Good afternoon. Welcome to the session on presentation skills. Someone was in here earlier and thought that presentation skills meant how do you present a case to your attending. This is not that seminar, so we're here talking about lecturing and presentation skills. So if you're under that illusion, you're free to take off if you wish. My name's Carl Chan. I'm a professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee and a recovering training director. Our speakers today include, in addition to myself, Dr. Robert Bolin, who is the chief of staff at the Meninger Clinic currently and also vice chair at the Baylor College of Medicine. He was also another recovering training director at Van Brigham in Boston. And he was, for a long time, the associate director at the Brown University. And then Monique Yohannan, MD, is formerly with the behavioral health editor for the Milliman Group. MCG, I guess, is its call now. And is chief health officer at Interface. Interqual. Inter. Interqual. Interqual, OK. And a graduate of both Brown and Harvard. She's actually internal medicine and a Stanford gerontology fellow, but has lectured a great deal on lecturing as well. So with that, we will start out with Dr. Bolin, who will speak to us on PowerPoint and beyond. Hey. So always daunting to talk about lecturing, because now that means I'm supposed to be really good at it. Don't worry. I'm not that good. But that's the whole point, is that if you're amazing at it, then you don't need it. It's for the rest of us and stuff. And how do we get by? And why talk about PowerPoint? Hardly a new technology. It's been around, well, not actually not as long as I've been presenting, but as long as probably a lot of you have been presenting. And I mean, the reason is that even though it's been around for a long time, we get lazy and stuff like that. And we still have to find ways to use it. It's become a bit of a cliche. And we can always do things better, I think, a bit. Number one. Number two, despite the fact that it's been around a long time, I think still some people kind of don't use it properly. And that can hurt them in their presentations. I'm going to fix my slides just a little bit for one sec. This is what you're supposed to do before the presentation. But I need to see what I'm doing here. There we go. And there we go. Later on, I'm going to show hotkeys, which are way better than doing what I just did. OK. Yeah, so disclosures and stuff. I get a, I work for the Menninger Clinic, like Carl said. I also get some funds from ABPN. I get royalties from Walters Kluwer, from the Kaplan and Saddock books, and MCG as well. So OK, so the goal is to increase your expertise, not to wow people with PowerPoint. So this isn't about sort of all the cool things you can do. If anything, really the goal is to get people to listen to you, right? And you're really the main attraction here, or you should be, not the slides. If all they remember when they come out of a talk is, wow, those are really cool slides, then I'd say you've kind of failed, right? I mean, it's really supposed to be about us. So here's what we're going to cover today. I'm going to discuss a little bit about the planning stage, meaning the things that you should do before you even start your presentation and making slides. And I'm going to talk a little bit about slide creation. And then I'll end with a few additional tricks. But I'm not going to get too much of that, because these people are going to talk about stuff I think that's more advanced. So I'm just going to keep it simple. All right, so what should you think about before you even start making PowerPoint stuff? Well, first, I would argue that every one of us should do what we probably don't do, is plan your talk in advance before you ever make a single slide. I know it's like just very tempting these days to just start building slides and put them together. But then you're kind of like, you're engaging yourself in stream of consciousness. And I don't recommend that. You should really think before you even start, what is it you want to say? And here are some of the things you probably should think about. Well, what's the purpose of your talk? What do you want people to come out thinking about when you do that? And what should be the flow? What do you want to make sure you cover? Keep in mind, and this isn't really a talk about presenting. It's about PowerPoint. But people can only take in so much. So what are the most important things that you really want them to take in before they leave? Once you've done that, you can ask the next question. How can visuals support the talk? Remember that originally, the whole point of slides isn't to be the talk. It's to underline what you're saying along the way. And so how can they help you with that? Something you'll hear me say a lot here and that I'll kind of be always emphasizing is I always think it's good to keep things very simple. And keep these things in mind. Once again, let PowerPoint support you, not compete with you. Avoid overly busy, complex things along the way. And really, I would say, keep going through your slides and editing to make sure that you only have the essentials in there. People can't take in lots of extra details. So what do you want them to do? And the usual rule is that each slide should be given to about one point. That's about as much as people can really take per thing. All right, so let's get to the meat of things here. Putting together your slides, let's start with just the basics, backgrounds. It's always a good place to start. It's probably not the first thing we think about, but it's the first thing that the audience sees, pretty much. So here's some advice for choosing appropriate backgrounds. We all know that people, for a while, always relied on the same sort of default PowerPoint backgrounds. How many times have you seen a background like that? We're all sick of it. So I generally don't use the PowerPoint defaults and stuff. Now, I know in the newer versions, they've upgraded it and stuff. But I don't know. I mean, I feel kind of mixed about sort of like default backgrounds. What is that really supposed to be? And what is that supposed to convey to us? And yet, I see that on a lot of slides and stuff. I mean, it's snazzy and nice, but I'm not sure it really helps your point. I'm kind of a simpleton about these things. I just like to keep my backgrounds plain. Most of my talks, I kind of just use a white background. I mean, it's because I don't want them to be spending a lot of time thinking about the background. It shouldn't stand out. It shouldn't be too fancy. If you want color, well then, just think about your setting and stuff. I mean, you want your background to mimic your environment. So it isn't that distracting. That's kind of distracting. So if you're doing something in a dark room, like he just darkened the room here for reasons I don't know, but use unobtrusive colors and stuff. So kind of have that as dark as well so it blends in with your environment, and kind of white if you're in a light room. I, a lot of times, insist on speaking to full lights because, let's face it, projectors these days are good enough to have enough contrast. You don't need to darken a room to see a slide. And it used to be, I won't mention institutions, though you already told people where it was, but as soon as the grand round speaker would get up there, they would darken the entire room. I'm like, well, good, because now I can sleep. And not only that, but now when they darken the room, they don't even have a spotlight. They darken the speaker. So at this point, what we're seeing are narrated slides. What is the point of that? And so if you want to use the background things there, you can sort of choose your own kind of design slides. You've got to do something a little bit nicer. You can have like, you use the design tab up there and they have some kind of pre-programmed formats and stuff, and that might be kind of nice. But, you know, you can sort of choose things on the side to make your own. You can kind of see there where like, if you go over here, you can go to the backgrounds and sort of choose if you want it to be nice and solid, or if you want something to be like a gradient, or if you want it to be a picture or a text. But once again, I would say don't get too fancy. If you want to do one of the automatic things along the top, well, yeah, okay, but, you know, only I think if it really, you feel it makes, it's a good idea. You can also find your own backgrounds online and stuff. But once, you know, I'm not gonna waste a lot of time looking, thinking about backgrounds. I just want them to be simple. What about text? You know, we're gonna keep talking about the fact that you don't want too much text, but you gotta have some. That's what people kind of expect to see. And you need to have some content and stuff, so text can't be ignored. You know, so what are the kind of the rules for text? Well, text should be as big as possible. Default in PowerPoint is 32 points. That's the one I have highlighted there. That's fine, but, you know, if you write too much, it starts to autosize down. It gets kind of hard to see. You can put it in bold if you want to make it bigger, but you have to be mindful of the fact that you want your audience to see it. As to fonts, the default in PowerPoint now is Calibri. That's the top one. Looks a little bit more stylish than Arial, which used to be the default thing on there. They're both sans serif, meaning they don't have those little feet on the font and stuff, which supposedly is a little bit easier for us to read when it's projected, I guess. The middle one, of course, is serif. Once again, your color should be a contrast to theirs, so pick something that stands out. I kind of like, you know, and remember that projectors tend to dull colors, so as I'm looking at this slide, I can see perfectly fine both lines of text. They don't project though as well, and they're kind of hard to see, so just be mindful of that when you're doing it as well. I think it's easy just to stick with easy things like black or blue. Dark blue against a light background are probably the best ways to do it, or white or yellow against dark backgrounds. And don't change the colors too much. That just gets annoying and confusing and things. Only veer from one color to another if there's a good reason, like there's something that you really want to emphasize as you're doing it. As to what you should write, well, no one likes to see a person just up there reading their slides. For example, the slide here lists in detail every point that I'd like to make about this slide and about text, but it's kind of long. It's difficult to read. You're probably reading it, in which case you're not listening to me because you can't do both, so it directs attention away from me, and not that I'm so special, but I am kind of the person presenting. So instead, edit it down to keywords, and then tell them what you're gonna say, and that's enough there for me to kind of remember what the point was and stuff. But it shouldn't really be a transcript of what you're going to say, and it shouldn't replace you as the speaker. You'll notice that PowerPoint always defaults to bullets. Carl, are you gonna say more about bullets? No, you can stay. Okay, right, exactly. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know why bullets became the default thing to do. Usually, they're meant to sort of emphasize like a list that you want to show. I don't know. I always see them all the time, so I mean, I don't feel strongly about this. You want to do bullets, fine. It's just, you know, it's not worth. You know, I have a lot of stupid pet peeves that are just me, so you have to take that in things, but it's easy to like take or remove bullets if you want. It's the same way you would do it in Word. You know, you can just go up to like that little, here, let me just, to the little sort of bullet-y thing up there and stuff and sort of pick what you want, so it's easy if you want to get rid of them, you can. But you do, so you do have control of those things. Finally, please use spell check. You know, it's just embarrassing these days when things are misspelt, and yet I still see it happen. So I'll talk on delirium once where the person kept misspelling delirium through the whole thing, and kind of like if you're an expert in delirium, you should know how it's spelled. I don't know. Numbers, more confusing than text, so be careful about using numbers. Yes, even scientific audiences have trouble with numbers. Avoid decimal points, hard to read, hard to see, and really, you know, just at least for text, I mean, I learned this actually from a much, you know, I mean, I'm not a researcher, from a very good researcher who used to get annoyed when people did that on things, like we don't need to know the exact number. If it's important, you can tell them, so he always rounded things off and stuff to keep it simple, and I thought that was a useful thing, and you know, give extra time, though, if you are gonna show math, if you have to, give people extra time to read it, and never more than, like, 12 to 15, like, individual numbers per slide. If you do use your data, the data should be cited in it. I usually put the citations in smaller because I don't know if people care or not, and sort of to make it clear that that's not my main point and stuff. You know, most of us don't get much thought to how we lay out the slides. We just kind of use the PowerPoint defaults, and most of the time, that's okay. The standard layouts, of course, are like, you know, that title slide that, you know, we all use, the title and content that's probably most of our slides, and such, and there's nothing wrong with that, but, you know, it can get a little boring sometimes. You've probably noticed that newer versions of PowerPoint give you the option of these kind of clever little designs on the side that you can choose as well. They just kind of pop up for no reason I can understand sometimes, and sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes I think they're too fancy and too involved and stuff. The only thing I can't, I mean, so should you use them? You know, I don't know. I mean, you know, if you want to. Sometimes they're too complicated, but they might sort of be a nice way to make things look a little bit more inviting. I do notice when I see shows now that people are sort of using them more often, so just to get across how to do it. So if I wanted to take this, you know, typical list and stuff, I can go from a simple slide like that and say, okay, let's see what the designer wants to suggest for me. Hmm, well, I'd already used a puzzle before, you'll notice, so maybe I can keep the puzzle theme going and I can kind of just click one button and change it to that, and that does look nicer. You notice that the font's kind of smaller. I don't know why it did that, but I couldn't make it bigger if I wanted, but, you know, it's kind of convenient. And the only thing I can't understand about these things is that it's not consistent. Like, let's say I kind of like this late. The next slide I make, it might not give me that choice. I don't know why. So you kind of have to sometimes wrestle with it a little bit. You know, people always seem to want handouts as well. Now, I mean, already you're probably following along the line that if you do some of the things I said, your slides are not gonna make very good handouts, right? Because they don't say that much on them, and often you're relying on visuals and a few words, so people may not know even what you're talking about if they get that. And yet people always insist on handouts. I used to fight them. You can't fight them anymore. We had to give handouts. Like, we had to upload our slides for this and stuff, so people are gonna do that. You know, I mean, the fact that my PowerPoint slides don't make good handouts, I don't apologize for that because, once again, they're not. They're not supposed to be standalone. They're supposed to be backing you up. So if you wanna do it, I mean, if you have to upload them, some people are very rigid about that, do it, and they can do what they will with them. If not, I would always suggest making handouts instead. You can see, for instance, here that this slide has nothing on it. Maybe it's just something where I wanted to do a little talking and didn't want the slide to say anything, but I put some notes on the bottom of what I wanted to remember to say when I got to that. So how do we translate that? Well, you know, people probably already know this, but I'll just say quickly, you can go to the Files tab and choose Export down there, and you can create a handout. And when you look at your handout choices, you'll see that one of them is Notes Next to Slides. So if you wanna give them that, you can do that. I must admit that with me, I don't exactly do that because, you know, sometimes I'm pretty detailed when I write my notes, including, like, if I wanna make a joke or something, and I don't wanna give away everything. So I'll sometimes do a one for Export and one for just me. You know, pause for laughter or something. Anyway, you know, so Word will just open up and then it does the rest for you. The exact fonts and stuff like that aren't always my favorite but I don't care, it's just a handout. One of the problems with this is that each of those slides that it did is now a, it's a picture. It's not the individual slide anymore. So it can take up a lot of space. Some of these files can be quite large. So if you wanna get, sometimes they're hard to send as a result by email, if you're emailing it to someone. You can get around that by just converting it to a PDF, the same way you would convert any Word file to a PDF. Graphics, we all like to put in images, and we should. I mean, graphics have a nice high-impact thing. Our brains take in graphics more quickly than they take in words. You know, I would, I once again, kind of avoid the PowerPoint defaults for these things. They're cheesy, they're better now than those ones were, but still, we see a lot of these kind of things and I don't think they're that interesting and stuff. And why should we when, like, there's just so many images available now that are just easy to grab and stuff. And they're easily available on the web, so not like, and of course, nowadays, you can even make your own and eliminate the artist from the whole thing and stuff. And the benefit of that, like, you're using like AI generation programs and things like that. That's AI generated. And I just said I wanna have like the Mona Lisa making her own portrait on a computer. You know, close, not bad. And so, I mean, what's the beauty of that is that not only is it your own thing, it's not copyrighted. I mean, most of the images in cartoons and stuff that we're gonna talk about here are copyrighted. You know, we took them off of Google and never checked, like, if someone actually owned them or not and stuff. You know, when you're just giving a talk in a closed room to a classroom, no one cares. You know, they're not gonna come after you and stuff. But, you know, since a lot of our stuff is getting put on the web now, that's kind of different. That's a real copyright violation. So, I mean, maybe I'm paranoid, but I worry about those things. Only use stuff, though, graphics in the end, really, if you wanna make a point, I would say. What about cartoons? Yeah, I mean, we all like cartoons. We all think that makes our, spices up our stuff. And, you know, they do have their purpose. I mean, you know, they provide a break. They give us sort of a humorous pause. They can illustrate a point sometimes pretty well. Lord knows, I mean, cartoonists love psychiatrists, so it's never hard to find something kind of relevant. I would say, though, that they're, if you're gonna use them, use them sparingly and stuff. You know, first of all, one thing is that they're usually not ours, so you're showing someone else's work and, you know, I mean, maybe it's funny, but I wasn't funny, so why do I wanna share? If you do remember, though, remember that the normal, here's where I'm gonna get a little bit obsessive, but bear with me. The normal caption format is hard for audiences to read, so if you just, like, copy something out of, like, a New Yorker online thing or something like that, chances are they're not gonna read it. Of course, and what are we taught to do when we realize that they can't read it? We're supposed to read it to them, right? And so people usually then read the comic to you, and what's the problem with that? Well, most of us aren't trained comedians who can deliver a punchline really well. I know I'm not. And beyond that, I don't wanna get too much into, like, humor, you know, sort of, like, humor theory, but all the same, something that's meant to be, that's funny when read is not the same thing as funny when spoken. That's getting a little bit obsessive, but all the same, I would argue that a lot of things just aren't funny when they're said out loud. They're meant to be read. So that's a long way of saying that I don't read my cartoons. I just make it, I just read them in a way that people can actually read them. For instance, here, no one can read that, so I just moved it to the top. I mean, I can write and just put it into a big enough font that people can actually see it. Okay, here's even super obsessive. I mean, like, if you're gonna do a cartoon, you might as well do it right. What's the problem with that? Well, there's a reason why the New Yorker puts the caption below the, usually puts it below, not above. Why? Because the humor comes from looking at, our eyes go top to down, and so the humor comes from looking at the cartoon and then reading what it's actually about, and the surprise comes that it's usually not what you expected. Here, I kind of ruined that because you're liable to read the caption first, but of course, PowerPoint lets us fix that easily by just delaying the entrance of the caption so that people have to look at it first, right? You just use the animation function and do something like that. A little obsessive, maybe you shouldn't have spent a lot of time worrying about this, but I figured this one's gonna do it. What about transitions? Well, you see, I grew up in a day where we were so thrilled when PowerPoint came out because up to then, we were using actual physical slides. Does anyone remember that? Thank you. Carl, fess up. You don't. But actual physical slides, so there were no transitions, there was click. So now we could do all these amazing things that's going from one to one, but that was ages ago, and it's just not cool anymore. It's just annoying. So what my advice about doing transitions, and every now and then, there was one person who had a transition that did something really elaborate where everything fell down and everything fell back and it made a noise besides, and it did that for every single slide, and it just drove me absolutely up the wall. So no one's impressed with that. What I would say is take the advice from the movie industry. So modern directors almost always choose to use the same transitions that silent movie directors did, including the direct cuts, so just going from one thing to another, the fade, which is really a crossfade where you're kind of dissolving from one picture to another. It's a little smoother, it gives it a more soft, relaxed feeling than a hard cut, and the white, going from one picture across to another, which kind of shows a transition or sort of a new thought or a progression and stuff. I mean, pretty much every slide that you use should use one of those, probably most of them just a direct cut, and really, any other sort of thing you have like that, just chuck it, they're just not cool anymore. Same thing with animations. It's fun to show animations, but only use them, I would say, if they have a point. I don't know what the point is of this, besides I like floating, turning brains. And of course, I can't even ever think of a good reason, hardly ever, to animate text. it's just really annoying. I'm sure, I'm sure there are. If you really reason, I mean, you might want to fade in different texts if you don't, if you want to kind of make one point at a time, that's fine, but don't use fancy things and stuff. Okay, I'm getting to my last point here, which is just, those are the kind of things that are important to me, so I've shared them to you. So if you want to zone out, now's the time. This is just some other tricks that are kind of fun to know that might be useful to you, but, you know, they're not on the same level. So here's that. So I'm going to, you know, these are just other kind of things. Get used to hotkeys when you're presenting. They're just kind of useful. So think about it when you see people starting PowerPoint presentations. What's the first thing they do? They start hunting for that tiny little icon on the bottom of the PowerPoint screen to hit that. I don't know about you, but when I present, I'm nervous, and my ability to hit targets gets a lot worse, and my ability to use a mouse gets a lot worse than it is when I'm just sitting quietly at a thing, and it's really hard to do. And sometimes they hit the wrong thing and go in the wrong direction and stuff. So F5 will start your show. If you already got into it, so how many times have you seen where someone will, like, be into a show, for some reason they'll get out of it to show something else, and then they'll go back in, and what happens? They end up hitting that thing and, like, ending up back in the beginning again, and you have to watch the whole thing. So F5 will bring you on the slide that you're currently looking at. B blanks your screen to black, and then you hit it again to come back. White blanks your screen to white. You might want to do this sometimes because, like, look what happened. I did that, and you all looked at me, like, what's he going to do now? So if sometimes you want to make a point, that's what you can do. You can do word art, too, and stuff, which is kind of a fun time. I mean, I don't have a strong feeling about text. You can use, like, Calibri at the default and stuff like that, but sometimes word art is good to kind of, like, you know, which is easy to get to there. It's a choice. You can easily take any text you have and then use the little word art thing here to pick some other thing if you want to do something else. That's fine. I would only use it at one slide or two, though, to make a particular point. I would probably do it the whole time. You can draw on the screen using Control-P. I'm not very good at drawing at this point, but you can see I can kind of, like, make it go like that if I really wanted to make a point. Not very good, but good enough. I didn't put on here, but I've already been doing it, but you can hit Control-L, and that gives you a little laser pointer along the way if you don't have one. If you want to be able to point at things, that can be useful as well, and to get out of those things, just hit it again. You can get the same thing on your presentation screen in the drop-down menu, but I could never do that. It takes too much dexterity. You know, I mean, like I said, it's right there. You can get the whole thing there, but I just prefer hotkeys. They're easier to hit. Okay, so I already went on a whole rant about transitions and not using fancy ones. You may have noticed there's one fancy transition I do kind of use, so I'll own up to it, and that's the morphing one. It's the kind of thing I was doing when I was going from that to that. I actually think that's kind of useful because it moves somebody beyond from the sort of like thought of just slide, slide, slide. It makes it look like you have a continuity of things where it's kind of moving from one thing to another using the same stuff but emphasizing different points. I just kind of like that. I probably like it because I used to have a PowerPoint plug-in that did that for me, and I used to use it a lot, and of course that was 20 years ago. But then PowerPoint bought the company because they were taking too much business from them, and they killed them, and then they created a new version of PowerPoint where the plug-in didn't work anymore. So I've been waiting for years, and finally it came in the newest version of PowerPoint, so I use it. So you can imagine, why would you do that? Well, let's say, I mean, actually I think don't ever do anything unless it makes a point. If it's helping you make your point, don't just do it because it's cool, even though it's tempting. But there are times when you want to say, there's a long list of things I want to talk about when I'm talking about depression. And let's say I've gotten to the part now where I want to talk about sleep, say, and sort of emphasize that. Well, what would I do? I duplicate the slide, so you just go to the duplicate function and make the same slide again, and now I have an identical second slide. Okay, so now I want to emphasize that I'm now going to talk about sleep, so I'm going to make the sleep one bigger so that you can see that that's what I'm talking about now. But I want to get the rest of them because I want to kind of see where we are in the talk so you kind of know and stuff. And let's say I decide that's not good enough. Let's say I want a visual, so I'm going to add a visual to that too. Now, up to that, to be honest, most of that you could still do just with the regular transitions. You probably don't need to more or less accomplish that. But let's say you want to change the layout a little bit to really emphasize your point and have people look at the picture first before they look at the words, and then move it over the other way. So what you have now is you have two duplicate slides, but you changed one slide. And, oh, and I want to change the color too because I really want people to know what I'm talking about. So what you can do there is you can just hit the morph button on top on the second slide. I always get that wrong, but you make a few mistakes and you'll catch it. You put it on the second slide and it knows to look for what was on the first slide so it ends up looking like the second slide. If you change it too dramatically, it doesn't work. But since I kept all more or less the same elements and added a couple things, it can figure that out. So now I can go from that to like that. Ooh, very fancy. And then let's say I want to move it one more time and stuff. I mean, I don't know, like I said, don't overdo it, but sometimes it kind of, like I said, I think it helps me in my organization. I used to spend a lot of time, I'm getting near the end here, I used to spend a lot of time talking about videos. There's not much point anymore. It's easy to put videos in slides. Does anyone still find that difficult? Okay, I'll say a few words about it. So it's, I mean, it used to be like you really had to go into the workings of PowerPoint to make it work. You had to worry about format of the video. Things didn't always agree with each other. They've kind of gotten around all the things. Things are pretty universal now and stuff. You can see here that there's actually just a little video function and then you get choices of what you want to do. Do you want to go a video on your own device? Do you want to do stock videos? The answer to that is no. Or do you want to do like online videos and actually try to grab something online? And so that actually gives you some choices now. And once you, and so let me give you an example of that. So let's say you pick online. Well, then you're taken to a pop-up that actually lets you put in a web address. Like, say, a YouTube address if you want to put on an online video. Why would you ever do that? Well, here's one reason. I used to do the intro to psych class that probably a lot of you have done and stuff and it's always lots of fun. I used to like to show a lot of patient videos and stuff. Okay, that's fine. I got patient's permission and they let me put their videos on there and they were actually happy to do it because they felt they were giving back. But then all of a sudden, the medical school starts putting all this stuff online and insisting that the exact same slides I use are going to be put online. Well, you know, I can promise my patients that I'm not going to misuse their videos and stuff. But once everything's online, who knows what's going to happen to it. People can make TikToks out of it and put it to music and things like that. I don't know. I don't think it'll happen, but I can't promise. So I'm just not comfortable with that anymore. I may show them individually in my classes. I'm still not going to share them. So, you know, I go to YouTube. There's an incredible number of patient videos on YouTube where people put them on. Really out of the goodness of their heart. They want people to understand what it's like to live with mental illness. And some of them show symptoms pretty well and stuff. And I kind of get around the idea of are they agreeing for this to be shown online because they've already done it. So to me, that's presumed consent. You can argue that ethical point, but most people do it. I see things like, look at my crazy uncle. Look at him. Doesn't he look so crazy? I don't use those. But when patients... But I have a video I use a lot of. It's schizophrenics saying, hello. He's obviously in remission. I'm Gerald, and I want to let you know what it's like to have schizophrenia. And he describes it and stuff, and it's very poignant, actually. So that would be an example here of someone being interviewed and stuff. I'm not going to show the video because we all know what videos look like, but you get the idea. You just put it in. You choose it. You put it there, and you click on it, and it'll go to the YouTube thing and show it as if it's part of your slide. What's the one problem with that? You're dependent on the internet connection actually working, and you're dependent on wherever you're presenting that they're not going to have some kind of firewall with, say, YouTube or something like that, which some places actually do. I can't live like that. So instead, I download the slides. I mean, the videos. I used to use programs that would download YouTube, and they still exist. But the problem is they're of questionable legality, and a lot of them have been kind of... they get hijacked a lot. So one that seemed legit before, I go to it now, and it doesn't look legit anymore, and it seems to be downloading viruses and things or pop-up things I didn't want on my computer. So I don't feel good about those anymore. So we've gotten to the technology well enough now to just use your own screen capture programs. So I just screen capture the movie and just use those. And to me, you cannot tell the difference between that and the original video, more or less. I happen to use Snagit, but there's a lot of good ones out there. I'm not recommending any particular one or not. Is that legal? Yeah, it is actually legal. It's just a violation of the YouTube agreement, but that's between you and them and stuff. I actually wrote YouTube one time, naively, and asked them, is it okay if I use your videos to show patients like that? They don't care about that at all. All they care about is that I'm not making money off of them. And I'm never making money off of them. Okay, just a couple other really quick things, and I'm going to get out of here. If you do use videos, here's my advice. No matter how beautiful you think your video is, when you're watching it at home, it happens quicker than when you're watching it in front of an audience. Things just seem to extend and stuff. And a one-minute, a five-minute video that at home, I think, illustrates the point seems to go on forever there. And I'm watching it thinking, yeah, I made the point already. I made the point already. I wanted to show that symptom. We've seen the symptom. And it goes on. So keep them shorter than you think you need to. You know, it's less of a problem now, but I generally, if I'm using a lot of videos, I want to use my own equipment, because I know it works on my equipment. And I have seen it happen at talks, either mine or others, where they say, don't worry, it'll be fine. And it's not. So just be warned. If you do, if I hear, if they insist on you using their stupid computer, fine. Make sure you go come in early and check it and make sure that it works. And you know what? Every now and then it's happened where it just doesn't work, and it's not the end of the day. Okay. I'm going to quickly say a couple things about Zoom, since we, a lot of times, our presentations now are on Zoom. And we're, you know, we're only getting back to live presentations still sometimes. You know, we've all seen good and bad Zoom presentations, plenty of bad ones I've seen. But, you know, there are some good things about presenting in Zoom. For instance, they satisfy my natural laziness. So you can imagine that if you did everything else I've said in this presentation, you really need to know your slides well, right? Because you can't just sit there and read them, like some people do. You've got to know what they're supposed to say, which means you kind of have to memorize them, or at least know them well enough that you recognize them when you see them, and that takes work. So I got really lazy during the pandemic, because on Zoom, what can you do instead? Well, obviously, in front of an audience, you would never sit there and read your notes, because that's boring. But you can kind of do that on Zoom, and if you're good at it, no one will ever know. So let's say you're doing a Zoom presentation. Assuming you have two screens going, which most of us have double screens and stuff, well, you know, you can have one monitor with your presentation screen of, like, your working screen, which includes the slides, what the next slide's going to be, and your notes along the way. And then the other screen will be your actual presentation, and the trick is, I make sure that the presentation one is on the screen that I'm not looking at, but that's the screen that I'm sharing, and then I'm looking, I'm putting my working screen on top of the Zoom screen, and I'm looking at that, and if you're good at it, you can kind of make it look like you're looking at the audience, when you're really looking at your notes, more or less. And so, you know, it takes practice. Don't just do that out of the box. It takes a little practice. You still have to be a little familiar with what you're going to say, but it does kind of work, so I got real lazy and stuff, and I'm only getting used to not doing that anymore. Just remember to do your screen shares properly, though, to make sure you're looking at the right thing. I'm sure you've seen presentations where you're seeing people's working screen instead of their actual presentation screen. Just make sure you get it right. And for me, I mean, my eyes aren't that good, so you can change the size of your notes using those functions down there. Here's the end, and who hasn't seen this, right? This seems to be how most presentations end. Once again, this is just my obsessiveness. It's not that big a deal, but, you know, I don't want PowerPoint to tell me when I'm done. I'll tell it when I'm done. It's like I kind of forgot that there was an ending, and I just kind of fell off the edge of the presentation and stuff. So, I would suggest that you should control your ending better and put in a slide or two to let you know that you're ending, so you can kind of stop there. Some people like to have obvious end slides, like something that tells you that this must be the last slide. Or, you know, you can have a question slide or something like that in there, just to kind of remind, so then you get to the question part, and you can kind of know that you're supposed to stop for questions. If I do that, by the way, the other thing I do is I always duplicate my slide, more or less, just so I don't accidentally run off and get that other annoying end screen. And that's it. Thank you very much. Applause Applause Dr. Gail Hannon. Hi, everybody. Thanks so much for having me, Carl, and I'm so glad everybody came today. So, today I'm going to be talking about lecture methods and a few different presentation styles, so ways of delivering lectures that I have found to be useful, whether you use them whole cloth or just in part. A little bit of housekeeping to begin with. In terms of disclosures, I don't have any. I used to work for MCG. I wrote behavioral health guidelines, and then I was the chief medical officer at Interqual and Change Healthcare. When they were acquired by Optum last year, I left, and so I am retired now. So I have a few goals for my presentation today. The first is that you would learn about a few different presentation styles. Hopefully they're going to be new to at least a few of you, but if you're familiar with them, then this can serve as a refresher. Second, I'd like you to think about your own presentation styles, and are there things that you want to enhance in your presenting? And finally, that when you leave the presentation, you might consider incorporating some new techniques into your own presentations. So today I'm going to be covering three different presentation styles. Kawasaki, Takahashi, and Lessig. And they're vastly different styles, but what they have in common, fundamentally they are ways of telling a story, and that I hope more than anything is what you can take away from what I'm going to be talking about today. When you think about taking your presentations to the next level, what you're working toward is to find the story in the data that you're presenting. So again, the structures I'm going to be presenting today are Kawasaki, Takahashi, and Lessig. What they will do, and again they're really different styles, they help to give you a structure for the story of your content. And they can really, I think, help to make them more compelling for an audience. So let me start off with Takahashi. This is the first one I'm going to be going through, the one I'm going to be spending the most time on. And I said Takahashi, and it's Kawasaki right in front of me. Kawasaki is basically 10, 20, 30. So it comes from Guy Kawasaki, who's a venture capitalist here in Silicon Valley. And this is how he used to put pitch decks together. So you're trying to get people to give your company money. So you have 10 slides, and why does he say 10 slides? Because it's like nobody can take in more than 10 ideas. So he also says, if you can't say what you need to say in 10 slides, you don't know what you're talking about. Now, I'm going to finish with another presentation style that's hundreds of slides. So due respect to Guy Kawasaki, there are lots of different ways to give a great talk. But I do think that there's merit in that as a concept. 20 minutes is when you are allotted an hour. And more than I would say, pretty much anything is, and I'm guilty of this, you get given your time. They say, you have 50 minutes to talk. And you put your talk together, and maybe you put a 45-minute talk together. Ideally, you're not just handing out your deck to people, right? You want to be able to have an engagement, especially you've come to a meeting. So if you're allotted an hour, I would encourage you to aim for 20 minutes of it. A third of it tops half of it in slides. If you let people out early, nobody will ever be mad at you. So 20 minutes gives you time for tech glitches. It gives you time if people show up late. It gives you time that if things go brilliantly, that you can have a discussion section. Those are the parts when I think back on the talks, to me, that have been most memorable in my life. It's when I'm engaged with an audience afterwards. So the 30-point font, and really going back to what Bob was saying, 30-point font is about the smallest that people can read. So you can look at it one of two ways. If it's smaller than 30, they can't read it. But what if they can? Because if people can read, I will tell you, I think I can multitask, but I can't. Nobody can. So if you have slides that people can read, you have made your audience deaf. Because if people are reading, they are not listening. So 30-point font, it's going to limit what you can put onto a screen, but it's also really going to discourage people from spending a ton of time reading. So when you go through a Takahashi deck, you start off with the introduction. And so I would say, I would encourage you to do what he says and start with your organization's mission. So there are a couple of things. You've been introduced, and one of the ways to do this, it's really straightforward, and there are a couple of reasons you start. It's sort of a soft way to start. So you start with a mission statement. So I knew that Dr. Bullen would be here, and so I said, okay, let me look up the mission statement for the Menninger Clinic, and it's a great one. So to create a healthy world by excelling in the art and science of mental health care. So why do you start with a mission statement? Well, your introduction really does a couple of things. First of all, it gives a framing for you. It sort of sets a tone, and it sets the framing for the story you're going to tell, but it also buys you time. It's really rare that everybody you want to be there at the beginning. So when you start with something soft, like a mission statement as part of your introduction, you're making sure that the people who you really want to hear your key messages are sitting in their seats and everything is settled in. Your second statement, your second slide's your problem statement. So it talks about your problem in a general way, and ultimately as you go through any of your talks, what I would encourage you to think about is why should I care about this? Because your audience is going to be asking themselves that. So in your problem statement, you're thinking about is this problem common? Is it a problem we don't have a solution for? Is it a problem we'd like to solve? You might see numbers in this. Those are throwaway numbers. Not real numbers. So you might say 90% of people with treatment-resistant depression don't respond if they have traumatic events in childhood or something like that. These are throwaway numbers. They're meant to convey the scope of the problem. They are not meant to be the specifics of your research. In Kawasaki, and I'll get to it towards the end, basically there's one slide with hard data. Most of it is sort of all this fluff around it because, again, people can only digest so much. Your third slide is the heart of your presentation. Really, again, you've given yourself a few minutes into it and this is where you start to get specific. So if you're doing a VC presentation, this is your value proposition. It's what you have to offer in exchange for their money. In an academic talk, this is really how you're going to solve the problem that you have set aside. What I would encourage you is aim for one sentence. If you absolutely have to, two sentences maybe, but you're really aiming to be very succinct. In your fourth slide, that's your magic. That's your secret sauce. Ultimately, anybody who comes to your talk, these are going to be people who know a lot of the field. Every once in a while you get somebody who knows nothing about it, but invariably there are people in the audience who are like why is this person giving the talk? I should be the person giving the talk. Your secret sauce, your magic, why are you the person doing it? I think that becomes really important because you're selling yourself as much as you're selling the slide deck. Otherwise we just mail the slide deck out to people in advance. Since you talked about secret sauce, you need to then ground that in something. What I would say, it's a business model if you're talking business, and I worked in tech for a long time which is I guess part of why this field is appealing to me. You also want to really think about methods. Say you're solving a problem in a really novel way, or you have really unique results or something like that, you need to let people buy in. If you have ground shattering results that you have created with your study, you have to give people something to buy in. Your methods really speak to that. Then the next slide is your practice changing, like why should I care about this, and you're really trying to get across how does this affect the individual patients that I'm caring for, how does this affect my hospital, how is this going to change medical practice in general. This slide, the competing theories is one I see as probably among the more useful things to take away from Kawasaki. Now again, when you're thinking about a competitor analysis, and that's what this would be called in a VC deck, there are going to be people in your audience who know the topic. Again, smart people are going to come to your topic, they know your topic, and they're going to be, well yeah, but what about this, and what about that. So you should know the competing theories for what it is you're presenting about. I wouldn't advise presenting all the competing theories during your lecture, but if you present a couple of them, it does a couple of things. So first of all, it lets the audience know that you thought about other ways of looking at this, but it also then tees up the idea of discussion, because if you bring up a couple of competing theories, then they're in this discussion section, you will probably have somebody who will say, but you didn't mention this other thing, so hold out on the big one, because people will know, and then that will tee up, because invariably, if you can get people talking at the end, that, I mean, this is why we come to a meeting, not to be sitting at our computers, we've done that for years now. This next one, people in pictures, so this is the place where, if you are in a company, you would have, this is my chief medical officer, this is my chief financial officer, and all of this, even if you don't have, so if you have institutional colleagues who are famous and you're junior faculty, you put a picture up of the chair who worked on this with you, you're trying to bring a gravitas to yourself by showing the pictures of the other people, I would say if you're not having this, have somewhere that you consider in your presentation where you have pictures of the famous people you're talking about, and I do think that there is something to grounding your work in the idea that this is not just facts and figures, but real people do this kind of work, and I think there's something very humanizing in that. So we get to the ninth of the ten slides in the Kawasaki deck, it is the only slide with facts and figures, that's it. So when you think about that ninth slide, you really want to be selective in the numbers you share, much like the competing theories, when you present some numbers, you have other ones, you know your stuff, you can talk about that in your discussion section. So try to have numbers that are in service of the story that you are telling. There's always going to be more, this is your area of expertise, you're always going to be able to say more. If you can present the numbers in a graphic form, all the better. But again, think about the story specifically that you want to tell, this is where it can be difficult, and much to the idea of a video clip, it goes on really long, and you have to be disciplined about cutting it, and you will get this with practice. But keeping your metrics down to one slide, and even if you do a different kind of talk, and you have metrics on more than one, consider condensing down the number of slides with hard data. You can give people your handouts with lots of facts and figures, and you can even tell them that, and you can say, these are our key results, I'm going to send the rest in my handout. So sometimes that calms people down about it, because they don't want to think that it's too squishy. And then your final slide is, how did things work out before, what were your successes, and what does the future look like? And again, it's sort of this recap. So the things I like about Kawasaki, whether you do 10 slides or you make it 20 slides, it's a very clear-cut structure, and I think it lends itself to a whole cloth, but I also think it lends itself well to adaptation. It works really well for a live presentation, but in particular, this is a method that works well for a webinar. It's just structurally something that is not technology-dependent, and it is something that is a pretty straightforward way. To Dr. Boland's point, if you're going to do this, you should think about perhaps having two decks, a handout deck, and then, because the Kawasaki method just is not going to have a lot of slides. Now I'm going to talk for a few minutes about the Takahashi method. So Masayoshi Takahashi was a programmer in Japan, he was asked to give a talk, he didn't have PowerPoint. I remember, when I started doing talks, we didn't have PowerPoint then, and so he came up with this idea to use a single ideogram. So huge font, white slides, and black font. So you use only one or, at tops, two or three ideograms per slide. So traditionally, if you look this up, it'll get taught that there are no images, and this is where I think, consider that an ideographic language is not the same thing as presenting in English. So characters in an ideographic language would have, from my perspective, much greater richness in an imagery that's inherent in the character. And I would argue that's not the case for English, and let me just try to emphasize that point. So if you're doing Takahashi, you have one word per idea. So in English, this reads to me as shouting. When you use Takahashi, it can be a really effective, really impactful style, but I will tell you, it can be a fatiguing style. So what I would say, classic Takahashi is hundreds of slides. I don't think there's an audience in the world that could have a 20-minute presentation like this, with that many slides. It would just be too much. Let's say you have a couple of points, like a minute or two presentation. Really high impact. It could work, I think, really well in that way, or you have a specific point that you want to make. You can think about Takahashi. If you're going to do it whole cloth, limit it to about five minutes tops. I really don't think Takahashi works in English, if it's much more. But what if you're trying to present in a non-ideographic language, and you like the idea of Takahashi, hundreds of slides, but you want to have more? The Lessig method is a style that can be really effective, and this is the last one I'm going to go through. In contrast to Kawasaki, but like Takahashi, lots of slides in 20 minutes, and it depends on a rapid-fire, highly synchronized delivery. Ultimately, it is a much easier style to show than to tell, and so now I'm going to play a short video that I think, better than anything, I found this video about 12 years ago, and I still stick with it, because I think it works pretty well. So, I'm going to talk about what is identity, what is identity 2.0, why will it happen, where are we now? So to start off with, what is identity? Well, I think identity is who you are. So who am I? Well, if you don't know Dick, this is me, Dick Clarence Hart, and for a number of people here, they remembered my identity as being at Hip Communications, where I got involved in Pearl, which eventually led to ActiveState, with O'Reilly, but some of you probably don't know that I live in Canada, which is located here, for those of you that don't know, and I live in the province of E.C., which is over here, the city of Vancouver, which looks like this from the sky, courtesy of Google, we have the Olympics coming up, which is causing its own identity crisis, I live in a part of Vancouver called Gastown, which is located right here, is where I live, which is also where our office is, in case you didn't notice, I'm male, this is when I was born, which makes me 42, over 19, over 21, over 25, and under 65. I went to school at... So I think you get the idea. You know, whenever I see this clip, you can imagine like a metronome, just, it is a very, very stylized presentation. A few thoughts about the Lessig Method and that clip. First of all, video clips always are gonna feel long, and so, I would encourage, if you're gonna use any kind of video clip like this, that you practice at home, and then it'll start to feel long to you, and then you practice again, and you keep cutting and cutting, and it will be painful for you. You're gonna think, oh, but this really good thing is here, and you're just gonna have to lose a lot of it with your video clip, but that's okay. The next part is there are parts in the talk where people are laughing. Comedy is high reward, but it's high risk. You have to be honest with yourself, because there is nothing sadder than somebody trying to be funny, and it's not working. So finally, if you don't wanna do a full Lessig talk, it does lend itself to adaptation, and the way he replaced traditional bullets, and this is really the last point I'll make, is a good example. So if you look, he talks about showing a map of Canada, and then he drills down to Google Earth and the image of Vancouver, and then to a more detailed map of Gastown. So in a traditional PowerPoint, think about what that would be. That would be a header, a bullet, a sub-bullet. So that's actually got a name for it, too. That's the Godin method, G-O-D-I-N. So if you wanna substitute sub-bullets, you can do that. Big picture, smaller picture, even more detailed picture, and again, this is one of the ways that you can kind of riff on Lessig. A couple of practical considerations. One, your talk is gonna be too big to email to people. So you can either send a PDF, or you can think of another way that you're gonna share. But for example, if APA asks you for a full deck and not a PDF, you're not gonna be able to upload this talk. It's gonna be a problem. You're gonna need to think of a way around that. Also, afterwards, people will ask for your deck. You're not gonna be able to email it to them. So think about what your alternative is, because people will wanna share if you've done a good job. Also, if your talk is streaming, keep in mind, if you have hundreds of slides, you better pray that your internet works perfectly, because it's gonna glitch. And we have to be prepared for those kinds of glitches. I mean, I assume that people have been in a talk where the internet glitched or something, and we all feel that pain. Like it happens. And so to Dr. Boland's point, if it happens, it does, because you're among friends with this. We've all had it happen. So just to finish up, what I think more than anything with a talk is find a way to tell a story. I do think having some sort of structure is important. Not just for the specific talk you're gonna give, but you can, I think if you start to build a career doing presentations, if you have your own structure, people will start to know this is the way that Monique presents, and they get used to that. You will also make your life easier when you're putting talks together about anything. If you have this is the way I do a riff on Kawasaki, it will be easier for you to put together your presentations. And I just have fun. I mean, it is fun to do a talk, and it shouldn't be painful. If any of you wanna reach out, please feel free to email me. But thank you so much. I so appreciate you inviting me today. How many of you are residents or students? Okay, we got some. I'm on the program committee, and this workshop was supposed to be for residents and students, so the rest of you are pretty young at heart, it seems to me, at this particular point. So my portion of this workshop is on delivery styles, and it sort of flows a little bit from our two previous presenters, in part because we've been doing this workshop, we've done this workshop about 10, 15 years ago, and like comedians, I tend to steal from other people and I don't know what is mine originally anymore than what I've learned from these two folks. And so there's gonna be maybe some overlap in terms of what we're talking about, but sometimes repetition sort of reads learning as well. So I think one of the things when you're making a presentation is that the important point is how will your audience remember what you've said? And that should be the focal point. Not what I'm gonna say, but what are they gonna learn, what are they gonna remember? And so your delivery style may have some impact on this effect. So educational researchers, a long time ago, I'd say maybe about 30, 40 years ago almost at this point, did an experiment which has been called the Dr. Fox effect. And what they did was they prepared in a lecture called Mathematical Game Theory as Applied Physician Education that was completely devoid of information. And they made it an engaging script, comical, high personality, and they hired an actor to deliver it. And so I happened to find actually the clip for this. And it's only a minute, luckily. I'd like to start today by getting into the applicability of game theory in the field of medicine and in the field of teaching. Now, when Morgan Stern started game theory, it was not long before they realized that game theory was primarily concerned with disclosing the optimum strategy, what it really is concentrating on. It's concerned with the logic of conflict, that is, with the theory of strategy, and Now, in this way, interestingly enough, being here at the gambling state of Nevada, the question could be asked, is game theory different from gambler's choice, where there was a conflict of interest between the two parties, out of which one is to emerge victorious and one is to be defeated? application, if you will, of general systems where the entire man, the entire thing is discussed in relation to the ill of that patient, because everything changes. In ping pong, which does not correspond to game theory at all, I have won three games, and game theory doesn't help a hell of a lot there. In chess, there have supposedly been a whole variety of differences. But chess does not come under this category, because there are a whole series of potential changes which can occur in chess. So this talk was given to a group of physicians, and he actually got great reviews. And somebody actually went up to him and said he was acquainted with his writing. So these researchers decided that, well, maybe style isn't everything, so they decided to redo another experiment. And so what they did was to create another series of lectures in which they called the biochemistry of learning. And what they did was they took two sets of lectures. They said one set of lectures was going to be low seduction, meaning the person would deliver it in a monotone, sort of boring expression, and not a lot of expression engagement. And the other would be high seduction, sort of like this guy. It would be joking, engaging, humorous, and such. And so what they did was they had 26 facts, and so they gave a low seduction lecture with 26 facts, and a high seduction lecture with 26 facts, and then another set with 14 facts in each category, and another set with four facts with each category. And then they gave a quiz to the audience after the lecture based on those 26 facts. Well, what they found was what you might expect. People who got more facts generally did a little bit better than people who got fewer facts. However, what they also noted was the group that had in the high seduction group that had only received four facts did about as well as the low seduction group that got 26 facts. So there is something to do with style that can influence what your audience is going to learn from your presentation. And so how many people have watched TED Talks? So these are people that are really working on their presentation skills. I mean, I think I read somewhere that some TED Talks, the speaker has been working on it for about a year ahead of time in rehearsing as well. And they also make sure that it's only 7, 11, I think 15 minutes long because the attention span only goes for about 20 minutes at most. And so if you want to look at good styles of lecturing, TED Talks are wonderful examples of them. So just a few tips in terms of how to pay attention to your style. One is do you have some passion or enthusiasm for what you're talking about? I remember having a faculty give a talk and they'd come up and they'd say, well, I can't cover all this stuff in the chapter, but, and it sort of just sort of turns off the student audience at that particular point. So, you know, try to maintain some enthusiasm for what you're going to be speaking about. And we talked a little bit before, both speakers, about narration. You know, the human brain does not memorize lists very well. But it seems to recall stories better. And so if you have a story to tell, it can actually convey the information a little bit stronger. And if you study memory experts, for example, if they go around the room and remember everybody's name, what they do is actually they look at a person and they invent a story with the name and the person's face. You know, there's Alice. She's wearing a bun. There's a bunny. That's like a, that's bunny. Well, this is Alice in Wonderland going around the rabbit hole. And then they remember Alice that way. So remembering a story in some way helps with remembering just what you're trying to remember. Also thinking of a presentation, a talk as a presentation, as theater, in fact. You know, there's a concept of stage presence. Do you know where you are in the stage and in the audience? And so if you don't have just a single microphone sitting in front but you have like a lavalier microphone, it's okay to get away from the podium and circulate among your audience to try and engage them a little bit in terms of what you're talking about. Eye contact is one that you don't want to seem like you have nystagmus and you're sort of going back and forth. The suggestion is, you know, talk about one thing to one person, get that idea across, and then you shift your idea to the next person and finish that thought so that you're sort of trying to engage the whole audience. Projection is one, too, is that part of it is getting in the room and seeing whether or not you have a microphone and whether the microphone is working and whether if you don't have a microphone, can the person in the back of the room hear what you're trying to say. And so you want to make sure that you're heard in terms of what you're trying to get across. Modulation, it's interesting. I had, when I was in college, I had some classmates that were in journalism and there was a course that they took on news journalism where they had to learn about modulating their voice. I mean, you may have seen some ads where an athlete is endorsing a product. I want you to buy this product, this widget, because it is really good for you and they put the emphasis on the wrong syllable as opposed to, say, the television evangelists who say, let me hear you say yeah. Can you say yeah? There's an inflection and there's a tone in their voice that sort of captures the audience a little bit as well. So that's part of that high seduction technique that that study showed in the beginning. There are also vocalized pauses, and this is something that I have to purposely be aware of because I slip into it all the time, is whether I am going to say the right thing and the odds that sort of get in the way of the presentation. This used to be the FedEx Fast Talker commercial, and you also see this on radio and television at the end, the disclaimer that takes place that individuals may vary and such, and they sort of talk very rapidly. Most of our conversations are about 150 words per minute, and so that's sort of the pace that you would like to give your presentation. Going too slow is not too good either, and going too fast people can't follow as well. Anxiety is something that is one of the reasons for fast talking. One of my faculty, when I was giving the lecture to the medical students, the evaluation was the lecture, the professor talks too fast. And so I met with the professor and he said, well, you know, I get so anxious to get in front of the room, I just naturally start talking faster and faster and faster. And so take a deep breath. Sometimes breathing, controlling your breathing can help in terms of slowing down your pace. If you rehearse and you videotape your presentation, maybe you can observe how quickly you're talking and how quickly you may force yourself to slow down a little bit. You don't want to be too anxious because then you can get, that has problems as well, but there always is sort of an optimal level of anxiety in presenting that can help you be a little bit more aware. I know I had some friends that were part of the symphony orchestra in Milwaukee, and they're always kind of anxious, and they wanted to, they felt that it gave them a little bit of an edge when they're performing. So it's not altogether bad, it's just that you don't want it to be overwhelming. Transitions. When you read a journal article, you get the introduction, you get the methods, you get the results, you get the discussion. And so there are transitions. When you're giving an oral presentation, you can insert some oral transitions. Maybe the adage, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. So you introduce it, you give the presentation, you summarize it. And so you can use those words as well. When I talk to medical students, one transition that really gets their attention is, now this subject is going to be on the exam. Boom, the attention rises. And I have a pet peeve, and that is, if you say, and in conclusion, really mean it. Because I've been in lectures where it's droned on for another 25, 30 minutes, and so make sure you're accurate in your transitions. Bob mentioned this before. The title I give for it is slide text association. You may not have a slide that covers what you're trying to cover, and so your audience is reading that slide and you're talking about something else, and so when you hit the, as you said, the B button, it turns black, and you hit it again, then you come back to when you're ready to talk, or the W button as well. Anybody know where this is? Carnegie Hall. And how do you get there? Practice, practice, practice. And so one of the things as well I think that Bob sort of touched upon is it's important to know what you're talking about because sometimes something fails. And I think just yesterday at one of the workshops, two days ago, the computer did something and all of a sudden I didn't have that cube anymore. So hopefully you know your material well enough so that if disaster strikes you can at least continue on with what you're trying to say, at least finish up in some fashion. And again sort of reiterate about handouts. How many people in here actually look at handouts after a lecture? See that's about right. It's about 5% in every audience that I've surveyed will actually look at the slides, the handout slides. And so and yet we're required to provide them. And so and as we've been talking about before, these types of slides don't have a lot of information written on them. And so some people suggest that instead of slides handout you have a text that you've written out. If you have a book chapter or a paper that you've written that might be a more appropriate handout than actually slides. And so it's something to think about. And Bob was talking about the fact that copyright for images. We talk about using visual images. A picture is worth a thousand words and so picture images can convey a lot of things. Yet they're copyrighted and the fair use doctrine probably won't get you any trouble when you're lecturing to your students and residents and such. But once it goes on the internet then you could get into some trouble. So there is this. How many people recognize this? Okay so if you haven't recognized it, it's a Creative Commons copyright. There are material out there that's under Creative Commons which means that it's in fair use. If you cite who did it, you can use that picture. You can do that. And one of the Flickr is a photo collection thing. They have a Creative Commons site. And this I checked probably a few years ago. At that time there was like 87 million pictures that are on there. And you can sort of ask for certain topics and you can search and maybe find a picture that you want to use. There are stock photo sites where if you want to pay for it. I'm sort of cheap so I don't. I use some of my own photographs. But like I said, if you need to use a picture to illustrate your point, there are other sources and legal places to get them that you don't have to worry about it. Because if you go to Grand Rounds sometimes they're starting to put their stuff on the internet as well. And so even unintentionally it's a problem. I don't know if you guys have a suggestion but I like this book, Gary Reynolds' Presentation Zen. He covers a lot of what we've sort of talked about today. And so it's a good source and a good reference book in your library if you are interested in developing your lecturing careers. There's the old Boy Scout motto and that is be prepared. And so some of the tips I leave is get there early wherever you're going to speak. Sometimes there's not a parking space or the parking pavilion is a block and a half away and it's going to take some time for you to get there. There's also test the equipment. We did this workshop, not this workshop, another workshop on Wednesday and Friday, Saturday. There was all sorts of glitches going on with the computers and trying to figure out how to work and run them. And so you need to give yourself some time. And also some time to do a sound check too. To know whether or not there is a microphone or if there isn't, how loudly do you have to speak in order to project your voice at the back of the room. And also anything that can go wrong oftentimes will go wrong. Years ago, literally before the age of notebook computers, I was working on a technology teaching workshop with some colleagues who had brought a desktop computer, a monitor, and all this equipment that we were going to demonstrate teaching with technology. And we set up and we started to introduce ourselves and we blew a fuse. And so you want to have some backup. Think about having some backup too. When you go to a presentation, you may want to use your own computer because you've got your movies or videos on there, whatever reason. But sometimes they say, well, we want to put it on our computer. And so you need to make sure not only you have it on your computer, but maybe have it on a thumb drive so that you have some backup as well. So instead of in conclusion, I'd like Steve Jobe's one more thing. A gadget bag, a gadget go bag. As you begin to develop your lecturing careers or continue on with your careers, think about having some equipment that you take with you because sometimes when you get to a site, it's not there. You want to use a pointer and they don't have a pointer. If there's some problem with the computer, you have a jump drive that has your presentation with you that you can put onto another computer. If you're a Mac person, depending on the year, they don't have the right dongle for your Mac. So carry your own dongles. If you need power, you thought you had enough power to do an hour-long presentation and suddenly you're at 30%. Make sure you've got your power thing. And carry batteries along with you as well in terms of if you have certain devices that need the batteries. But those are some things to sort of think about and you'll develop your own go bag as you do your lectures and you see what you need in certain situations. But be prepared to, it's a good thing to have some extra equipment on hand. So with that, that concludes sort of the formal presentation. We actually have about 15 minutes for some discussion and experiences, share some experiences. I wonder if questions, whatever. Advice? Advice, yeah. I mean, it's a learning process. It's an ongoing process too. It's not like we have all the answers here, but we're sort of sharing some of our experience. I was asked to give a Zoom seminar during the lockdown without slides. I got 10 seconds into it before the revolt started. Do you ever recommend trying to make a presentation without visuals? You know, Bob has, and I found it as well, Peter Novig from Google was coming back from a presentation and he said, he wondered whether Abraham Lincoln would have used PowerPoint slides for the Gettysburg Address. And so, I mean, I think you have to plan that out in terms of, it gets back to, I think what Monique said too, is you have to think about what are the points that you want to make, I think. And if you think about the fact that the audience usually takes home about three points, focus it around that. If you can focus your talk, I mean, if you're stuck in that situation, you have to make lemonade when that's all you have is lemon. So, but if you can think in terms of just what are the points you're trying to make, it may make it easier to give that presentation without a PowerPoint. Who here has heard a great talk that did not use slides? Right. So, that kind of answers the question too, right? Yeah. Better be good though. Thank you all. Chris Aiken from North Carolina. And another tip I found just was from watching Al Gore's movie on environmental catastrophe in the planet. I don't remember the title. Great title. Yeah. And I noticed he had no words on any of his slides, just evocative pictures that brought you in the mood. It's just a comment, but I had a question for you. I love this Kessing method. Lessing. Lessing. Yeah. But technically, how do they do that? How do they talk such that the words on the screen match what they're saying? It's literally practice. And so, I have done this style of talk before. My kid used to play piano and I had a metronome. And I would practice it with a metronome. There is a new PowerPoint thing that you can, there is a rate step that you can do. Sorry about that. But what I would say is I practice it with a metronome. And it's literally, I'm following the pace of it. There may be a more sophisticated way to do it than that. I haven't found it though. You're watching the screen? So, I have my talks memorized and I typically, my script comes because I will practice it and then I develop my script. That's just my own style. And then I will just have it paced out. Now again, this is where technology is not your friend. If you have a glitch, then the pacing is off and it really does depend on the pacing. So, I would say it's a really high reward. If it goes well, it seems like magic. And then the audience can kind of relax and it's fun and you're in, you know, they're in your hands. But I would say pace it out with the slides. You can, there is I think a PowerPoint program with timings that you can do. But I would be more old school than that. I don't know, Bob, have you ever done a talk like that? No. To be honest, I've used all your methods never as an entire talk. I use it to punctuate portions of the thing. Because, you know, we get the monotony of slide after slide loses an audience. So, you always like, you start to think what are ways to bring them back? And one of them is to sort of change the pace. And doing any one of those methods helps me do that. I usually do it for less slides than what they would do. And do you use the clicker to advance or does it just go on its own? I like, you know what, I don't like having it go on its own. So, I mean, this is part of my own like tapping. So, I'm tapping. I like to have, you know, I can't really give over complete control, but that's my own problem. But I would say you could do it that way. Again, you're putting your hands, I mean, we've all had technology fail on us during a talk, right? You know, it just, it happens. And that is the one thing I would keep in mind is if the technology fails, you will be in good company. Like people do want you to succeed. Like there's one or two jerks here, but mostly people are going to want you to succeed. So, I would not give in to just having somebody advance it for me, but I guess you could. Thank you. Yeah, having the third person. Yeah. Well, automating it. Next slide. I'm just, that makes me nervous. I just, but I do it as part of a pacing, I mean, because that's how I put that kind of talk together. Hi, first of all, thanks to all three of you for the presentations. Two questions. How do you do that thing with two monitors where your script is on one and you're looking at the other? Because my monitor is attached to my laptop. I'd love to be able to do that, but I don't know if there's a way to do it with that configuration. So, do you usually use two monitors when you work? No, I usually use just my monitor and have my laptop closed. Gotcha. If you opened up your laptop, you've got two monitors. So, that would be one way to do it. I mean, I'm sort of assuming, and maybe it's not fair to assume that, you know, I think we all have gotten comfortable with dual monitor setups and stuff. And you probably are. I mean, you're familiar and stuff. So, you'd have to do that first. And my advice with Zoom is practice it a few times so you know which one you want to share. And then make sure you choose the screen that you want to share. Fortunately, with Zoom, it's easy to practice because you can just create your own Zoom meeting with just you in it. And you can go and like see how it looks. You can even record it if you want to like play it back and see if you've got it right and stuff. So, you know, it's the same thing on practice and stuff like that. These are the kind of things that used to be incredibly difficult to do, and now they've gotten kind of easy to do. Like your computers recognize another screen and they quickly sort of do it. Oh, I guess I should say one thing that probably everyone knows, but when you have the dual monitors, be sure to choose. It'll give you the choice. You right click on a blank part of your screen and say extend laptop or extend screens, right? Because otherwise, it'll show the exact same thing on both, and you don't want to do that. And there's ways you can use iPad as your second monitor. Yeah, on your phone. I've used my phone as a second monitor. You can do that. You can do an iPad. You need a program to do that with, but you can. Dual display or something like that. I think it's great. Thanks. And then Monique, the second question's for you. I get pitched by a lot of companies and often see, I think it was slide eight in the Kawasaki method with the pictures of the head honchos, but I usually see that at the beginning. Does it matter? It doesn't really. You know, I think a lot of the first part, my gut with it, the sequencing I think matters less, but you're just doing filler for the first 15 minutes because oftentimes the most senior person doesn't show up on time. And so I would say half the talk really is about buying time until the person who's going to write the check shows up. So I actually do like having pictures earlier too, though. That's a good way to let your anxiety dissipate too when you first start to get into a talk. Exactly. No, absolutely. Let me just read one question from the internet. Is there a standard way to search for copyright permissions for images, quotes, and studies? Yeah. Well, it depends what you're using, but on Google, you'll notice that every time you see a Google image that says this image may be copyrighted and you can go to that and click on it and it'll tell you more information about what the copyright and what the restrictions are. There's also, you know, you talked about using cartoons. There's actually the New Yorker, they have a permissions page if you want to technically, if you officially want to get permission to use that. Have you done that? I checked it and it was like $50 a cartoon and I was too cheap at that point. But there's also, I did do it with NPR. There was a audio clip that I wanted to use for a presentation and I felt, you know, NPR was a nonprofit and I wanted to support them. And so it cost me $50 to get permission to use that particular. So you contact the source, I think. I know, I go, I, early on, I naively contacted the motion, like, like Paramount Pictures to say, like, I'd like to use like fatal attraction in my course, because I think it'd be a good example of borderline personality. And they said, sure, it'll be $10,000 or something like that per showing. So I learned not to do that. Yeah. Hi guys, Danielle Kushner from New York. I just want to elaborate, I guess, on the last point about anxiety and somebody that's not as comfortable with public speaking. And you're, I know, technically we're always told about practice, do your presentation over and over. And sometimes we don't have as much time or we're reluctant. So do you have any other tidbits to also add into that besides just the- I will tell you, I used to get hives every single time I gave a talk. I wore turtlenecks and scarves. And literally, I'm like, well, I'm not going to be able to get rid of it. It does get easier with time. But if you break out and you get nervous, then do that. Make sure I always bring a bottle of water up, like, have your tricks with you, you know, and this sort of, and breathing and all of that. But literally, my tip is that until I got more comfortable, I wore turtlenecks and scarves. So, because sometimes you can't necessarily work your way through it. You just, it will get easier over time. I don't know if other people- The, John Grist, who's a major biological researcher at the University of Wisconsin, talked about the fact that he had social anxiety and he got very panicky giving presentations. And it was only the repetition and more and more giving it that it finally dissipated. And so there's that extinction behavioral approach of just practicing. And then there's a speaker's group, I'm blanking on the name, that, Toastmasters, that is local and things that will help you to sort of work through some of those things by giving more presentation. But it really sort of, oftentimes, is an extinction process of repetition that sort of finally brings it down to a manageable level. John, isn't it really daunting to record yourself giving the presentation? I was just going to say, so probably one of the best courses I ever took, it was mortifying, let me just tell you. But it was a class where they videotaped us, when I was doing my MPH, they videotaped us. And then we had to do, the first one, we introduced the person sitting next to us. And you watched a videotape of yourself talking for 30 seconds. Then you gave a minute talk of something that they had put together for you. And then you did one the day after. And you had an entire class of people who just picked you apart. If you can do that kind of class, getting a sense of what your quirks are. For example, Bill Clinton, very famously, used to point at people. And the most that he could ever get trained, like he does this thumb thing, because it was the only way he wouldn't wag his finger at people. And you could tell, when he would really go off script, he'd start to wag his finger again. So you will see what your own quirks are. And you can either decide, am I going to try to do my thumb and work through it, or am I going to lean into it? So if you can be videotaped, I would strongly suggest it. And honestly, I know it's easy for me to say, but we tend to present to friendly audiences. These are not people here to criticize and stuff. They're people who want to learn. And so it doesn't have to be perfect. It never is. The first time I saw myself videotaped, I thought I had a thought disorder. It's very humbling. One other question I had was just regarding polls and things that you kind of add on. Because I know for the presentation here, they're suggesting poll everywhere. I was just curious if there was other little websites or apps that you'd recommend. I used to use Poll Everywhere. Anything else you use? So Presentation Zen, the book, is a website, too. So we definitely recommend it. She means things you can put into your thing. I don't use much anymore. I've become more minimalist. I used to use poll stuff a lot. Poll Everywhere is the most, I think, commonly used one. Then there are some more better ones. Anyone else have anything that you like to use? You said everywhere? Everywhere. Poll Everywhere. Yeah. P-O-L-L. Everywhere. Just yesterday, it didn't work. Yeah. You said the poll was full before anyone had a chance to... Yeah. I mean, you live by technology, you're going to die by technology someday. Just get ready. It has to happen. And the one bad audience I will tell you that I had, there was a guy who was just mean. That's a story I tell 15 years after the fact. So that is the worst that happens if you have somebody mean. Hello. First of all, thank you so much for a great presentation. I'm Gilmar. I come from Canada. And I'm actually one of the poster... We know who that is. I showed him. I'm actually presenting a poster tomorrow. So I was hoping to get some tips about poster presentation. I know there's a lot of things that will be applicable, of course, from PowerPoint and poster. But I was hoping maybe to get something extra or, I don't know, anything else you can recommend. Do you have your elevator speech ready? Yeah. So I will tell you, I will do the clean version of this. My first poster I presented, one of the faculty, he said, you know, Monique, there are people who will come to your talk and there are two kinds of questions. And the one question is that people want to show how smart they are. And the other is they're trying to trip you up. And he gave me this pin that I still have to this day. And it said, we have charts and graphs to back us off. So back off. So that is what I think of with posters. Posters, so in all seriousness, though, and my friends who are more academic, that's how I used to troll for talent was in the poster session. So definitely engaging with people I think is really important. That is how you're looking at the people who are coming up as junior faculty. Right. But having, I mean, I'm sure you, it sounds like you've already done it. Having that very short, few minute summary of what your poster is about for people, they'll get all, they'll love that. I mean, that's, you know, being able to sort of like do that for people and sort of just summarize it quickly. And then it sort of leads to discussion, which is fun. That's the fun part of posters. Let me just do one online and then we'll finish up with you. A related question is, any tips in regard to dealing with a more resistant or hostile audience? What if the topic of presentation is more controversial? How can you engage the audience in a way that promotes effective dialogue? Ten seconds. Don't fight back, be humble. If you've ever seen Jack Drescher present, I'm going to pull a name out, you know, who does a lot of LGBTQ stuff and is talking about transgender now. He's, you know, I've seen him present to more hostile or skeptical audiences. And he just is very good about saying like, look, this is my opinion. This is a complicated, you know what I mean? It's like, don't, don't engage them is all I would say. And if people, if that's not good enough, then you've done, you've done your best, I think. Yeah. I really try to encourage questions for the end. In part, you know, say that's a great point and we'll bring it to the end. Sometimes that takes some of the heat of somebody who's trying to hijack your presentation. But again, I did have an experience once years ago where it went bad and sometimes you prepare for everything and a bad thing will still happen. You know, so I think you do your best with it, but if you can delay it till later, sometimes that'll take the energy out of it. And one last question. I'm having much more difficulty giving talks on Zoom. I think because it's just so much easier when I can see who I'm talking to, you know, you're feeling some connection and I'm wondering if you, you know, cause even if you know, you get your screen set up and you're looking at your presentation, you're not seeing much of what's going on with your audience. Well, you won't. You're not going to get reactions. It's just too hard to do. Sometimes you'll build pictures beyond there, but of course I've already covered them with my slides. The one thing I'd say, I mean, this is not exactly answering your question, but one tip I would give you is learn how to look at the camera, not at the screen. Right? I mean, I really admire like TV reporters and people like that cause that's what they're doing. Right? Like when they interview someone on, you know, on a show or something, they're not looking at the person, they're looking at the camera and that's a good talent. I, it's hard to do, but with practice you'll do it. So at least then it'll be more engaging to your audience cause it'll seem like you're looking at them. That doesn't, I mean, as far as getting their reactions, it's tough. I mean, half the time they don't even have their videos on. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. There's no easy way just to rehearse, you know, to talk to a blank wall sometimes. There's a way to stick a little picture next to the camera and look. Oh, that's smart. I like that. I like that. Thank you very much. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you so much.

presentation skills

PowerPoint

Carl Chan

Robert Bolin

Monique Yohannan

Kawasaki style

Takahashi style

Lessig style

audience engagement

storytelling

visuals

tech tips

Zoom