10 ways to ruin your presentation

25 March 2024
Written By Seb

Here’s your proven guide and blueprint for ensuring your audience falls asleep or worse, checks their e-mails while you speak.

1. Embrace the Art of Reading Slides: Treat your audience to a live audiobook session. They surely haven’t mastered the art of reading and will appreciate your narration of every. Single. Word.

2. The More Points, the Merrier: If your slide isn’t resembling a densely packed novel page, you’re doing it wrong. Make War and Peace look like a pamphlet!

3. Reject the Less is More Philosophy: Who said simplicity is key? They obviously never enjoyed the thrill of navigating through 50 slides in 20 minutes. A single, or very small set of elegant slide to anchor your presentation? Absurdity!

4. Dodge Questions: If your audience is engaged and wanted thought-provoking discussions, they’d have gone to a philosophy lecture. Stick to the script, and treat any question as an unwelcome surprise. Better yet, tell them to save it for the end, they'd have forgotten by then.

5. The Notes are Your True Audience: Why connect with the room when your notes deserve all your love and attention? Make sure to keep your head down; eye contact is a sign of weakness. Your eyes on the notes, audience on their phones!

6. Reading the Room is Overrated: Adjusting to your audience’s energy is a flexible approach we simply can’t endorse. Stick to your predetermined path, regardless of yawns or glazed-over eyes. You are on the stage afterall, not the rest of the room!

7. Avoid Audience Engagement: Why risk a lively, interactive session when you can single-handedly shoulder the weight of the conversation? Participation is so passé.

8. Laughter is Your Enemy: Ensuring your presentation is a humor-free zone is crucial. Laughter might lead to engagement, and we can’t have that, can we? See point 7.

9. Prolong the Agony with Unnecessary Length: The perfect presentation knows no time limits. Why aim for conciseness when you can embark on an epic journey through every tangent possible? Your audience has nowhere better to be.

10. Technical Difficulties are a Feature, Not a Bug: Forget practice and preparation. Begin your 20 minute presentation with at least 15 minutes of fumbling with cables and insisting that it worked just fine moments ago.

By steadfastly following these guidelines, you’re not just giving a presentation; you’re embarking on a bold journey to make it an unforgettable ordeal. And by "unforgettable," I mean the kind that has them rushing for the exits—or at least mentally checking out long before you’ve concluded. Here’s to making a statement that will echo through the corridors of corporate lore, warning others of the path not to take!