You might have heard this advice about presenting before. The advice says to “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” How should you implement this age old advice in your presentations? Here are a few tips:
The Old Advice Doesn’t Work As Well As It Did Before, Why?
This advice doesn’t work anymore, because presenters often ended up repeating the same thing too much. Sometimes, presenters feel a bit weird saying the same thing over and over again, so they try to change it. And so, audiences think that the same message is not being repeated. Rather, it comes off as two or three different messages as the presenter struggles to avoid repeating the same sentence and boring the audience.
Instead, you should follow the same pattern that Hollywood and Everyone else follows these days. “Tell them” a story.
Beginning: Start With The Conclusion of The Entire Presentation
Start the presentation by telling everyone what you’re going to tell them in the presentation. Make them curious. It is very important that the audience knows why they should pay attention to what you’re about to say to them. This will help them remember what you tell them. But, you will need to tell them why they should listen first.
Middle: How You Got To Your Conclusion
Telling the audience how you got to your conclusions is very important. This is also the most boring part of the entire presentation. Thankfully, if you performed the first step correctly then you won’t need to worry too much here. Just keep things simple and only present one point per slide.
End: Tell Them What They Should Do
Hopefully, you’ve done your job till now and people now understand what you told them in the beginning of the presentation. Now, you’re going to need to tell the audience what they should do. This is called a “call to action”. Here, you need to ask the audience to do something specific in response to the information they just received in the presentation. If you don’t make it clear, then it won’t happen.
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