Another Blog Post About Presenting Naked

I love learning and I love going to different presentations to learn. I am always fascinated by the presenter’s style and how he or she goes about imparting information. More often than not, it is a PowerPoint presentation. Do you use PowerPoint in your presentations? And if you do, what would a person in the audience think about your particular style of sharing, teaching or training?

In October of this year, I came upon a blog post written by an HR professional named Ben Eubanks. It was an intriguing post titled Presenting Naked. What a catchy title! The highlight of the post:

“Next time you have a presentation to make that doesn’t involve high pressure and a lot of data, why not try to present naked? Drop the slides and just talk to the people who need to hear your message. When you have slides up behind you as you speak, they are partially distracted anyway, so it might actually help them to get more out of the discussion, not less.”

That blog post really helped me and it got me to thinking. It helped me decide with certainty NOT to use PowerPoint as I delivered a training session last week on professional résumé writing / personal branding / competitive job interviewing. Instead, I just talked. It was such fun and I so enjoyed sharing without the accompaniment of PowerPoint. 

Did the audience mind? Not one bit, it seems. In yesterday’s mail, I received such a thoughtful note from the seminar’s director. “There were fantastic comments about your program and more notes taken by this group than I can ever remember them taking.”

The next time you are invited to present to a group – be it five people, 500 or 5,000, how about it? Maybe you could “just talk to the people who need to hear your message.”

Thanks, Ben, for your “Presenting Naked” post!

cross-posted billiesucherblog