How do you use your visuals

Welcome to the remarkability Institute. This is Bart Queen, your host. Now, if you were following me last week, I covered an episode around visual AIDS. This is the second piece to last week's episode. So if you missed last week, guys, do me a favor. Go back and pay attention to last week's episode first, and then join me on this one.

[00:02:05] We're covering today is the second major bucket on how you use your visuals. In last week's episode, I spent a fair amount of time talking about crafting your sides, not detailed things, but simple ideas that will keep you the center of attention. Everything that I talk about around communication boils up into three major buckets.

[00:02:33] How do we build trust? How do we build engagement, and how do we build a relationship? And when it comes to this use of visual AIDS, building that trust and building relationship is critical to your success, whether using PowerPoint, a whiteboard, chalkboard, a flip chart, or you're showing some type of a prop, maybe a piece of equipment that you're showing them.

[00:02:59] I want you to remember that you need to be the center of attention, not your visual, not the whiteboard or the chalkboard people buy from people. They buy from people that they like. They're going to buy you first and then get your slides. So everything that you do, you have to keep yourself the center of attention.

[00:03:21] Now, on last week's episode, I asked you to take a paradigm shift around how you craft the slides and today's episode. I'm asking you to take a paradigm shift around the way you use your visuals, how you interact with a whiteboard or a chalkboard, how you interact with your PowerPoint, which is the visual itself on the screen, your laptop, that equipment, and your audience.

[00:03:48] If you will take that paradigm shift for me if you'll take everything I'm sharing with you and make sure that you are the center of attention, here's what you're going to find. Number one, you're far more engaging. Number two, you're more connected to your audience. And number three, your ability to move the listener forward is exponentially much greater.

[00:04:09] As you think about using your visuals, there are three major areas where you interact. If you're taking notes with me today, I want you to note these three major areas where you interact, number one, the way you interact with the audience. Number two is how you interact with the visual itself, what's up on the screen or the whiteboard, or the flip chart itself.

[00:04:33] And then how you interact with equipment and a PowerPoint perspective. That's your laptop. Now, if you've been following me through the series of episodes, you have heard me discuss what we called your delivery skills, your eye, contact, your paws, your gestures, your facial expressions. Movement and your posture, when you think about those delivery skills, which three interact in the areas that I just mentioned to you of the audience, of the visual and of the equipment.

[00:05:13] Take a moment and think through those just a little bit. If you came back and said, Bart, the number one skill I practice with the audience is eye contact. You are correct. And here's the paradigm shift you're going to take. When the average person presenter brings up a slide, as soon as the slide comes up, what do they do?

[00:05:38] You're correct. They begin to talk right off the top of the bat. Now let me ask you this question. What is the listener? What is the audience doing? the audience is trying to consume your slot. Now, you and I are both intelligent. Your audience is intelligent, but guys, they can't read the slide and listen to you simultaneously, they can only do one thing at a time.

[00:06:03] They're either reading or listening. They're either reading or listening. A great example of this. If you will think back to when you were in grammar school on the days when you were little, and you came in after recess at lunch, and the teacher read to you when the teacher read the book to you, and she or he wanted to show you a picture in the book, can you remember what happened?

[00:06:29] Remember, the teacher would turn the book and slowly show it to the class. Now, let me ask you, did the teacher speak? Nope. The teacher was silent because they knew you were absorbing the picture and connecting it to what they just read. The majority of you will lock yourself in your home office on a Sunday and make sure your PowerPoint slides are perfect.

[00:07:01] But when you bring it up, you don't give the listener an opportunity to absorb it. Why bother we do this because you have spent so much time around that side, it like the back of your hand, and when it comes up, you're immediately going to try to discuss it. But you have to give the list or an opportunity to absorb it.

[00:07:20] This is the first paradigm shift you're going to take around this idea of using visuals. Now, the second skill set, when that visual comes up, is the power of the pause. You've got to pause and let them absorb it. Now, here's your kind of guiding principle around that. Guys. You do not have to wait for every single person.

[00:07:45] To absorb the slide. Cause somebody's going to look at your side and they're going to go back down memory lane and think, wow, that's pretty cool. They're going to be thinking about their job. They're going to be thinking about whatever's up there. The majority of your audience, when they have consumed it, they will look at you now.

[00:08:02] Here's where it connects to your eye contact. As soon as most people are looking at, you begin to speak again, the person who is so absorbed in the slide, as soon as they hear you speak. They will come right back into your content. But from an eye contact perspective, the slide comes up. Watch your audience; see what they're doing.

[00:08:25] If they're reading your side, don't speak. Now I have to chuckle here because for some of you, the amount of information that you all put on a slide, I could take you all out to a three-course meal, come back. We could watch a movie, and somebody would still be reading your slides for the volume that people put on a slide.

[00:08:45] Now, that's where I want you to reference back to last week's episode because I gave you some very strong guidelines to make readability high. So let me recap what I've shared with you. You bring up a slide; the slide comes up, your audience is reading it. You have to pause. Now, remember they're working, you get a chance to relax.

[00:09:08] So if you'll think about it, this is an opportunity to look at your notes. If you need notes, this is an opportunity to take a sip of water. This is an opportunity to glance at your audience and see what they're doing, and then be able to reconnect with them. So here's the thought from an engagement perspective, when you transitioned from slide to slide, this is an opportunity to reengage your audience.

[00:09:34] This is an opportunity to reengage your audience, but you have to give them a chance to absorb it. Now you can decide the percentage of 50%, 75, 85 90. You decide you have to be able to read the situation. But remember, give them time to read it. A good rule of thumb is you read it. And once you've read it, go again, nine times out of 10, they'll be with you.

[00:10:01] So here are the first two skills—your eye contact. Wait for them to absorb it. Pause, don't say anything to the majority of your audiences with you. The third one is in this idea of, with your equipment. You have to be able to move. Now. Here's what I see—a lot. Someone is using PowerPoint. They are...