One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
I’ll just talk through this slide…”
|
“I’ll just talk through this slide…” Harmless phrase, right? Except it usually means: 👉 I haven’t crafted a message - just collected some slides. 💡 ONE IDEA WELLThis is one of the most common traps for early presenters: Thinking the slide is the presentation. But here’s the truth: Slides support your message. They shouldn’t be your message. If your audience can get everything they need from the slide, they don’t need you. And if they can’t make sense of the slide without you, they’re probably lost anyway. Slides aren’t scripts. They’re scaffolding. You still have to build the bridge. 🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGETry this instead: 🎯 Before designing a single slide, ask: “What’s the one thing I want them to remember?” 🎤 Then structure your talk around that message. Only after that— build slides that reinforce, clarify, or illustrate. 👉 Bonus trick: Say it out loud like a voiceover. If the slide can’t survive without narration, you’re on the right track. 🧭 ASK YOURSELF THISIf the projector died…
would I still know what to say?
|
TEACHING ISN’T A SCRIPT. NEITHER IS THIS.
One idea a week to help you teach and present with more clarity, confidence, and calm. No fluff. No scripts. Just practical tools that land.
I once saw a brilliant doctor explain febrile convulsions to a parent. He started with: “It’s about hypothalamic thermoregulation.” Accurate? Yes.Useful? Not even close. The parent nodded politely.But nothing landed. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL The more you know, the harder it is to explain. This is The Curse of Knowledge—a bias where we forget what it’s like not to know something. We assume shared language. Shared logic. Shared leaps. But when we present from that place, we leave people behind. We skip...
My first talk in English class was about bats. I was 14.I brought in a desiccated pipistrelle to show everyone.Instead of an acetate, I held up a wallpaper scroll I'd drawn with outlines of bat species. Another student read a piece on VW Combi vans. No images. No props. Just words. I had figured out you could do it the same way it had always been done.Or you could do something different.More memorable. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL We often treat presentations like assignments.Say the thing. Prove you know...
You make a Star Trek reference.“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a…”Nothing. Blank faces. Then it hits you - they weren’t born when The Next Generation ended, let alone the original series. The cultural shorthand you’ve used for years? It’s become static. "The audience do not know who Dr McCoy is. I find that… troubling." 💡 ONE IDEA WELL Know your references. Know your audience. Every speaker carries assumptions.But the most dangerous?That your cultural references are shared. That Matrix slide?...