The privilege of speaking

- You present for many reasons. Sometimes, you present to teach. Sometimes, you present to share. Sometimes, you present to lead. And sometimes, you present to persuade. In every case, though, you're in front of an audience. And if you're like most of us, that can make you a little nervous. Sometimes a lot nervous. But you don't need to be. In our modern world, to have a voice is a precious thing. In this day of two-second attention spans and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat, to have an audience sit quietly and give their attention, even for a short time, to you and to what you have to say, is pretty cool. Even if it's routine. Even if they're your fellow employees and they've been forced to be there, it's a privilege to be listened to. So you want to be your best. You have everyone's ear, and you want to make the most of it. And I'm saying this as a preamble before we get to design, because the better you feel about yourself and your talk, the better the slides will be that you're gonna make. If you're afraid of speaking, you'll tend to use your slides as a crutch instead of the helpful storytelling tools that they can be. This is your place to find your voice and just let those pressures fall away. This is a course about making slides, but the first thing to know is that we, the audience, have come not to read your slides, but to see and hear you. That's not to say we're here for you quite. We're here for what we'll learn from you. But we are here with you. So think of your presentation, not as a performance, or you're up there and we're down here, but more like a conversation. We're in this together. You and me or you and us. What we don't want is for you to feel nervous, that's you're not welcome here or that you're wasting our time. We really do want to like what you have to say, and if you say it well, it'll really help us.