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.
No slides. No problem.
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We spend so much time making things look polished - obsessing over slides, animations, transitions. But sometimes, clarity comes from stripping things away. 💡 ONE IDEA WELLWhen the projector failed, everything worked better. I was mid-way through an ALS course, ready to deliver the “Cardiac Arrest in Special Circumstances” lecture. I’d done it many times. The generic slide deck was burned into my brain - blue background, yellow Comic Sans, and all. But then the slide projector failed. No visuals. No bullet points. No fallback. So I just… talked. I told stories. I leaned on experience. I brought the nuances to life - the little things that don’t fit neatly on a slide but do stick in people’s memories. And it flowed. When the tech was stripped away, the connection came through. The session landed more deeply than any previous one. It taught me something: sometimes the best slides are the ones that never show up. 🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGEHere’s a challenge: If the answer is no, try this:
🧭 ASK YOURSELF THISIf your slides disappeared, would your audience still understand the key takeaways? |
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...
“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 WELL This 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...
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...