Here’s a radical notion: Your slides are not your presentation. YOU are! The best presenters know this. And they know how to own the energy of the room so that their slides serve the exchange of ideas and information, instead of substituting for it.

Read this guide from the perspective of your most valuable experience with business presentations: that of an audience member. So let’s start with what it feels like to be in the audience of the conventional presenter.

You walk into a meeting, and see a slide screen in the middle of the wall, with a laptop off to the side. A presenter stands next to the computer, pressing “enter” to advance the slide. Even with a wireless remote in hand, the speaker is still stuck to the side so people can see the slides. Often, we’ll watch one presenter after another step forward, and hunt for their deck on the laptop. Sometimes they plug in a thumb drive, or swap out the laptop altogether, while we wait for things to boot up. Our attention wanders. The energy drains out of the room and out of the ideas being brought into the room. We behave as if we’re each there to hear someone speak, and maybe even to speak to each other. But everything about the room and the speaker tells us the truth: We’re here to see slides.

It’s easy to do so much better than that! Put on your audience hat, and imagine this: you’re actively engaged by ideas instead of passively looking at slides. Presenters hand off to each other seamlessly, like sprinters in a relay. You leave the meeting before time runs out, with a set of actionable ideas, rather than needing a nap. Presenters who own the energy of the room make this possible for their audience. This Guide will help you do it, too.

Action Steps.
A shift in perspective will help you be able to own the energy of the room, so that your ideas take center stage instead of your technology.

• Take the time to decide if you should give the talk at all. If you’re reporting out data, with no need for discussion, just email the deck to us. Don’t make us travel down the hall, across town or across the country to hear something we could have read more easily on our own. Bring us together only when there’s need for focused discussion. I recommend: start a discussion NOW with your colleagues about this idea. outside the context of a specific meeting. Then people can see you mean it as a principal, rather than taking it personally. Begin to build permission for fewer "face time," information-only meetings.

• Don't put your script in the slide deck. Use pictures and short, strong phrases to support what you are saying rather than to carry what you are saying. I recommend: Make a second draft of your slide presentation. Dump the detail down to the notes section so you remember your chain of thought. Keep on the slide only what the audience absolutely needs to see to follow your ideas. If you need detail for a leave-behind, speak from the simplified Speaker Deck, and print out the detailed deck. to distribute afterwards.
  

• Don’t let the slide screen take center stage. If there is only one idea you take from this Guide, this is the one. The real estate front and center is the most energetically valuable spot in the room. Don’t cede it to a cold piece of technology. Ask for the screen to be put in the corner, off to the side, so you own the center. That way, people can see a slide when they need to, but in the meantime, they will be focused on YOU and your ideas. If you’re speaking in a room where the screen is permanently installed in the center, you can still own some of the juice of the room by stepping toward the audience, and away from the screen. You can step out of the way when you really need them to focus on the slide instead of on you. I recommend: To find the screen-to-the-side, speaker-in-the-middle placement that works in your space, get a colleague to come early and sit in a variety of seats to make sure they can see you AND the screen

• Count on audience instincts to focus where you are focused. You can help your audience “know” when to look at the screen by turning to look toward it yourself. Every eye will follow your gaze to the screen. Then, we’ll come back to you when you turn back toward us. We will do this reflexively, whether you mean us to or not. That’s part of why it’s so important for you NOT to read your slides to us. When a speaker’s eye lingers too long on the screen instead of the audience, the energy drops and the audience bails. When you take conscious control of where you want us to focus – on the ideas you are sharing, on each other, or on the slide on the wall – you capitalize on something powerful that will happen with or without your conscious choice. I recommend: to see how this energetic principal plays out, watch other speakers. See how they engage – and lose – their audience, just on this level alone.

• Position your laptop so you know what slide is up, without having to look back at the wall to see it. That way you send your energy where we in the audience want it: toward us. I recommend: Turn off the sound. Get rid of the timer that will send the screen into sleep mode when you rest in one slide for “too long.” And get a wireless remote! They cost so little, and give you so much flexibility. Then practice with it, so you know which button does what.

• Don’t pass out your deck before your talk, so they can “follow along.” Give it to them afterwards. Otherwise, they will leaf through it, hunting for the “what applies to me” stuff and miss the experience you are trying to build for them.I recommend: Tell them you have taken the notes for them, and they will get a detailed deck at the end.

Tips and Tactics
Skip the laser pointer. By the time your shaky hand finds the part of the slide you mean, you could have focused us directly by saying, “Look at the second line.” And while you may be close enough to see the laser beam, most audiences won’t see it. If they do, it’s usually moving around so much it won’t mean much.

Set up your computer and slide deck before your audience arrives. Don’t let the energy of the room drop out while you get your deck up and ready to go. If you are one of several presenters, don’t make us wait while you swap out computers with the speaker ahead of you. See if you can arrange to have all the day’s decks put on one computer, as one big deck, so every presenter can just hand off smoothly to the next presenter. Think from your perspective as an audience member: When speakers keep us engaged, we are less likely to reach for the Blackberry or go on mental vacation.

Send the energy of your ideas into our hearts, minds and hands. Intend that we’ll take some action with your ideas. Most speakers’ bottom line is, “Like me.” When your bottom line is, “You can use these ideas now,” the energy you send is about US, the listener.

And that’s just the way every audience likes it!