You've heard me mentioned that people are horrible multitaskers you're better off getting people to do one thing at a time. But how do you do that? As a practical matter, you get your PowerPoint slide your speaking there's some handouts. You can do it. If you decide in advance you will. So let's say you have a slide, you've just finished a slide you now want to talk about something else.

What do you do? So you don't distract people, you have three main options. Option one is when you're ready to speak again, just hit the letter B, on your computer, keyboard, B blacks out the screen, hitting any key whatsoever, it brings it back to where you are. So if you finished talking about the slide that's up, you hit the the screen goes completely black, there's nothing for the audience to look at other than you. That's great. You've got a captive audience.

Another option you can do is simply hit the letter W, W whites out the screen, not much interesting to look at, they have to look at you, I typically don't use the W because the white is so bright, it can still capture people's attention. But it's a lot better than an interesting PowerPoint where you're now on a new subject, people are still trying to figure that out. The third option, the best option, the option I use, and it costs nothing is to simply build in an extra blank or blank slide in between every one of your slides. So you're always advancing. So you finished one slide that has an image on it. You drove that point home, people looked at it, you're ready to talk again.

Simply click Advanced. It's now going to a black slider at blank slide. Nothing for anyone to look at, you say what you want to say. Then you hit advance and it's on to your next one. That's the most effective way to really control the attention of your audience. And that's critical.