In this episode we're discussing the speaker is the presentation, not their PowerPoint slides.

While your slides should aid you and your talk, your audience's sole focus shouldn't be on the visuals, otherwise you've lost them.

We'll discuss:

• Why dense slides can hurt your talk
• How to simplify dense slides (which can mean different things to different organizations)
• The real purpose around slides and how great communicators interact with them

The slides are there to help guide your audience, give them something else to engage with, and be your speaker notes, but they shouldn't be the main show.

Hybrid work. It's not going away. So the best thing we can do is learn how to make it most effective, whether you use it daily or just a couple of times a month.

You need to consider a few things:

1. How to prepare before the meeting even begins
2. The best practices that can help you be clear, confident, and prepared
3. Whether cameras need to be on or off
4. Understand how to end effectively

A lot of people start virtual meetings on a whim. This can work at times, but if you want your meetings to be purposeful, engaging, and you want people to come back in the future, there's a lot more that goes into making this happen.

Don't skip the prep work simply because all you need to do is hit "start meeting".

This month, we're discussing Storytelling as an influential tool.

People tend to remember a story long after they forget the data. A great message may inform, but a great story can help people feel the message.

We discuss a few specific areas:

1. Why stories influence better than information alone
2. Where we see stories show up, and why they work
3. Some common mistakes people make with their stories

Storytelling can be an effective tool in so many areas; you just need to know how to tell the right story.