I recently took the course of Impactful Presentations by IDEOU. In 6 weeks with a cohort of people from all over the world, we received different tools for ensuring presentations were not just transmission of information but a memorable experience that the audience would remember. I would definitely recommend this course if you’re looking to break the pattern of powerpoint and reading content from the screen.

The course in 10 key learnings

1. It’s all about emotion: A great presentation is not about content, it’s about emotion and connecting with your audience. Let beauty guide and math follow. Beauty is the experience and emotion, the math is the data and information you want to share.
2. What’s your big idea?: Identify your big idea before you start thinking about any further details of the presentation. What is that one thing your presentation is about? Ask your self “so what” several times, until you get to the core of it. After several iterations, what I thought was a presentation about having better meetings became a presentation on improving collaboration and human interactions in the workplace. Identifying your big idea will help you navigate better through the content, and find the best way to guide your audience.
3. Identify the beats of your story: Brainstorm all the content you would like to share with your audience and group it by topic. By labelling the groups you will find the main “beats” (or ideas) of your presentation. You can then organize the beats in the best story arc so that your audience can be better guided. The different arcs such as: 4C’s (content, conflict, climax, closure), hero’s journey, rags to riches, and others; show different ways of guiding the audience through your beats.
4. Prototype your story: Experiment with the beats of your story. Preparation and prototyping is key. Once you have the beats of your story, you can organize them in different story arcs. This will be your prototype. For better results you can test different story arcs with people that could be part of your potential audience and gather early feedback. This can make the difference between a good and great storyline.
5. Design for your audience’s experience: Once you have the story ask yourself, how do you want your audience to feel? When will they feel what emotion? How will you get their attention and make sure it’s a memorable experience? How will you connect with them? The answers to these questions will also be part of the journey you are preparing for them.
6. Connect with your audience: Fun ways to connecting with your audience is making questions, making them interact with each other, throwing live surveys, engaging them in the story, making pauses for them to answer and participate. Whatever you choose, make sure that your audience participates and is invested in what you have to share.
7. Make it memorable: We get so much information throughout our lives that not everything sticks. Making your presentation memorable can happen by making your audience FEEL what you are saying, surprising them, breaking the pattern they are used to, playing with your voice tone, altering your slides, and being taken on a journey. It’s recommended to break the pattern at the beginning and every 10 – 15 minutes.
8. Make it yours: Make sure that you put something into this presentation that is your personal touch, that only you could do. Bring the audience closer to your world, be vulnerable, share your own experience and your own perspective. This will feel authentic and help them understand better why this matters to you and why this should matter to them.
9. The ending is just the beginning: Give them something to look forward to after your presentation and engage them in what is going to happen next. You can even design for a nice ending where people get something physical like a poster, cheat sheets, or others. In my presentation for better meetings I came up with the idea of a deck of cards with “monsters” that hinder collaboration and their antidotes or how to fight them.
10. Practice makes perfect: Going through your presentation with someone or alone (like recording it) can help you improve areas that you are not aware of, increase your performance, and give you more confidence for focusing on connecting with your audience. Once you master the content, you can focus on your audience’s experience.

Aha moment!

I liked this course. It was a great way to see presentations differently. I personally benefited from the feedback loops from the community and the challenge to improve. I didn’t choose an overly exciting topic, that it later became very exciting for me; and as I was going further I managed to push the boundaries of what is the “conventional” presentation style and move towards a way to entertain my audience and give them a memorable experience.

As an example of something that changed, I realized during the process that sharing with people ways of improving meetings was boring, everyone knows what to do so I created the “monsters” that derail meetings and “antidotes” for fighting them such as The Tangent Tornado and the Agenda Anchor. The idea was to engage the audience in a different way and help them use analogies for identifying the barriers for having good meetings in a playful way. I didn’t have anything like this in mind at the beginning, but going through the process made me think about my audience and what would give the message while being fun.

So my aha moment was that it’s not only about the content but about how you as a speaker connect with your audience and take them through a journey that could only be created by you.