Tips on Practicing Your Presentation Skills with Presentation Zen

One great way to practice and develop your presentation skills is to create a PowerPoint presentation explaining someone else’s great ideas. If you feel like you don’t have time to spend working on your PowerPoint style for fun, maybe you can find a reason to present relevant expert thinking to people you work with, or even clients. If you’re serious about raising the level of presentation skills in your workplace, perhaps you could organize an informal weekly lunch group where members present to each other.

The other day I re-read a 2008 post by Garr Reynolds, Brain Rules for PowerPoint & Keynote Presenters, which includes a PowerPoint deck he created about Dr. John Medina’s book Brain Rules. Garr mentions that “Every year it seems a new book comes out with practical applications for presenters and speakers, even though it's not a book about presentations at all,” and Brain Rules is one of them. One of the things I love about Garr Reynold’s blog is the way he focuses on what makes an enjoyable experience for a presentation audience, and in doing so draws from a wide range of writers on design, marketing, philosophy, and psychology. His suggestions on how to create great slides and presentations really emanate from a solid understanding of how to connect to people.

Garr’s presentation focuses on three of Dr. Medina’s twelve rules that he finds most relevant to presentation. I summarize what I took away as the main point of each:

Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power. – Most people in a lecture hall or conference room are already in a static environment not conducive to thinking, so you have to be aware of that and wake them up. The office or cubicle where you’re preparing your presentation is another “anti-brain” environment – stepping away from the desk, moving around, and exercising are going to keep your mind fresh.

Rule #4: People don’t pay attention to boring things. – You have 10 minutes to grab an audience’s attention, and then you have to change gears every 10 minutes after that to keep it. The brain won’t process too much information at once, so you need to focus on creating a structure around a few big ideas.

Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses. – Ditch slides packed with words and data points in favor of simple ideas backed up by powerful images.

You’ll get a great feel for Garr’s style by clicking through the presentation in this post. As you explore his blog and book, and get a sense of his recommendations on slide design and storyboarding, you’ll see that you don’t have to be a design expert to start building dramatically better presentations – presentations that will make your bosses and co-workers look at you in a whole new way.