POWER PLAY #9

Use Pictures Instead of Bullet Points

Whenever I ask people to tell me what qualities they associate with ineffective speakers, one that always comes up is slide presentations with too much information on them. Probably the worst are entire paragraphs, which the presenter then recites to the audience. Second worst are endless lists of bullet points.
To improve, you could adopt the 5 x 5 rule, which means you don’t use any more than five bullet points per slide, and no more than five words per bullet point. But there’s something even better than that, something Steve Jobs used that blew bullet points out of the water: he knew how to captivate with pictures only.

Consider having a headline of two or three words and a picture underneath. No bullet points. This is where you can get really creative, choosing photos and illustrations that communicate ideas and feelings and situations without the literal restrictions of text. At first, you might think this is scary—you’re taking yet another step back from having a script to read. But working from pictures frees you up to tell the story instead of making a bunch of points. I love using pictures in my presentations. The pictures I use energize me, and they actually make me more conversational and comfortable. It’s been said that a picture paints a thousand words, and that’s especially true in a presentation.

The pictures inspire me to get out of my head and speak from my heart, which is where the most powerful presentations come from. The way I do it is to search Google for the type of picture I need. Then I get picky. I don’t like the standard pictures everyone uses in PowerPoint presentations. I want pictures that inspire me and have real impact. I may have to use several keywords and wrestle around with two or three great pictures before I settle on the one that speaks to me. For instance, recently I was giving a presentation on leading winning teams, and one of my key ideas was that as a leader you have to “Surround Yourself with Winners.” I had just read a book about the US Navy SEALs, one of the most elite military forces in the world. They put their people through incredibly intensive training to see who the real winners are, so I found a picture of the SEALs bonding together in freezing cold ocean water, and I used that as the picture on my slide. This led perfectly into my story about how the SEALs are incredibly selective, and they only allow the best of the best to become a SEAL.

It’s true—finding the right pictures to support your ideas and entertain your audience may take a bit of time, but it will make your presentation up to 300 percent more powerful. And it will enable you to become a charismatic, conversational speaker, instead of the person who just reads slides.