The Mobile Presenter

There is not the one way to do a presentation. Instead, there's a pool of recommendations, best practices, approaches, and tools that you can pick from for the unique circumstances of your next presentation. What works and what doesn't will depend on factors such as the audience and the topic, but also your personality as a speaker.

To illustrate that, I often share links to posts with recommendations by other speakers about how they create their presentations. A few days ago, I almost shared yet another such link, since I agreed with the author's general approach: Getting away from the computer to think about the main message of your talk, for example, and building a story arc. But then the article came to the fateful point where the author wrote words to the effect of after that, it can take me anything between 4 and 40 hours to write the slides.

"Write" the slides?

I often find parallels between musicians and presenters. While they are both putting on a show (of sorts), they still need to come across as human to be able to connect with their audience. In that attempt, though, they sometimes share a bit too much.

When you look into creativity and innovation, you'll inevitably come across improvisation theatre. Since this isn't a topic I know a lot about, I recently read the classic "impro" by Keith Johnstone. This book (and topic) doesn't seem to have a lot to do with presentations, but bear with me for a moment.

One way to make things more memorable for your audience is to involve some of their other senses, in addition to the senses of hearing and seeing. For example, have you considered making things more tangible?

With all the preparation that goes into a presentation - the content, the slides, the technical equipment - there's one very important tool that speakers often forget to take care of.

Their voice.