Presentation Skills You Need To Learn Use Your Slides To Engage Your Audience, Not Put Them To Sleep

Developing the Next Generation of Rainmakers Presentation Skills You Need To Learn: Use Your Slides to Engage Your Audience, Not Put Them to Sleep Last week I posted Presentation Skills You Need To Learn: Tell Stories. That is certainly important, but it doesn’t cover all the presentation skills you need to learn. If you want to be bored beyond words, just sit through a series of presentations done by lawyers with bullet point slides and too many words on a page. Are you yawning just thinking about it? Mark Opashinov is a Toronto based lawyer with McMillan LLP.  Mark focuses  on Corporate and Competition Law. While I was coaching Mark , he was offered the opportunity to speak at a conference on “Tips & Traps Competition law for Intellectual Property Licensing” I had worked with Mark’s coaching group on giving presentations using slides with visuals rather than bullet points. At first Mark thought that would be impossible because the material he was covering was complex. I suggested he read Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson. After reading the book, Mark followed the “storyboard” method, found visuals for the slides on istockphoto and put what had been bullet points in the first draft into speaking notes, Mark’s presentation was a huge success, in part because his PowerPoint slides were so different than the other speakers whose slides were filled with bullet points and words, Mark also found it easier to speak more naturally and engage the audience using this approach. Look at  the  Tips & Traps Competition law for Intellectual Property Licensing PowerPoint slides  Mark used four years ago and see how you can make your next presentation more interesting. I practiced law for 37 years developing a national construction law practice representing some of the top highway and transportation construction contractors in the US.