What NOT to do: don’t turn the lights off! This is a blog written by Michelle Bowden, presentation skills trainer and best-selling author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley). The aim is to help you avoid all the common mistakes people make when presenting in business. Enjoy!
When you’re sitting in a meeting and the presenter is using slides, you know yourself that you will be more inclined to sleep or switch off when the presenter turns the lights off to make it easier for you see their slides.
Don’t turn the lights off in your slide presentations!
Unless of course you’d like them to sleep while you are speaking! When the lights are on and you can look into people’s eyes,
your audience is way more inclined to focus on you and your message.
What should you do instead?
If the audience can’t see your slides with the lights on, don’t turn off the lights! Turn off your slides! Controversial I know!
Seriously, either redesign your slides so people can see them with the lights on, or replace them with a flipchart, whiteboard or some handouts instead.
There is one moment it’s OK to dim the lights. And that’s if you are doing a demo of software or something where you do in fact want people to focus on the slides or screen.
In that case, just have the lights off for the demo and put them back on quickly so you can reconnect with the whites of people’s eyes as quickly as possible.
Happy Presenting!
©2024 MICHELLE BOWDEN is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 1000 times for more than 13,000 people over the past 25 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia.
Michelle Bowden is a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more.
Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and her new book is called How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley).
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