The Mobile Presenter

Just a few quick thoughts about I problem that I was just struggling with while preparing the slides for a presentation:

As explained elsewhere, using visuals will help your audience remember the content of your presentation. Another thing that will help them remember is repetition. So you should repeat your main point or points at the end of the presentation. Consequentially, this summary of your presentation should also repeat the visuals.

But sometimes, the visuals that you used earlier in the presentation don't quite work when repeated in the summary. What can you do?

Inexperienced speakers are often afraid that they may be forgetting an important point of their talk or that they get stuck and can't remember how to continue. Which is one of the reasons why so many presentations have lots of text on their slides.

Cue cards would seem to provide a solution to this problem. They're handy when you get stuck and since you now have the text of your talk at hand (pun intended), you can use more visual slides and still make sure not to forget anything of importance.

Back in April, I did an interview with Jenny Blake over Skype. It's part of a series of interviews with speaking professionals that will air in the week of August 25 under the name of the Speak like a Pro virtual conference. You can watch the 25 interviews for free during that week or purchase the set later.

I'm tempted to write "24 speaking professionals plus yours truly", because really the line-up is somewhat humbling. It includes several of the people that I've learned much of what I know from, including Nancy Duarte, Pam Slim, and Susan Weinschenk. I'm also happy to point out that the lineup includes a friend of mine, surgeon Ross Fisher, who gave a great talk at TEDxStuttgart back in November 2013.

At an event that I attended recently, the conference pack included the usual feedback form. It was a bit smaller and printed on stronger paper, so it was more of a card than a sheet of paper. At the closing session of the event, one of the organisers reminded the attendees to leave feedback and put the feedback cards into the provided box. Said box stood on a nearby table. It was half-transparent and the sun happened to be shining on it at that moment, so you could clearly see that it only contained one feedback card at that point (which happened to be mine - I had just filled it out before the closing session). The woman was clearly shocked and had to ask her team if someone had emptied the box before (answer: no).

While having only one feedback form at the end of a full-day conference is indeed a bit on the low end, an overall low return rate at that point shouldn't really come as a surprise; it's a simple matter of logistics.

So this week's topic was learning. On a personal level, I took an evening course to refresh what's left of my French (not much, as I quickly found out). And then I attended a local congress on the topic of lifelong learning; which sort of provided the view from the other side. On top of that, my weekly repost of an old article on Twitter happened to be about learning something from your own presentation, which was a nice coincidence.

As presenters, we should of course be willing to learn all the time. We learn about our topic. We learn how to give better presentations. We learn how to interact with people.