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This is Kate 48 hours before the midterm presentation.
Kate is happy.
She's at a wedding with her friends about to celebrate with her friends.
Be like Kate.
This was Kate 12 hours before the midterm presentation.
Kate is not happy.
She is suffering from the lingering effects of celebrating with her friends.
This is Kate four hours and one minute before the midterm presentation.
Kate is happy again.
Be like Kate.
Unfortunately this is Kate exactly four hours before the midterm presentation
when she realizes that she has that same midterm presentation in four hours.
Don't be like Kate.
Fortunately for you all, we're going to walk you through what to do
if you find yourself in a similar position as Kate,
which is you have a limited amount of time to prepare for a big presentation.
And to start us off, I'm just going to walk us through what to do in hour one,
four hours left until the presentation.
>> Thank you, Will.
So it's game time and the clock is ticking.
And if you're like most of us, you're probably feeling anxious.
So the first order of business is to make sure
we change your status from being anxious to being in a state of flow.
Now by show of hands, how many people know here what is the flow state of mind?
Awesome, for those who don't know, it is a state of mind
that is fully immersive and helps you focus at the job at your hand.
How do you get from a state of mind?
A lot of people also refer to it as a state of being in the zone.
So today, I'm going to share a technique with you that will allow you to get in
the zone in less than five minutes, and it's called box breathing.
It's a technique that's used by US Marines to go into
a state of focus, feel calm, and activate the critical thinking.
And this is how it works, you basically breathe in,
hold, breathe out, and hold again.
And you do each of these steps four seconds each.
Let's try it together.
Breathe in.
Hold.
Breathe out.
And hold again.
Awesome, so now that you're in this ninja mode,
let me walk you through the three steps of building your presentation.
Number 1, always, always start with your AIM.
And don't just think about your AIM, write it down.
It's going to save you a ton of time in the future.
Number 2, pick your 3 key takeaways.
Research shows that people only retain 20%
of the information that you share with them.
So you want to make sure that you're absolutely clear about your takeaways.
And number 3, create a storyboard to limit the scope of your presentation.
You don't have enough time.
So you want to make sure you don't rely on research, but what you know already.
And number three and most important, when it comes to visuals less is more.
Use the principle of KISS, keep it simple, stupid.
>> [LAUGH] >> In summary, limited content told more
confidently is better than a ton of details that you're not comfortable with.
So with that said, we have three hours left and
I'm going to pass it on to Will to walk you through the content.
>> So we just heard about some initial steps,
you can take to ideate on what you're going to say.
But equally important, is ideating on how you're going to make that content
come alive for the audience, how you're going to make it memorable.
And there's three things I want to encourage you to focus on,
which is a lot of things we've actually learned about in this class.
The first thing is you need to have a hook.
I want to give you two examples.
Suppose I started a presentation by saying, hello, my name is William Faulkner
and I want to tell you about a skydiving experience I once had.
Versus, I was 1,500 feet above sea level.
My first string had failed and
I was falling about 400 feet per second, needing 1,000 feet for the shoot to open.
I mean, I had about two seconds to save my life.
Clearly the second is much more effective at, shall we say,
parachuting the audience into the story.
>> [LAUGH] >> Make sure you have a good hook.
The second is find a good story.
Now I'll admit that it's very hard to ideate stories
when you're in a time pressure situation.
And therefore,
what we have found the best way to have a good story in a time constraint is
actually have a story bank before you actually reach that time constraint.
And I can speak for personal experience,
a good way to have that story bank is to think about the people,
places or things in your life that have created the person you are today.
A great example was applying to Stanford Business School.
We had to think about what matters to us most and why.
And it is from that ideation process that I can pull from my head right now three or
four personal stories to get emotional connection with you,
the audience, regardless of the topic.
I can change the story to meet the topic.
So the second thing that you need to be able to realize is that you need
a story bank that you can pull from at any point in your life
to deliver to an audience on any topic.
The second thing you think about is audience engagement, and
that's really dependent on what kind of audience are you speaking to.
For an intimate class setting like this,
audience engagement could be more than just raising your hand.
It can actually be following up with people.
If Jay raises his hand in response to a question,
I can call on him to actually vocalize and tell me why he raised his hand.
I can even get moving, people moving to one side of the room or the other.
For a bigger audience obviously that's going to be more challenging, and
so maybe you can just relying on things like raising your hand.
So the three things I would focus on in the third hour, creating the hook,
finding a story, and figuring out how you're going to engage your audience.
Now that we have two hours left,
Akhil's going to talk about how you should think about content.
>> Now the good news is that if you've been following diligently along,
you've already avoided the number one pitfall that people make when they're
designing slides under time pressure, and that is getting stuck in design limbo.
We have all been there before, you are working and
reworking your slides over and over again.
You're stuck in your head, trying to figure out exactly what you want to say.
Meanwhile, the minutes are flying by, and you're getting nowhere fast.
The secret to getting out of design limbo is to reverse the process.
Create your content first, design your slides last.
If you do this, you will go from spending 75% of your time designing your
slides to 25% of your time designing your slides.
Now had I not followed this advice,
I probably would have put together a slide like what you see on the left.
Now it's not terrible.
I mean, it even has a pie chart, and we know how much JD loves pie charts.
But the slide on the right is better.
I used a photo slideshow minimalist template to create the slide on the right.
Now you might be thinking it's better because it's more aesthetically
pleasing, it's simpler.
And those things are true, but that's not the reason it's better.
The reason it's better is that while the slide on the right took me ten
minutes to prepare, the slide on the left took me ten seconds to prepare.
And when you're in a time crunch, time is everything.
Now ten seconds is awfully fast.
How did I design a slide in 10 seconds?
The answer is I didn't use PowerPoint.
PowerPoint's not a great software for designing beautiful slides quickly.
Instead I use a tool called Haiku Deck.
And there are other tools as well, like beautiful.ai.
These are online pieces of software that are great for
minimalist templates designed when it comes to slides.
Use one of these templates and you'll save yourself a ton of time in the end.
Okay, we have one hour left.
We're at the final part of our presentation.
Kate's going to walk us through what to do next.
>> [COUGH] Now you have an hour left to do your presentation.
What should you do?
Yes, you got to practice.
Now, we will give you three important tips to help you practice efficiently.
First tip is to practice opening.
Even if you have ten minutes to prepare, you still have time to practice opening.
The reason why I'm stressing the importance of opening is because if
you can practice and perfect the first few minutes of your presentation,
your stress for the presentation will go down significantly.
And the rest of the time will fall into place much more easily.
So now, how to practice opening.
So our tip is to remember first few sentences so
that those come out crisply and confidently.
The second tip is to try to memorize what to say, not how to say it.
It's really important for you to have those anchor points that will keep you on
track throughout the presentation.
More specifically, only memorize key phrases that you want to stick to and
key interaction points with the audience,
such as asking a question at the start of the talk.
The final tip to practice efficiently is to try three rounds of practice
focusing on content, vocal, and visual.
Remember when you practice vocal and
visual part, exaggerate everything.
Talk louder, try hand gesture,
use longer pauses, and try power pose.
>> [LAUGH] >> This will feel very unnatural to you.
But to audience, you will look much more confident.
Now it's presentation time.
In four hours, we entered the right frame of mind.
We picked out our content.
We prepared our slides, and we practiced in record time.
If I had access to these tips earlier,
I would have avoided a lot of stress for my midterm presentation.
And maybe earn a big hug from.
>> [LAUGH] >> So in your individual practicum,
if you find yourself having just a few hours to prepare for
your presentation, we hope that you will incorporate some of our advice.
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