The POWER of Storytelling in Captivating Audiences (Part 3)

The Power of Storytelling in Public Speaking: Enhance Your Presentation Skills

In Part 2, we discussed the significance of employing pathos, or an emotional connection with your audience, in public speaking. Audiences’ ability to remember and retain information is greatly influenced by their emotions, which also help them remember and relate to your presentation more deeply. Speeches that lack this emotional component are more likely to be forgotten. We also exhorted that the stories need to be concise and relevant to the crux of your speech message. Now in this final part, we will discuss the usage of visual aids in bolstering your speech impact and how sharing authentic stories that exposes some vulnerabilities may maximize a speaker’s impact!

Enhance Speech Delivery with Visual Aids

Whether presenting in person or online, using a visual assistance is a prevalent challenge in our daily lives. Slides, pictures, or videos are examples of visual aids that can enhance your narrative and visually augment important ideas. Other modes, such as flip charts and prototypes/ props, can be used as visual aids in addition to your traditional PowerPoint slides. Regardless of the range of tools available, your objective as a communicator is always the same: to engage your audience and accomplish your speech’s aim. In the context of a corporate presentation, this is very crucial!

Using slides as a visual aid is one frequent source of discomfort. Even if there are numerous methods (or schools of thought) for organizing the information on your slides, you may still use your visual aids to increase audience engagement. This extends beyond the color, typeface, and slide design! Resist that temptation to fill your slides with content from the start all the way till the end. You have to keep in mind that your audience members have to take in information from the visual aids and the speaker in a presentation setting. If your presentations involve constant drilling of content to download and internalise, you are more likely to lose your audience’s attention.

Imagine this – you wish to get your audience to realize the vast amount of water they have been wasting, but instead of flashing out that piece of statistics in your powerpoint slide, you can try:

Instead of trying to impress with lots of data and statistics strewn all over a slide in a McKinsey Consultancy-styled presentation slide:

image of cluttered presentation slide with lots of infographics

Try this instead:

image of uncluttered slide design with just a swimming pool

Ask your audience members to visualize the gallons of water it takes to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool. Imagine that is how much water a person wastes annually – oh wait, multiple that by 10!

Trust me, the impact is greater than a slide cluttered in cool looking infographics.

Maintain authenticity & Allow Some Vulnerabilities to Shine

A genuine personal story that exposes your own shortcomings, or fears, or inadequacy (i.e. vulnerabilities) can build greater rapport with your audience; if the audience member shares the same vulnerabilities as you, they will connect with you strongly, whilst even for audience members who do not, they appreciate the courage to share those insecurities with them and that garners respect and admiration. Your personal story can serve as a warning/ cautionary tale to your audience, teaching and guiding them to not follow your footsteps (or to follow the solutions that you have taken or the mindset that carried you forward). If your audience doesn’t adopt your suggestion or concept, what will they lose out on? Your vulnerabilities in your story might be used to illustrate the “beautiful world” that they will “miss out” on if they decide to stick with their existing way of thinking or doing things, OR the “spectre” that they will be staring at if they make the same mistakes that you had. Make your vulnerabilities the driving engine behind your audience’s personal growth, and they WILL appreciate your candour and courage!