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.
The Night-Before Ritual
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Next week I’ll be speaking at the ASOHNS meeting in Hobart. Right now, I’m performing the ritual that happens in hotel rooms and home offices all over the world in the days before a talk. Opening the slides one more time. Click. Checking everything still works. Fonts. Because every presenter knows that beautiful slides have a habit of falling apart the moment they meet the conference computer. You arrive early for your session. And suddenly something looks… wrong. The layout has shifted. The fonts look strange. One slide in particular makes your stomach drop. On your laptop, the slide says: BETTER OUT THAN IN On the conference computer, it appears as: BETTER OU THAN I Two letters gone. The font has been substituted, and the slide you spent time designing has quietly fallen apart. It’s a small thing. But in that moment, your brain spirals: If that is slide broken… what else has? 💡 ONE IDEA WELLMoments like this reveal something important about presentations. Many presenters believe the talk lives inside the slides. But it doesn’t. The talk lives inside the speaker. Slides are visual anchors. But they are not the story itself. When presenters rely on slides as the script, small technical failures suddenly feel catastrophic. Fonts change. And the whole talk feels fragile. There’s a better way to think about it. Slides are scenery. The talk is the actor. 🧰 A PRACTICAL FIXAfter one too many font surprises, I started doing something simple. Before travelling to speak somewhere, I export my slides as images. No missing fonts. What I design is exactly what appears on the screen. It’s a small reliability hack. But it also reinforces something deeper. If the talk only works when the slides are perfect… the talk probably isn’t ready yet. 🗑️ LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGEOnce you stop relying on slides as the script, something interesting happens. The slides start to get simpler. Fewer words. Because the slides no longer have to carry the talk. They just have to support it. Good presentation slides work the same way theatre scenery does. They set the scene. But they never compete with the actor. If the audience is reading the slide instead of listening to the speaker, the scenery has quietly taken over the stage. Less mess. More message. But they’re not the talk. They’re just the scenery. |
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.
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At a recent talk in Hobart, I had 90 slides. Thirty minutes. Ninety slides. If you’re doing the maths, that’s three slides a minute. Which sounds… fast. By most presentation advice, that’s a problem. Too fast.Too much.Too many chances to lose the room. Afterwards, no one mentioned it. Not one comment about pace.Not one raised eyebrow about slide count. Because they hadn’t noticed. 💡 ONE IDEA WELL The “one slide per minute” rule has been around for years. It sounds sensible. Clean. Reassuring....
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