Presenting With More Stories And Less PowerPoint

When it comes to presentations, we often rely heavily on PowerPoint slides to convey information. While PowerPoint can be a useful tool, it can also be overused, leading to dull and uninspiring presentations.

Engaging an audience and keeping their attention requires more than just bullet points and charts. By incorporating engaging stories into your presentations, you can create a memorable and impactful experience for your audience.

The Power of Storytelling

Humans have been telling stories for thousands of years. It is ingrained in our nature and has always been an effective way to communicate and connect with others.

Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint

by Dave Yewman (Kindle Edition)

4.6 out of 5

Language	:	English
File size	:	1440 KB
Text-to-Speech	:	Enabled
Screen Reader	:	Supported
Enhanced typesetting	:	Enabled
Word Wise	:	Enabled
Print length	:	116 pages
Lending	:	Enabled

FREE

When it comes to presentations, storytelling can help captivate your audience and make your message more relatable and persuasive. By presenting information in the form of a story, you create a narrative that engages both the logical and emotional parts of the brain.

Stories allow you to convey complex ideas in a simple and digestible manner. They create a context that helps the audience understand and remember the information you are presenting. This can be especially useful when explaining abstract concepts or data.

How to Incorporate Stories into Presentations

Now that we understand the power of storytelling, let's explore some ways to incorporate stories into your presentations:

1. Start with a Powerful Opening

Capture your audience's attention from the beginning by starting your presentation with a compelling story. This can be a personal anecdote, a relevant case study, or even a fictional scenario that relates to your topic.

A strong opening story sets the tone for your presentation and grabs the audience's attention, making them more receptive to the information you are about to present.

2. Use Stories as Examples

Instead of simply presenting data or facts, use stories to illustrate your points. Whether it's a success story, a customer testimonial, or a historical event, stories make your content more engaging and memorable.

By providing real-life examples, you make your ideas more relatable and show their practical application.

3. Create a Visual Narrative

In addition to PowerPoint slides, consider creating a visual narrative that complements your story. This can include images, videos, or even props that help visualize the information you are sharing.

A visual narrative adds another layer of engagement and helps the audience better understand and connect with your presentation.

4. Add Emotional Elements

A successful presentation should evoke emotions in your audience. By incorporating stories that resonate with your topic, you can tap into those emotions and create a deeper connection.

Whether it's a heartwarming story, a humorous anecdote, or a thought-provoking scenario, emotions can help make your presentation more memorable and impactful.

5. Practice and Refine

Presenting with stories requires practice and refinement. Make sure to rehearse your presentation multiple times to ensure a smooth flow and to become comfortable with the storytelling elements.

Solicit feedback from colleagues or friends, and make adjustments accordingly. The more you practice, the more your storytelling skills will improve.

By incorporating more stories and relying less on PowerPoint, you can create presentations that are engaging, memorable, and impactful. Stories have the power to captivate an audience, make information relatable, and evoke emotions.

Next time you prepare for a presentation, consider the power of storytelling and how it can transform your delivery. So, ditch the bullet points and let your stories take the center stage. Your audience will thank you!

Weekend Language: Presenting with More Stories and Less PowerPoint

by Dave Yewman (Kindle Edition)

4.6 out of 5

Language	:	English
File size	:	1440 KB
Text-to-Speech	:	Enabled
Screen Reader	:	Supported
Enhanced typesetting	:	Enabled
Word Wise	:	Enabled
Print length	:	116 pages
Lending	:	Enabled

FREE

Think about it: on weekends, we’re all great communicators because our default is storytelling. When we go to a party on Saturday night, we don’t talk about how we optimized our calendar last Wednesday to monetize our mission-critical, best-of-breed, seamless-solution-provider business. (If you do, that’s probably why you haven’t been invited back to many parties).

Instead we tell a story about something that happened on Wednesday. On the weekends our speech is conversational, simple, clear, and interesting. We speak in examples, anecdotes, and analogies.

And what does our audience do with those stories? They engage. They ask questions. They laugh along. And then they walk across the room and say to their friends, neighbors, husbands, and wives, “Hey, you should hear what happened to Heidi last week. This is classic.” That’s the portable, sticky communication Chip and Dan Heath talked about in their bestseller, Made to Stick. Nothing “sticks” like a good story.

But then Monday morning hits. We step into the office and downshift into product feature lists and ten-point plans (that no one cares about) full of jargon, “high-level” terms, non-words, and nonsense.

And to punctuate this meaningless language, we beat the snot out of our audiences with 118-slide PowerPoint presentations chock-full of twelve bullet-pointed sentences per slide. Text is shrunk to ten-point fonts to make sure we can squeeze it all in. And if we’re feeling particularly frisky, we might even zoom in some clip art. This approach is generally called “Show Up and Throw Up” and leads to “Death by PowerPoint”— that syndrome affecting audience members who have to sit through 118 slides without any discernible point; that speech where people walk outside and think, “Well, that’s an hour of my life that I’ll never get back.”

Audience members typically don’t remember anything from those types of presentations. But they do remember stories.

Stories are the superglue of verbal communication and a staple of weekend language. The Heaths call stories the stickiest, most memorable, most portable form of communication. It sounds simple because it is, but it’s what separates meaningful, memorable communication from the pointless and forgettable PowerPoint-driven corporate blather we spew in the boardroom and during sales pitches Monday through Friday.

The approach and techniques found in this book are designed to help you replicate your existing strengths as a weekend storyteller so you can drag them into your weekday presentations to and conversations with customers, partners, employees, and investors.

In fact, we’ve put them to good use over the years as executive presentation and storytelling coaches at Google, adidas, Dell, Microsoft, Ingram Micro, OpenText, CA Technologies, Petrobras, Zurich Global Life Insurance, Bazaarvoice, Rackspace, Expedia, eHarmony, eBay, CBS, T-Mobile, Cook Medical, Sony, and many more.