When speaking, whether to a crowded room, in a podcast, or in a one on one situation, engage your listener by using vivid visual information…. I call it, “creating movies in their minds“.

I’m not talking about using arm flailing body language, and I’m not talking about using a box full of props. And boy, I’m certainly not talking about using the same old PowerPoint slides.

What am I talking about? Let me illustrate it to you… read these words carefully.

Goat.

Prince.

Thunderstorm.

Drunken brawl.

What happened when you read those words?

Did an image of the letters that make up the word “goat” appear in your mind? Or did you think of a mental image of a goat, maybe in a green grassy field?

What about “prince”? Did your mind associate that word with the letters P, r, i, n, c, and e, and “display” that in your thoughts like chalk on a blackboard? Or did you see in your mind’s eye an image of a young man draped with robes in a royal hall?

Thunderstorm – dark clouds, flashes of lightening.

Drunken brawl – last Saturday night out on the town and the local thugs duking it out.

We don’t remember groupings of letters, we associate words with images and stories in our minds.

Merely reading collections of notes put together in PowerPoint to the room is NOT increasing your listeners retention with visual information. Its called being boring, lazy and ineffective.

How can you use this information?

For one, throw out the notes written in PowerPoint. Just because some study 10 years ago showed people remember visual information better than auditory does not mean PowerPoint is the answer to your prayers… its not. Its a crutch you’ve depended on for too long, and a crutch that will eventually break and hurt you.

When speaking one to one, or even on stage, remember - people associate your words and ideas with visual images and story. Take advantage of that to make them remember your point, and remember you.

When you’re engaging your audience, here’s my difficult, long hours, hard work solution to help you chase boring, unoriginal, and ineffective slides from your life:

1. When you’re speaking, don’t use your slides to remember what you’re saying. Know your content well, or at the very least, deliver it from notes you’ve made, and deliver it with as much enthusiasm as you can muster. Just because you’re talking tax doesn’t mean you can’t talk a little horror.

2. Use your slides to show a powerful, interesting and throat grabbing “visual backup” to the point you’re making.

For example, are you talking about the economy? Sure, tell them about the percentage drop, but show them the picture of a pile of dollar bills burning. Show them an avalanche, or show them a house of cards falling down. Show them a cake and how much they don’t get to eat now. Anything but a boring graph.

3. Create stories for them to go along with. Use analogy and metaphor to create more easily related ideas and vivid visual imagery.

We’ve all heard analogy & metaphor before. “He cried like a baby”, or “Its like shooting fish in a barrel”. What does this do in our minds? It creates visual imagery and points of reference that we can all relate to.

Here’s a few of my own:

Creating visually interesting stories is like crack for your listeners mind – they can’t get enough.

Keep feeding them information based around statistical data, numbers, and figures they can’t relate to, and your audience will sour quicker than milk in the Australian sun.

Get it? Good!