One of the great revelations in public speaking or presenting has been to include a story in your speech or presentation. Of course, storytelling in presentations or public speaking is not something new, but it is something that causes people a lot of stress.

So in this Presentation Quick Tip #5, I want to show you a very simple way to think about storytelling in your presentations.

Check out the video for what to do and read more below the video. You’ll also find the video transcript there, too.

If YouTube is unavailable in your area, please click to view or right-click here: Presentation Quick Tip #5 – How to Structure Your Presentation Like a Story

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All you need to know you learned as a child

Remember when as a child, you heard stories about monsters and heroes, and princesses and princes? If you remember those, then you most certainly remember that all of them started with an introduction, some conflict and then some sort of resolution.

The great thing is that that is the exact structure you can use for your presentations.

How to apply storytelling structure to presentations

When structuring your presentation content, remember the following…

First…

Every story has a main character, a hero. In a presentation, the main character or hero is the main topic or points you want to make.

Second…

Every story has an enemy, an antagonist. In a presentation, this will be the challenges, problems and consequences of the main topic or points.

And third…

Every story has a beginning, middle and ending. In a presentation, the beginning is your introduction or background of your topic.

The middle contains the challenges and problems, and the consequences of those challenges and problems.

The ending is the hero overcoming the enemy. In a presentation, you can now present your ideas or the solution to resolve the challenges and problems you described previously.

Does this work for every presentation?

The quick answer would be yes, but every presentation is different. However, when you’re stuck thinking about how to structure your content, you can always fall back on what you’ve learned here.

Remember to think in terms of a beginning that introduces, a middle that describes conflict and an ending that resolves the conflict and saves the world so you can kiss the girl. Ok, I made that last part up, but since we’re talking about storytelling…

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions.

Be sure to subscribe to my free newsletter so you don’t miss tips like this and other cool stuff, too.

Carl

Transcript

Hi, it’s Carl Kwan here. And this is Presentation Quick Tip #5.

In this video, I’m going to talk about how to structure your presentation like a good story.

Every story has a main character, which is going to be your main points or topics that you want to cover.

Every story also has an enemy, which is going to be the problems or challenges faced by those main points and topics that you want to cover.

Every story also has a beginning, middle and end.

So the beginning is going to be the background, the introduction to everything else.

Then, the middle is going to be the problems and the things that are going to be challenging your main points.

Then finally, you want to have an ending, which is going to be presenting your solution, presenting your possible way to overcome the problems and challenges faced by your audience or whatever your topic is.

So once again, how to structure your presentation like a good story…

Make sure you have a good main character, an enemy and also the beginning, middle and ending structure, as well.

So that is Presentation Quick Tip #5.

If you have any questions or comments about this one, please leave them below this video.

Thank you for watching and talk to you again soon.

Bye-bye.