about blah, blah, blah.’
Here’s what we did. We started with one crucial question.
What must they know?
I asked him, “If you had 60 seconds to do this presentation, what is the ONE bit of information you would ABSOLUTELY give them?”
This forced him to prioritize what was most important. We went from there.
Then we did 3 simple things.
1. We started his presentation with a quote. Instead of beginnging with a title slide, we started with an idea relating to the problem his company was facing. Then asked, “what if we could…?” It was only after that did we return to giving his name and the title of the talk. We moved away from the standard format.
2. We used large images on all the slides to represent the emotions we wanted the audience to feel.
3. We broke the slides apart and placed only one important idea on each. Sure, we ended up with more slides. But, each one was purposeful and impactful.
We didn’t have a lot of time and we were on the phone so we couldn’t tweak his entire physical presentation style. But, we did enough to make sure he came across as confident and credible.
The day of the presentation? He rocked it. All of the feedback said he was, hands down, the best presenter of the entire conference.
Me? I felt like I was walking away in slow motion, smile on my face, towards the sunset, knowing I’d helped a small town defeat the evil villain, but knowing there were other towns to go help.
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About The Author
My name is Robert Kennedy III. I’m a leadership and communication speaker, trainer and author. I recently released 7 Ways To Know You Were Meant To Lead on Amazon. Connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebookor on my website, RobertKennedy3.com.
