- Start with Your Presentation Goals
- Build a Narrative
- Create an Outline
- Ready for Creation?
Ready for Creation?
If you have spent your structure time wisely, the creation of your presentation will be much easier because you have already laid out the scope and narrative and ensured that your main points and any subpoints are on track with your presentation goals. You will have already battled through some of your favorite, but potentially off-track ideas, and you will have put yourself in a great mental state to start cruising through one of the most fun parts of presenting—building the slides.
You will also be well positioned to start getting feedback on your presentation, because rather than a mess of pictures and barely started slides that no outside person can begin to make sense of, you at least have the foundation of your talk laid out in a structured way that makes it much easier to share with people. And while it is nice to hear compliments about the visual aspects of your slides or the pretty images you are using, the content of your presentation is really what you want the audience to remember. Sharing your outline in its various stages with people who will give their honest perspective will help them stick to providing feedback on the meat of your presentation.
And finally, if the dreaded technical difficulties that all presenters fear and hope to never deal with do happen to you—the projector doesn’t work, slides get mangled, etc.—you should have such a strong understanding of your points and overall message that you could give the presentation without slides or notes at all. This means you could even tell your story in a strong and compelling way if you magically found yourself in an elevator in front of your CEO or your personal hero.
And that alone is worth the structure work.