The Best Presentations Are Conversations That Move People

Most presentations die before they even begin. Not because the content is weak or the speaker lacks confidence, but because the presenter starts in the wrong place. They open a laptop, summon a familiar template, and begin arranging boxes on a slide. It feels productive, even responsible. but it’s the fastest way to drain the life out of something that could have been powerful.

The best presentations don’t begin with slides; they start with a conversation.

Not a literal one, at least not yet, but a conversation in the presenter’s mind. A moment of clarity where they ask themselves the question that most people skip entirely.

Why This Question Changes Everything

What is so important that I’ve chosen to bring these people together?

It’s a question that forces honesty. It strips away the fluff and the corporate habit of presenting for the sake of presenting. It demands purpose, and that is where honest communication begins.

There is always a reason you’ve gathered people.

Sometimes it’s a new idea they’ve never heard of. Sometimes it’s an idea they’ve listened to but don’t yet believe. Perhaps it’s a problem that needs solving, an opportunity that can’t be missed, or a shift in perspective that will change the trajectory of a team, a project, or an entire organisation.

Whatever the reason, it should never just be “because it’s on the agenda.” It is always something deeper, something human.

When you start thinking of a presentation as a conversation, everything changes. You stop obsessing over what you want to say and start thinking about what your audience needs to hear. You stop treating them as a passive crowd and start seeing them as individuals with their own beliefs, biases, hopes, and fears. You begin to realise that your job is not to speak at them, but to take them somewhere; from where they are now to where they need to be.

The Journey From Point A to Point B

Every audience walks into a room at Point A. They may be sceptical, distracted, overwhelmed, or simply unsure why they’re there. Your task is to guide them to Point B,  a place where they understand, believe, and feel compelled to act.

That movement is the entire purpose of a presentation. If they leave the room unchanged, then nothing meaningful happened, no matter how polished the slides were.

Years ago, when I was a corporate executive, I had to deliver a presentation that would determine the business’s future. Sales were collapsing, morale was low, and the board was anxious. I could have opened with a chart, a statistic, or a polite acknowledgement of the situation. Instead, I distilled the entire conversation into one sentence:

A loss of 200,000 sales a year is crippling this business. In five years, we will be out of business, but we have a plan not only to stop the decline but to reverse it and flourish again.

That sentence didn’t just inform, it created urgency, direction and a shared understanding of what was at stake. It told the audience why they were in the room and why they needed to care. It framed the conversation that would follow.

Why Creativity Doesn’t Live in PowerPoint

Once you have that clarity, that single sentence that captures your perspective, your position, and what’s at stake, the real work begins, and the real work never starts with PowerPoint.

Creativity doesn’t live in templates or bullet points. It doesn’t live in the default layout your organisation has been using since 2012. Creativity lives in the messy, unstructured space where ideas collide and rearrange themselves.

That’s why the most effective presenters step away from their screens and surround themselves with blank space: a wall, a table, a stack of Post‑it notes.

They write down the message they need to deliver, then they let their mind wander. They explore, imagine and challenge themselves. They give themselves permission to think before they design, and then something interesting happens.

When you stop trying to build slides and start trying to make meaning, the story begins to reveal itself. You start to see which ideas matter and which ones don’t. You begin to notice the emotional arc, the tension, the turning point, the release. You begin to understand not just what you want to say, but what your audience needs to feel.

When the Story Is Clear, the Slides Become Simple

That’s when you’re ready to open your laptop, not before.

Even then, the goal isn’t to decorate your thoughts with graphics. It’s to translate your thinking into something your audience can grasp instantly. A slide should work like a billboard, clear, bold and impossible to misunderstand. If it takes more than a few seconds to decode, it’s not helping you; it’s slowing you down.

Resistance Is Inevitable and Important

Even the clearest message will meet some resistance. Every audience brings their own experiences, assumptions, and anxieties into the room. Some will agree with you, some won’t, and some will be quietly wrestling with fears you haven’t considered.

The mindful presenter anticipates this, not by memorising answers, but by understanding the conversation so deeply that nothing feels unexpected. When you’ve explored the objections, the doubts, the alternative perspectives, you become unshakeable. You’re not defending a presentation, you’re guiding a conversation.

Presentations are not performances, lectures or opportunities to prove how much you know. They are conversations, human, dynamic, alive. Conversations that move people, change minds and shift behaviour.

When you approach them that way, everything becomes more straightforward and far more powerful.

The best presentations are conversations. If you’d like to learn more:

– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Invest in some really good one-to-one public speaking coaching.

– Get yourself some excellent presentation training

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