7 ways presenters can stop dwelling on a single slide

Your presentation won’t get into gear if you linger long on that first slide, and it will screech to a halt if you glom on to a particular tile or image later on. Here are seven remedies.

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Marketing guru Seth Godin recently shared this familiar scene:

“I sat through an endless presentation by the CEO of a fast-growing company. He was doing fine for half an hour, but then, when his time was up, he chose to spend 45 minutes more on his final slide, haranguing and invecting, jumping from topic to topic and basically bringing the entire group to its knees in frustration.”

He’s not the only presenter who does this. I’ve got clients who can spend 15 minutes to two hours on a single slide; sometimes, they never get past the title slide before their time is up.

Some plan it that way, creating a graphic with just enough text to serve as one big cue card. It’s the presentation equivalent of hanging onto the slide as life preserver, except that it’s your audience doing the drowning.

Let me throw you a line and pull you out of this bad habit with these corrective steps:

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