Creating Wow Moments in Presentations

In the northeast change comes conspicuously in November. The colors of leaves shift from green to gold, red, burnt orange and a hundred shades of each before the leaves disappear altogether for winter’s dormancy. On some days, like the day I took the photo of the trees to the right of this blog entry, the change literally stopped me. I pulled over my car, took in the colors, and took a photo. It was a wow moment.

That’s the power change has over us. We can run from it, avoid it, ignore it, even deny it, or we can embrace it and turn our full attention toward it. We can do the same things with our presentations too.

It’s too easy to settle into a routine with presentations. You know what I’m talking about: pull up an old one on our laptop, change a logo or two, a word or two, and essentially deliver the same presentation to a new audience. Easy. But if you do that too often, even though the presentation might be new to your audience, it won’t be new to you. It won’t take you to the edge with anticipation. It won’t keep you on full alert as you prepare for it. And that’s because it lacks change.

Change for the sake of change is a tricky thing. You don’t want to blow up things that work great. But it is a good idea to change something in your presentation to keep you as the presenter as engaged as the audience. In that case, change for the sake of change is a very good thing.

Nature knows more about presentations than I ever will. That’s why I pay such close attention to Her. Have you ever noticed that nature never puts together a clunky color palette for sunrise or sunset? Nature also has limitless ways to produce wow moments that hold our attention. That’s our job as presenters, too. Find ways to change something in your presentations that add a wow moment. It could be a moment that wows your audience; it could be a moment that wows you. Both of those moments have real value. And like nature’s take on change, those moments don’t have to last long or even dominate the presentation. They just have to shake things up a little, grab our attention, and for that moment make us forget about everything else but that wow.

Give it a try. And let me know some of your ideas of what wow moments look like. I look forward to hearing from you.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Gerry Sandusky – View the original post .