4 new ways to look at your presentations

Magazine

For most, presentations are a bread and butter tool. You’re taking part in a meeting, so you’ve either prepared or are digesting a presentation. There are, however, more empowering ways to approach presentations.  

You are building a system

Over weeks, months, and years, you encounter different situations, questions, and types of meetings. Instead of just preparing for your next step, prepare for the whole journey. Ironically, we are experts in preparing for the next talk, but amateurs at preparing for the next series of talks that it will take to be successful. For presentations this means:

• Create strong reusable messages
• Keep refining these messages
• Create mini-presentation with distinct topics
• Create a lego system of buildable presentation material
• Be creative on how to connect the mini-presentations
• Keep working on the system as a whole, not just the pieces

You perfect cycles

Part of the presentation and meeting system is not to only focus on your next meeting or next message but instead to focus on all the cycles you want to successfully follow through sales cycles, campaigns, training cycles, management routines, etc. By looking at the chains of interlinked meetings, messages, and challenges you can make them work together and better. They may seem abstract at first, but incorporating this dimension into how you plan, use, and reuse, your material will change the impact of your material:

• Before, during and after meetings
• Pull and push of information
• Automatization of messaging

You apply new filters

Looking for proper grammar, spelling, and clear language use are some of the filters you can use to review a message. Other aspects of your communications with equal importance:

• Precision – vague messaging creates vague outcomes
• Boldness – there is a lot of noise, how to break through
• Authenticity – being original is a way to stand out
• Structure – how to I build the flow of logics
• Critique – how do I solicit ongoing constructive criticism

You value excellence

With a bread and butter approach, there is less room for excellence; it is more about getting something done. However, striving for excellence in how you communicate creates a bigger impact:

• Your message inspires (immediate) action
• You save time
• You can be innovative, in less time
• You gain stronger support
• You cut the cycle length in half

Excellence is part of the “system thinking”, changing how you think about cycles and applying reliable filters. Excellence is also consistent in form and flow, the visual harmonization. Excellence is working on being unbeatable. Excellence is also in the conviction that by applying the best judgment you’ll magic X factors. Make the effort to excel in your presentations, how you think about the system of messaging, and you’ll be surprised at your outcomes.