Props

For the public speaker, props can give wings to your talk. On the other hand, they can sink you like a stone.

Props are the icing on the cake. Great icing can’t rescue a bad cake but bad icing can ruin a good cake. However, great icing on a great cake marks the master baker.

You therefore need to start with a solid and persuasive message that can stand on its own. If your message can’t work without props, go back to the drawing board until it can.

Then you go off quietly to a corner and imagine yourself in the audience. What visuals, what models, what interactives will turn on the lights for your audience? Only when you have imagined yourself sitting in the auditorium should you turn yourself to PowerPoint, to flash cards, to a paper-mache pink elephant, or to sound-clips.

Props can entertain, but should never do so at the expense of your message. It took me a long time to learn that funny pictures might draw a laugh, but were counterproductive if they deflected attention from the central message.

Good props illustrate what you are saying, and sometimes they amplify what you are saying. They give the audience another window of insight into your message, assisting those people who are more visual or tactile than audio.

PowerPoint, Google Slides, Canva, and a dozen others offer enormous presentation options, with all kinds of templates. Artificial Intelligence is scary good. Wondershare’s Filmora allows you to produce Hollywood-grade video, and Doodly makes it easy to create caricature-type visuals. You can be your own impressario.

There are two traps, though, in using software to create props. The first is that they can make you lazy, doing the thinking for you. This is fine if you’re OK with vanilla presentations.

The second trap is that almost all these products offer you a dazzling array of templates which make it easy to cut and paste to make your show look glitzy. Unfortunately, a million other people are doing just that, and you no longer look unique. And “unique” is what sets you apart from the crowd and gets you asked back. Use the tools to amplify your uniqueness, not to make you one of the cool kids.

Remember, props exist to make your delivery amazing, not to “prop it up”!