154: Do You Need Slides?
As technology has changed over the years, so have our attention spans—shortening down to roughly 8 seconds for the average person. As speakers, that means we have to continuously keep our audience engaged and intrigued. So what does this mean for your presentations?
In today's episode, we're discussing when slides are appropriate, how to use them to serve your audience, and how they can compliment your talk. Listen in as we explore how the four primary learning modalities can impact your presentation, along with the benefits of knowing your talk with and without slides.
If you loved this episode and it motivated you to work on more polished presentations, I’d love for you to leave a review on iTunes and tell me about your biggest takeaway. Take a screenshot of you listening on your device, post it to your Instagram Stories, and tag me @jessicarasdall.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Creating Engaging Slides
According to research, our attention span has markedly decreased In 2000, it was 12 seconds. Now, it's shrunk significantly to 8.25 seconds. In fact, scientists reckon we now have shorter attention spans than goldfish, who are able to focus on a task or object for 9 seconds.
This simply means that we have to adjust both our talks and our slides to capture their attention and keep them engaged.
Using Learning Modalities to Impact Our Presentations
There are four widely accepted learning modalities that can help you serve a wider audience in your presentations:
Visual
Auditory
Reading/Writing
Kinetic
While your talk is primarily audible, you can create a visual in a slide to help reinforce what you're saying. This encourages a more powerful way to present your content.
When I first started sharing my story nearly a decade ago, my talk was simple and did not include slides. I wanted to share my story and keep them focused on my words, but with the students I was primarily speaking to, I knew the best way to connect with them and relate to them was to show visuals of pictures that also took with their friends.
By adding a slideshow with music to the end of my presentation, students could put themselves and their friends in my story, which helped make a bigger impact.
This slideshow reinforced everything I'd shared in my story while also putting a face to a name. It humanized my story.
Slides Should Reinforce, Not Replace
Your role as a speaker is to share and educate your audience audibly. Therefore, your slide deck is not your presentation, it is a tool. You should be using your slides to reinforce, not replace. By creating slides, you're can reinforcing your points for the audience, because our brains process visual information efficiently.
When you add slides to your talk to create a visual representation, it's important that you're not relying primarily on those slides. When you rely on slides, you're doing a disservice to both you and your audience. They're missing out on the full story and the passion that comes from you knowing your details. Not only that, but if you're relying on your slides, anything can go wrong—technology fails, which puts you in a bind.
Be Considerate & Accessible in Your Presentation
Let's talk about how you're using your slides. We've all been in a presentation where someone relied too heavily on their slides to get the point across, but have you ever considered how this impacts those who can't see them?
I was once watching an Easter service on TV with my family. The preacher was using visuals to express emotions—but not actually describing what each visual actually looked like. This meant that my father-in-law, who is bling, didn't resonate with the speaker. Therefore, he immediately lost a listener. In that moment, I forever changed how I present my own talks and how I educate others to plan and present their slides.
Not everyone can see your slides, so it's important to prioritize accessibility in your talks. If you're going to continue to include images or gifs in your slides, make sure you're describing them along with verbally communicating everything that you're showing on the screen.
As a reminder, your slides are supposed to compliment your talk, otherwise your message can get lost in your slides. It's your job to guide your audience through receiving slides.
Whether you use or don't use slides, get into the habit of putting your audience first.
Wondering what actually needs to go IN/ON your slides? Check episode 26 Slide Decks: The Good Back and Ugly
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Read the Transcript from this Episode
Transcript for Episode 154:
0:00
As you're preparing to take some of your virtual presentations back in person, maybe you're wondering if you need to start preparing slides, or if you should scrap the ones you made for your virtual talk. Do we need slides for our presentations? Yes or no. Today, we're breaking it all down.
0:28
Welcome back to another episode of The speak to scale podcast where we're helping small business owners just like you grow and scale their companies by speaking on stages, podcasts, webinars, and more. I'm your host, Jessica Rasul. And I can't say thank you enough for joining me. The solo episodes are some of my favorites. Yes, I love, love, love our guests interviews. I'm so grateful for everyone who has come on the show and poured into you guys. But sometimes I feel like the solo episodes are just a jam. sesh of you and I sitting here nerding out about speaking and business development. And I love it, it feels like a little heart to heart. So thanks for being here, friend. Now, today, I really want to talk about slides, and how slide decks have evolved how the way that we interact with them as speakers as audience members has changed. And what you really need to know to decide should you be using slide decks or not? And if you are, what should you be considering? So according to the internet and Google search that I did, already attention span as humans has continued to decrease because back in like 2000, but they would say, Oh, you know, the heat, the average human has an attention span of about 12 seconds. That's not my kid who has an attention span of about point five seconds, but the average human, but now they're saying it's shrunk significantly, by probably about 8.25 seconds. And this research was not today, it was a few years ago. So I'm going to go with we're around eight seconds or so. And you know that for for most of us, they say that's less than a goldfish. So a goldfish can focus on a task, or an object for nine seconds. So to say that we as humans have a smaller attention span than a goldfish is like, oh, how on earth? Are we supposed to get up on a stage and captivate our audience and keep them tracking with us? for longer than nine seconds? How do we do that? Well, I think it's really important for us to with everything that we do in speaking, make sure that and business ownership, but making sure that we put our audience at the forefront. What is it that they need from us? How can we show up and serve them? Well? What is the best way that they receive from me? In fact, that is something that is constantly coming up in conversations here behind the scenes at the public speaking strategist. Just this week, on a team meeting, we were talking about considering possibly shifting the way we handle our group coaching calls inside of the speaking strategy Academy. But those conversations are not about what do I want? or What does the team want? The conversation is? What do our members want? What is going to serve them best? What do they need from us? Like? How can we best support them. And that's the stuff that allows you to create something that is powerful, that creates change that delivers a transformation. And I know you want that for your talk. So we've really got to think about how does our audience best learn. And if you haven't nerd it out about different learning modalities, then let's do that for a little bit. chali way there are four different types of modes that people learn in I'm sure you know, this, you know visual, auditory, reading, writing, and kinesthetic which is like movement. And now I'm not saying that each of us only learn in one way.
4:29
But some of us, a lot of us have preferences. So those of you listening to the podcast today, Hey, friend, you probably like auditory learning, you like to hear things said to you. A lot of people are going to be visual learners visual tends to stick in our memory really well. Our brain processes visual information very efficiently. And it's easier for us to recall of him in a vivid image like a picture than it is to remember maybe what some He said or what they wrote down. That's why a written outline handout slides used along with our presentation really help reinforce what it is that we're saying. I want you to think back to when you were a kid, or when you were in college when you know, when you're learning something. What were the things that you did to make sure you remember the information especially like, when you were studying for a test? If you were studying for a big final? What was it that you were doing to remember the information? reading the book for me like, that didn't do much. Yeah, I would highlight things. But I was an avid note taker, written in the writing is a really good way for me to consume content, it's a really good way for me to remember things. So I was big on writing outlines to go with the content. To go with the textbook, it was something I learned from a teacher in middle school, she used to require us to write these outlines of the chapters in our textbook, and I hated it all I was the worst. But it taught me so much. Looking back on her. And I have this very strange routine that I would go through with speaking over the years where, even though I knew my talk, I knew it inside outwards frontwards backwards, I would print out my slides before traveling to a speaking engagement. And I'd print it out with that like note sheet, where you have the picture of the slide on one side and lines on the other side. And the night before my presentation every single time in my hotel room, writing down these little bullet points of what I'm going to say on each slide. Like I don't already know this. But the act of doing that of physically writing it out, is like what ingrained in my mind. So I want you to think about that. Right? What is the best way that you go about remembering things? Are you cool with just listening to the podcast? And then you're going to remember all my action steps? Do you need to write them down? Do you need to see a picture in front of you What is the best way that you learn? Now what we need to consider is that when we're delivering your presentation, whether it's online or in person, our audience might not learn like us. So the more that we can do to hit on all four of those modes, the more likely we are to not only make an impact on them in the moment, but be memorable for the long haul, make sure that our content and our stories have sunken in. And they recall it years later. So when I first started speaking, in 2006, I didn't use slides, that was not something that I did as part of my presentation. It was more about my story. It was all my story. But what I did do is at the end of my presentation every single time I spoke when I was done, I played a video slideshow a quick like three minutes slideshow. And it was pictures of you know, here I was on the stage telling the story of me and my best friend, and how a decision that I made claimed her life. But I'm talking to students who are a year or two younger than me, people who like we were on the same path. They understood friendship and my main goal for that talk my billboard statement, right? We just went through this a few episodes ago, I wanted to connect with them on a level where they could see themselves in me in my story, because I knew that myself at 18. And all of them felt like stories like mine happened to other people, but they could never happen to me. Right? That was stuff we saw on the news, but it wasn't my reality. And I wanted them to see themselves in me and my best friend. I wanted them to think about them and their best friend, and how the pictures that I was sharing in that slideshow were just like the pictures that they took with their friends on there at the time digital camera and not iPhone. And, you know, played this video slideshow to
9:15
really make sure it hit home and they remembered it. And that slideshow was so important, because it hit visually, it also played a song. There was a song that I know, I was probably violating copyright law now that I'm a business owner looking back on this, but there was a song in this video slideshow. And you know, I would hear from people in the audience's years later about how every time they heard that song that they would think about us or that they could still remember some of the pictures from this. Words are powerful, and they matter and I'm not telling you to skimp on your talk or what you're saying. But if we can use visual and auditory And these other activities and you know, engagement things. If we can do that we can reinforce our words even more, we can make our message hit home. And that's what we want to do with our slides, we want to make sure that we are using them as a way not to replace our words, not to like you know, be our presentation, your slide deck is not your presentation. But it is a tool to help you reinforce your message, it is a tool to help your audience track with you. It's a tool to illustrate what it is that you are saying. Because again, our brains process visual information very efficiently. And if we can help somebody be able to retain our information a little bit more than That's awesome. When it comes to showing what it is that we're saying. Like that's why it's so important that when we are including stories in our presentation, that we are trying to make them as visual as possible. You know, we want our audience to be able to close their eyes and see themselves in the experience as we were going through. That's why just saying Yeah, in the beginning of my business, I was really scared. No, like, that's not enough. You want to talk to them about what things felt like what it looked like, what was going through your mind? What were the What were you not doing? Because you were scared? What were you doing, because you were scared, all of that stuff is important. And it's going to help really just teleport your audience from sitting in that, you know, auditorium seats from sitting in that conference room from sitting on that zoom call to being right there with you in the moment. But there's something about slides that I've have not talked about on the podcast yet. I've only talked about this over on Instagram. And I don't know many people who are talking about it. And I will say it's not really until you encounter the situation that you realize you've been doing it wrong. And I had been doing it wrong. See, it's really tempting to have slides and want to make them really fun and really catchy. And you know, we put up these little gifts or these memes. But we forget that maybe not everybody in our audience can see those slides. And you know, we work really hard to craft these signature presentations. There's no reason to miss out on an opportunity to pour into our people. Because we left out certain audience members,
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friend, don't show an image on your slides. And assume that everyone in the audience can see it may not know this, but my he probably don't know this. Why would you know this? My father in law is blind. And he was here at our house one weekend. And it was actually over Easter weekend. And we were watching like Easter service on the TV. And I noticed a speaking habit that I think many of us are doing, you know, myself included, I definitely was the speaker was showing a series of images on the screen. And he would make statements like sometimes we feel like this. And he would just kind of gesture to the image. And he would say, you know, sometimes kids do this, and gesture to the image. And it was supposed to be this light hearted fun like opening where he was showing the the funny memes that he collected that week. But as he gestured to those slides, while Yes, you know, this practice was very engaging for the audience. And you could hear people laughing. It also left audience members feeling left out, you know, I looked over at my father in law, and it just like hit me like a ton of bricks, I realized he had no idea what images were being shown on that screen, the entire message of that part of the presentation was lost, completely lost. If you're going to show an image in your slide, you know, if you're going to put up a funny GIF, we can't just assume that everyone can see it. Because your audience could include somebody with visual impairment. It could include people who can't see the slides because of how far away they're sitting. It could have people who looked away when that important slide was up. There's a lot of different reasons why you should never assume your audience can see your slides. So they're only supposed to be complimentary. And if you're sharing something important, pause, pull your audience in. But make sure you're also verbally communicating what you're showing on the screen, especially if that slide includes images, gifs quotes, graphics, or diagrams. If you're already verbalizing it, cool, proud of you, you're doing better than I was. But if you're simply showing up Usually, that's more of an implied message. Here's what I want you to do going forward. It's simple. Say what's on that slide. Listen, I want you to see if you can tell the difference here. And this is the perfect opportunity. Because you can't see what I'm talking about right now. Right? You can only hear me. So what if I said, when you see a new inquiry in your inbox, you feel like this?
15:28
You don't know what I'm talking about to you? Right? You don't know if I'm pointing at an image of somebody who's really excited? Or if I'm pointing at an image of someone who's terrified and nervous? You don't know. Because I, you can't see it. And I didn't tell you instead, what if I said, when you see a new inquiry in your inbox, you get as excited as Ana did when they finally opened the gates and Aaron Dell. If you're a parent, you know, I'm talking about frozen here, and she's so pumped. But that very popular gift of Ana excited about the gates opening would have been lost? Had I not told you that second part, you don't need to read your slides word for word like Please don't do that. But I do want you to start to consider what is the experience for your audience, when they are receiving your message? If they can, or they can't see your slides? Are they still getting it? Are they still able to receive your message? I want you to know that whether you slide or you don't use slides in your presentation, solely fine for it. I mean, unless the host told you you need slides, you better have slides. But I want you to get into the habit of putting your audience first. And really thinking about audience members who may not be able to see your slides. How can you guide the ship? How can you be sure that we're hitting both visually and auditory guide your audience through receiving those slides, not just assuming they can receive it themselves? Obviously, right now, listening to this podcast is a great example, if you're wanting to think of ways where you want to practice being more inclusive with your slides, podcasting is perfect. But if you're like Jess, I don't know how to describe my slide. I don't know how to describe this data. I don't know how to narrate this, here's a really good place to look for examples. All you got to do is watch the History Channel, the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, any of those, because the imagery. While it's incredibly impressive, it's always complimentary to the narrative. And I know this, because my father in law loves to have those channels on. Because he feels like he's listening to a story, right? He doesn't even have to see the TV, he can just listen. And they're going to narrate about, you know, how that Cheetah ran so fast and what it pounced on, like, it's going to narrate the experience so that even if you can't see it, the message isn't lost on you. I will challenge you today to watch one of those channels and close your eyes. Listen to the narrator. And I bet you can still walk away with a clear understanding of what was covered. And I want you to start working to create that same experience for your audience in your presentations. We don't want to spend all this time you know, creating this outline writing this talk building these slides only to have our message lost because we didn't communicate it effectively. So if you are going to use slides include everyone, showcase and narrate the visuals that you put on those slides. Remember, your slide deck is complimentary to your presentation. It's not a guide for you, right, don't read off of it, don't bank on them being there because there will be a time when you go to give a presentation and tech fails. And I need you to be comfortable and confident delivering that talk without slides even if you built them. Even if you packed in a ton of hours and making like the most amazing slide deck. Be prepared to give that talk without it. So that means practice that presentation with your slides. So you know when to advance to the next one without turning around and looking at it. But also practice without your slides so that you are confident in a situation where Fingers crossed. It never happens to you but your slides are not available. If you are looking for some information about what should actually go on to your slides, hop on over to Episode 26 an oldie but a goodie Episode 26 slide decks the good bad and the ugly. This was recorded Back when the podcast was called the creative speaker podcast, so don't get confused when you listen, same podcast, your same favorite host, just an older branding. Okay, okay,
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but the tips still apply. So the things like, what should your colors and your fonts, what should you consider what goes on your slides, what doesn't go on your slides, all of that is an episode 26. And I'm going to link it in the show notes for you. But what I want you to leave here with today, is really understanding that your audience may not be like you, your audience may not learn like you. So when you are designing your presentation, when you are building out the slides or not building out your slides and just writing your talk, make sure you're creating and presentation that includes everyone. If you want a visual for what this looks like, and that Arendelle on a story I was telling you about. I'm going to link for you an Instagram post I shared that broke this down so that you can have both the audio and the visual for this. Just head on over to the show notes. Click the link and you can hop right on over there. I can't thank you enough for listening today. Friend, this truly is something that I was failing on. I know that if I did you likely you might be doing it too. And I wouldn't be a good friend. If I wasn't hearing your corner saying hey, we can do better. We can impact even more people if we just put them at the forefront and consider how they might need to learn from us. So are you with me on this? Let's create more inclusive slide decks. I know you are. Alright friends. I'll see you next week for another episode of The speak to scale podcast. Thank you so much for tuning into today's episode of The speak to scale podcast. It would mean the world to us if you could just take a second and head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. Your support of this show allows us to continue creating this content for you each and every week. And we appreciate your reviews and you sharing about the show more than you know. As always, I will be over here cheering you on friend. I'll see you next week for another episode of The speak to scale podcast.
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