Now we're making progress. You know the goal you're trying to accomplish in your speech, you've got your five messages, you've got examples, case studies, stories for each one, and you have a cheat sheet on a single sheet of paper. Now, and only now is when we're going to talk about PowerPoint. Folks, you may have surmise that I'm not a big fan of PowerPoint. That's actually not true. I'm just not a big fan of awful, boring PowerPoint that puts the audience to sleep and sucks dozens if not hundreds of hours out of an organization putting it together.

But I'm perfectly happy with good PowerPoint, if it can be used effectively to help the audience and if it's the wisest use of time for staff and speaker alike. So here's what I'd like you to do. It's a mindset change. You are the speaker. What you say how you say it is the presentation presentation is not the PowerPoint. The second you tell yourself, the PowerPoint deck is the presentation Game Over, you've lost, you're going to fail miserably in my professional opinion.

You have to have the attitude that you're the expert. You're the one who knows this. It's your presentation is your words, your ideas, your enthusiasm, your passion coming out. And yes, you may have some slides to amplify those ideas. That has to be the proper mentality when it comes to PowerPoint. So here's what I want you to do.

Go back to your outline, and then look at your first message and ask yourself, how can you somehow visually make this idea come alive in a way that's more understandable than just words coming out of your mouth, and more memorable than just words coming out of your mouth? And come up with an image, whatever it is. So for example, if you are trying to talk about how Alzheimer's affects a very high percentage of Americans over the age of 85, regardless of social position or economic status, you could put a whole bunch of statistics. But you could also just put a picture of Ronald Reagan, somebody famous, everybody knows. And those who remembers life knows that he did, in fact, have Alzheimer's, when he was in the last years of his life, so that picture will drive that point home in a much more powerful way. Then text words, bullet points.

So that's what I want you to do is to come up with a picture an image if you need to have a graph. The graph needs to be simplified so that people can look at it instantly get the idea. It can't be a graph with seven or eight or 12 different lines color coded showing the movements of every single week for the last two. four quarters. People can't look at that while you're speaking. So I need you to come up with an image for each one of your message points, that makes the your idea more understandable or memorable.

If you can't think of any image, picture, simple graph to do that. That's okay. Don't use anything. Just talk to your audience then. So that's what I want for your slides that you're actually going to project at your homework. Do it right now.

So ideally, you've got five points, come up with five images that you're going to project in your PowerPoint or Keynote show.