You’ve just been asked to give a presentation at work. You only have two weeks. So you open up PowerPoint…
Stop.
It’s too early for PowerPoint.
You’ll be much happier if you do this first:
Ask yourself the most important question for creating any kind of communication:
“What do I want them to be able to do when I’ve finished the presentation?”
This is where you start — not with “what should the slides say?” but “what do I want them to walk away and be able to do?” Once you’ve answered that second question, it’s much easier to answer the first one. And it helps in other ways as well.
It leads you to other very valuable questions, such as “what is keeping them from doing this right now?” — which puts you in their mindset, not trapped in your own.
It gives your presentation shape. It’s not just a stack of information now; it’s a series of actions, and you ask yourself: “what do they need to know to do this?” Now it becomes much easier to figure out what needs to be included, and how deeply, versus what just needs mentioning and what can be left out of this presentation altogether.
It can also shift your mindset from showing your expertise to helping your audience, and that takes some of the pressure off. It changes what you’re doing from providing information to teaching other people how to do something, which we’re much better at as human beings. We teach people to do things all the time. Very few of us spend much time simply informing people of things.
Crucially, it gets you talking to people rather than at them, which can be a hard shift to make. When you’re relaying information you know — as information — it’s easy to talk at your audience. When you’re helping someone figure out how to do something, it just feels more like a natural conversation.
Notice how much ground you’ve just covered — and you haven’t opened PowerPoint yet! You have a goal, a sense of your audience’s starting point, and a structure that’s already taking shape.
Two weeks? You have plenty of time.
Now that you have a clear goal, you can also focus on why it matters. Why it’s important to you — giving you a deeper reason for the presentation — and why it’s important to them — giving them a stronger reason to engage. Your “talk” quickly becomes a “conversation” about something that matters to you and them both. It’ll stop feeling like a performance, and you’ll feel a bit more like yourself.
And you don’t need to act like anyone else to present successfully. In fact, it’s better if you’re not trying to be someone you’re not. Be you. A version of you to be sure — we all have different versions of ourselves for different circumstances and people — but still you as a person, not you as a source of information.
Once you’re comfortable with who you are for this audience, the other techniques for successful speaking become easier. The breath becomes easier. The pacing feels more natural, because you feel like yourself. You feel more grounded.
There are specific ways to work with your breath, to pace a talk well, and to feel more physically present when you’re up there — but it starts with you being you.
Now you’re ready for PowerPoint.
Now you build your presentation, because starting with “What do I want them to be able to do when I’ve finished the presentation?” has helped you discover how to begin, what to include, and where you — and your audience — are going. The structure practically writes itself, and you can focus on how each slide fits into the arc you’ve already created.
Two weeks is more time than you think when you start by focusing on the right things. With this approach, it stops feeling like a starting pistol for a race — and starts feeling like a plan with plenty of room to breathe, even before you’ve created a single slide.
