 Today, my topic is on visual aids. What is visual aids to you? Visual aids is anything that we can bring on the stage to enhance our speech. It can be maybe a chart that we want to show. It could be an object, like a prop. If I was, for example, going to talk about how my mother used to discipline me when I was young and I bring a stick, that's a visual aid. But in the modern context of corporate world, when we talk about visual aids, what is the first thing that comes to our mind? PowerPoint. And that's why I decided today to focus primarily on PowerPoint as a visual aid, because it will help you in your work. But I want you all to keep one thing in mind. Whenever you are preparing a PowerPoint presentation, that it is a visual aid. It is not a presentation. What do I mean by that? Many times, when we are asked to prepare, and you prepare PowerPoints at work to present your products, present your findings if you are in accounting or auditing, you need PowerPoint to present to the management, and you do it all the time. But we have this tendency to put in the PowerPoint everything that we want to say. And we end up just reading what is there on the slide. And in this case, what happens is that that becomes the presentation, and you become of no use. So we need to think about how can I use PowerPoint as a visual aid, because at the end of the day, in my case, for example, I have always been, I always am, and I always will be the presentation. When I'm speaking, I want you all to look at me, what I have to say. I don't want you all reading from a PowerPoint slide. And today, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you some techniques of how to approach visual aids, how you should think of PowerPoint as something that is there to help you and not to replace you. Already, AI is going to replace us, they say, right? Why let PowerPoint also replace us? So that's why I picked up this topic, that by PowerPoint, because we tend to create PowerPoints where it is a replacement, and it essentially is a death of the presenter. And today, I want you all to make sure that it doesn't happen to you. Many of us have come across slides like this, where maybe the product manager puts up his slide of how he's performing, let's say this is a restaurant, and he's a restaurant manager, and he wants to explain to the board how his company is doing. And he will say, you know what, for breakfast, we had 7,500 guests, which is great because our budget was 6,750. By the time I finished that line, you have already reached dinner, because we read faster than we speak. So when you put a lot of information and you start reading what is there, the audience is reading faster than you, which means whatever you're saying is of no use. It's like one plus one, the end result is zero in your mind. So if you've ever been preparing presentations like this, what's the first thing we'll do? You'll not do something like this. We also have a tendency to create slides like this. And I'm going to work this as my basis. I want to, let's say, talk to you about benefits of Toastmasters. I've been told to explain what are the benefits. And I start creating a slide. And I created a slide like this. Benefits of Toastmasters, you have, you can become a great communicator, you can become a great leader, and you have networking opportunities. And then I start writing. What is the benefits of communication? I will say relationships build on the solid ground of good communication tend to be stronger and we can even help participants find opportunities for personal growth. Same story like the first slide. As you are reading, communication, you might be already reading about networking. Disconnect between what I'm saying and what you are listening to or what you are reading. So I'm going to talk about five strategies, just five, that you can employ in your presentations to make sure that the focus stays on you. People listen to what you have to say and you use PowerPoint just to help you out to take that presentation in the right direction. So let me get back to this slide. Now this slide, how many messages are there? Three, right? You can see that I'm going to talk about communication. I'm talking about leadership. I'm talking about networking. As humans, we are very simple. We think that we can multitask, but in reality we can't. I'll give you a classic example. Let's say today, you were sitting in your living room, a friend comes and he wants to talk something very, very important to you. But the World Cup match is going on. It's going on, right? They are lost, but it was going on, let's say. And so because he's going to talk to you something very important, you turn down the volume. But the match is going on behind. You're trying to listen to what your friend is saying, but at the same time, how much messages do you think you'll get? First of all, you won't enjoy the game. At the same time, you won't understand exactly what your friend is saying because we cannot multitask. There are some things we can multitask. We can watch TikTok while drinking coffee. That's multitasking, but that's very basic multitasking. But two messages, that's hard. So what you could do in such situation is that you can tell your friend, let's watch the match. Once the match is over, let's talk. Or you switch off the TV, which could be very hard. So the idea that I'm going to talk about is, sorry, is one message per slide. You can talk about three messages, but they should be on different slides. So when I'm talking about communication, that slide should have only items related to communication. You want to talk about leadership? Make a separate slide. One thing I want to stress, the number of slides in your presentation is never the problem. What is problem is the amount of information in a slide, correct? Many times there are companies which will say, oh, make a presentation, but make sure it doesn't exceed 10 slides. And what will you do? You'll try to bring all the information that you have into those 10 slides, like the one which I showed you. No, the number of slides is not a problem. You can have 200 slides, as long as it creates the right objectives that you want to deliver to your audience. So one message. So let's look at what we can do about this. I should change this so that I focus only on one slide. Let's focus on communication. Now when I'm talking to you, everyone knows this slide is, or this part of my presentation is all about communication. One slide, one message. By the way, at the end of this session, I'll ask, there will be a quiz. So please take notes. Now the second part, which I mentioned to you, is that your slides are your visual aids, which means don't use them as a replacement of you. What do I mean by that? In the previous slide of mine, I had text written, which perhaps I will read out, but instead of that, what you should do is, you should convert that into key points. Bullet points, right? Just focus on the bullet points, and so the only thing that the audience can read are the key points, but the message is coming from me. So when I talk about mitigating conflict, I will talk what mitigating conflict is all about. You will not read it from there. I want you all to listen to me when I'm talking about mitigating conflict, or any of the points, okay? Very simple, right? So first one was one message per slide. Second, use it as a visual aid by just listing out the key points. Of course, if you have the PowerPoint in front of you, PowerPoint has this feature called notes, narrator notes. So the audience will see this, but you will have the notes in front of you. But my personal opinion, you should know what you are talking about rather than reading notes. Prepare yourself and then deliver the message. You can also use images to heighten the impact of your message. So bullet points and some message, images that link to what you are saying. This is going to be a small game, but what do you think is the maximum number of bullet points I should put? Three, five, in my previous slide, actually there were 10. Do you think it's okay to put 10? Too much? Okay, let's do a small test. What I'm going to do is you will see on the screen a number of circles appearing, okay? The moment you see it, I want you to count and raise your hand and tell me how many circles did you see, okay? You're ready? Okay, so it took about five to six seconds. Okay, another test, ready? Eight, so it took about four seconds, less, right? Okay, let's look at this one. What I'm going to do. Did you see the difference that when I showed you five, your reaction was, you didn't even count. And this is human nature. There is a certain limit at which our brain doesn't have to think. It happens instantly. When I showed you eight, it took some time. 12, it took quite a lot of time. It's like an exponential curve, but at certain point you don't have to even think. And actually the number is six. It's proven through research that if I was to show you six, you would have instantly come up with that count also. I give you five as an example. So maximum number of objects you can have in your slide. Maximum is six, okay? Five, okay? And the reason is because when you put too many objects, you are making the audience go, I have to go through all of this. But when you put five or six, think about that. So we have covered three so far. One message. Key points and keep your objects up to, so here I had 10. So what can I do? I have to decide now. I came up with 10 and I need to now trim them. And while doing the trimming, I will focus on the most important ones. And you'll have learned something on evaluation also, right? When you are starting evaluating, you will note down everything. Oh, he did good. His body language is good. He was really having a good message. But when you want to give the feedback, you should not give everything. Because humans have a limit capacity. For evaluation, in fact, I'd say don't give more than three. I don't want to do an evaluation workshop, but you list all your points, the good items that you identified. But don't give more than three. Choose which were the best and focus on those three to the speaker. Also, when you are going to give him areas of improvement, you will list one, two, three, four, five. But don't give more than one or two because humans can improve incrementally. If you give him 10 things to do today, he cannot do all of them, right? He can perhaps focus on your speaking like this, right? So you want him to bring his hands forward. So that would be one. Think of another one. But even if he has many other areas of improvement, it's not a good idea to give all of it because the person will get overloaded. So I have to make a choice. Now I have PowerPoint slide focused on communication, talking about six key points that I will deliver in this presentation. Moving on to number four. Size, a brain always focuses on the biggest thing that is there anyway. So in the screen, for example, what's the biggest thing? That's where our eyes will go. So when I look at this, where does your eye go first? The picture, that's the biggest, right? And then where will you go? Benefits of Toastmaster, right? And perhaps then the logo, because it's quite colorful. We tend to look at colorful things first. And then the actual benefits. But really, what is my interest? It's not the picture. It's not to tell you the title is benefits of Toastmaster. It's not the logo. I just want to focus on the six points. And I should use size to my advantage to bring your attention to that first rather than the rest. How do we do that? So in this case, because I want to focus on the objectives or the benefits, real benefits, I've removed everything. And now your eyes will go to benefits. But that is not my intent. My intent is to show you. And how can I do that? Now, what are you reading? You are reading the benefits. The title is irrelevant. It's not important. So this is how I would construct when I'm doing something and I'm listing my point. I will highlight them. And the title, even if I have to put it, it can be. But it has to be in relation to the size, much smaller than my key points. And the final thing that really drives the whole thing together is what we call contrast. We tend to focus on contrasty things. Look at this image. I'm standing here and there is a presentation behind me, which is brighter. Your eyes will be going there, not at me. Even if you were to take a photo at this point, you notice when there is a bright presentation behind, the face of the person comes out quite dark. And that is because even the cameras tend to focus on bright objects. And our eyes also tend to focus on bright objects. How can I solve this? There you go. So now, the same points are there. But now, if you take a photo of me or if you are looking at me, your eyes are focused on me, the presentation, not the visual aids. But I can go one step further. Because there are five points, and I want to talk about one at a time, I don't want you reading all of them. I want you to read them as I speak. I want you to follow along with me. And I can use contrast for that also. Like this. The same content. But what are you reading now? Pro-productivity. When I am ready, I will say, yeah, client relationship. Let's talk about boosted employee job satisfaction. Let's talk about increased innovation. I am making you follow your eyes where I want them to go. That's how you can use contrast. Even if you had images, so you can use contrast and then focus on each item in that presentation. Let's have a small quiz. The first quiz, question. How many messages per slide one? What should we avoid sentences? Great. What's the maximum number of objects we can have? Six. How can we attenuate the attention by using size? And finally, draw the attention of the audience using contrast. If you follow this method of presentation, then I can assure you PowerPoint is not a presentation. It's a visual aid. And you are the presenter. Over to you.