[MISTAKES SERIES] Self-sabotaging mistakes you're making that stop you from becoming an effective presenter (part 2: the DIY)

Are you making it hard for yourself to become an effective presenter?

If you’re like most academics, researchers, scientists, or other professionals, then yeah, you are, and you don’t even know it.

That’s why I’m working on this series about all those self-sabotaging mistakes you’re unintentionally making. These mistakes will stop you from designing effective presentations, regardless of what slide software you’re using (PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, etc).

In the first post, I talked about how trying to learn by taking “baby steps” in your training makes your life harder (and doesn’t even guarantee you’ll learn how to be an effective presenter.

With that in mind, maybe you started doing some extra research about effective presentation design…which brings me to today’s post.

We need to talk about the second self-sabotaging mistake you’re making right now.

But first, make sure you grab this free download for today’s post because it includes the full version of the activity described in this post.

Mistake #2: Wasting time trying to teach yourself effective presentation skills

This mistake is a doozy. This is the one where we convince ourselves that we should just keep trying to learn presentation skills on our own by watching great presenters, and piecing together what we read online or in books.

Look. I know you’re smart. It’s not about that. So just stick with me for a bit.

How much formal training have you had on:

(A) communicating effectively using slides? I don’t mean a 1-hour webinar, I’m talking graduate-level course here.

vs.

(B) statistical analysis and/or research design?

If you’re like most academics, scientists, or evaluators…then chances are you’ve had almost zero training on presentations and a crap ton of training on stats and/or research design.

Now I want you to think about the fact that you had to take SO MANY grad level (and undergrad) classes on stats and/or research design. What does that really tell you about those topics? What’s the unstated message here?

The unstated message is that hard, difficult topics worthy of training are included in the graduate curriculum, because you need formal training in it.

What, then, does that say about topics that are NOT included in the curriculum?

Especially when that topic is about something that you’ll spend most of your career doing?

… the answer is:

It says … if it’s not in the curriculum, but you’re expected to do a great job at it anyway (all the time), then you should somehow just learn by osmosis (watching others) and/or by learning a few “PowerPoint hacks” or “PowerPoint quick tips” here and there.

I think the reason this happens, and is so common, is because slide apps are really easy to use. It’s pretty easy to pick up PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, or whatever and just start…creating slides.

psst… That’s also the reason so many people think that their presentations are ineffective because of the tool, and that if they just switched to Prezi or Pecha Kucha, or Google Slides that somehow their presentations will “look better.”

That gives us the false idea that communicating both verbally AND visually is easy too.

Written communication is hard enough, and (chances are) you’ve received a ton more training and support (e.g., feedback) for that compared to presentations.

Maybe not, though. Maybe you haven’t received a lot of support for writing well…but that just supports the point I’m making because then you’re probably struggling with that, too! And that’s just written communication — one type of communication.

Presentations are TWO types of communication: verbal AND visual.

And that doesn’t just mean double the struggle (heh). It means triple because of the interplay between both.

I say this all the time to people with one dog who want two of them. Before we adopted our second dog, we thought it’d just be double the work. But it’s not. We forgot about the work involved in dealing with the interaction between the two dogs. It’s more like triple the amount of work.

Yet, we still think slide presentations should be easy and take very little time to create…and even less time to learn.

But effective communication is hard to do, even harder to learn on your own, and you need training and support to do it well.

Can you imagine trying to learn how to conduct statistical analyses without training, without a mentor? Just DIYing it?

If you wanted to learn stats, all by yourself. What would you do? Probably start by searching Amazon for a stats book. Which spits back 147 results to sift through. So now there’s all the time involved with reading book descriptions and reviews, and trying to choose the best book (or books) to buy.

That doesn’t sound fast…

Okay so then you’d probably go to Google and do a search….which spits back 551 MILLION results to sift through.

Cool, cool. This will only take days. weeks, even.

Except not. We both know you’ll only click the first few, on the first page, even though it won’t necessarily be the most up-to-date or helpful resource (because SEO is weird).

So then you might think, “I don’t want to do any of that reading, I’d rather just watch some videos.” So you go to YouTube and see a bunch of results.

But, again, you will have to sort through a bunch of bad videos that don’t help or don’t cover everything you need. Plus, how do you even know what order to go in?

Overwhelmed? Of course you are! That’s why we take courses. Because the instructor has figured out all that stuff for us, ahead of time.

DIY is perfect when you need to supplement your training, or when you want to “add on” after completing training.

But if you’ve never really received that baseline comprehensive training, then DIY isn’t going to help you like you think it will.

If you’re really busy and short on time, DIY is the worst option for you.

If you are busy, which i know you are, and you want to be EFFICIENT with your time, then training is your best bet.

So now you know the second self-sabotaging mistake. There’s one more I want to share, so stay tuned for the last post in this series.

Still not convinced that DIY is a waste of time when learning presentation design?

Grab this FREE worksheet with a bonus activity that walks you through a plan to learn presentation skills using a DIY approach and how long it will take.

That way, you can decide for yourself whether you have that amount of time or not.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in professional development for your presentation skills…I have several options for you!