6 tips: how to make your presentations stand out

PowerPoint presentations have become an inseparable part of our working life. Whether at work or for a job, working on slides is a way of life. As a presenter, you’re desperate to deliver an impactful presentation while your listeners are just as desperate to stay awake. It is not easy to break this mold of corporate culture. Here are some tips that can make a difference in your presentations and make them different.

1. Alter your perception. ‘YOU’ is the center of your presentations, not PowerPoint. Don’t hide behind information-laden slides and hope they work for you. Slides, as attractive as they are, are no substitute for YOU to support them. Work on making an engaging delivery that can have an impact on everyone, instead of waiting for silly slides to speak for you.

2. Smile. Do all presentations have to be serious business-type matters? A smile will not only help you feel comfortable, but it will also ease the tension of your audience. Smiling is also a sign of confidence and that you feel in control of the situation. Here, I mean a genuine smile that exudes poise and not a plastic sneer plastered on your face throughout the presentation.

3. Review your current slides. How about getting your point across through a powerful image? A picture is worth a thousand words, so give it a try. Contrary to popular belief, text-heavy slides are hardly helpful in stimulating your audience’s interest. PowerPoint is just a visual medium to help your talk. So make sure the slides work for you, not against you.

4. Ask questions. Asking questions, rhetorical or otherwise, is an effective strategy for keeping the audience engaged. But don’t expect all the answers to come from across the table. Pause to allow listeners to understand the point you’ve made, and move on. Reserve the questions for select occasions when you can be most effective.

5. Use humor. You may not be the best at making people laugh with your jokes. But one can always think of an appropriate topical humor to make people sit up and take notice. You can also use humor to draw your audience’s attention to certain topics that might otherwise be taboo. However, be careful how you convey humor so it doesn’t backfire.

6. Think innovative. Try something that can make your presentation stand out and also make it interesting. You can have the audience play a quick game to introduce the central theme of your presentation. Use a flipchart or drawing board to draw figures to explain your data or illustrate graphs. This is better than loading slides with graphs full of numbers that are left to the imagination of the audience to interpret.

Practice your techniques well, either with humor or by asking rhetorical questions.

You don’t have to try it all at once. Pick a change you feel most comfortable with, and then scale it up.