You can't expect every presentation to be filled with laughs or poignant moments or cartoons or even videos.  A presentation can't be all talk or all entertainment.  If you have too much of a good thing, like all pecans in your snack mix, it gets boring.

What you want in the perfect presentation is a little bit of everything. You want variety.  So you sprinkle in a little bit of humor, some pathos, some basset hound puppies (or is that just me?), and some new ideas, actions steps and hopefully tools that your audience can put to work.  You might choose to be more conceptual in nature when you are delivering a keynote presentation, but you still have to deliver the right mix of entertainment and new ideas if you want people to be wowed by your message, your delivery, and your incredible stage presence.  

You have to not only use different emotions, you must vary your energy, speed, and the inflection of your voice.  And be sure to add plenty of pauses.  The pauses, like those no count peanuts in your expensive can of mixed nuts, help your audience appreciate the good stuff (the cashews) even more.

Who's hungry??  Yikes! 

So here's the main thing.  Start off with a punch.  Find an impactful opener.  It might be humor, or a video, or a pithy quote.  Fill in with some meaty content in the form of great images (don't you even think about having slides with a bunch of bullet points and text on them) and then wind up with a big bang.   And if you can have a great high energy song (something like "Up Against the Wall you Redneck Mother") to start your talk that is the best (for you and your audience.) 

For me, the subject at hand usually leads to some kind of funny image, play on words, or animal that I can work through the entire presentation.

But you need to find something that works for you.  

Here's an example.  

I used Elvis Presley's song "You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog" to open my keynote presentation at Accountex 2016, called "Being the Basset Hound".  

There's a picture and a video of Elvis singing his song to a basset hound while wearing a tux.  My message was about being true to yourself and in that video, Elvis was forced to tone down his hip movements and sing to a dog.  You can see the embarrassment on both of their faces (Elvis' and especially the basset hound).  Message? You can't be your best self if you aren't being your authentic self - hip actions and all.  

The presentation started with the Elvis thing, included some videos showing bassets wagging their tails in sequence, and ended with  videos comparing different brand messages from a car company. 

My last point was  an assignment for the audience - you want them to do something with your message right? 

I wanted the accountants in my audience to DELIVER EXCEPTIONAL SERVICE which means: 

•Insights not balances
•Conversation not reconciliation
•Timely is often better than perfect
•Make THEM feel smart 

How might this presentation tip apply in your world? ​

Eventually the startup was sold to a bigger corporation which took the very same copy and turned it into this version of the whitepaper. 

In this version, Ethel has been sent off to a nursing home and is now wearing a dopey grey suit. You cannot even make yourself read enough of this dry looking copy to find out about poor ole Ethel. 

I get big corporate brand policy. I understand consistent look and feel but it's a big fat bummer.

Do the brand police have to suck the life out of everything?   Where's the visual interest? The humor?

For me, it all comes down to finding clients who get my message. Who fit with my tone and style. Who value good design. That's when I can do my best work. Good design makes my words cleverer (?).  (It doesn't however fix bad grammar, or stupid. That is all me.)

I miss the little guys who would take risks and have some fun. 

Note bowl of grits below the adding machine tape. 

Thank you to Rick Menard for perfectly illustrating my inner basset hound. 

I live for feedback. The worst thing I have ever experienced in a job is no feedback. I would rather have bad news than nothing. I want feedback so I can learn, improve, change course if necessary, get better.  (Check out my LinkedIn post on compliments.)

Every time I speak I rush to read the evaluations. Unfortunately, no matter how many positive responses there are, it is the negative ones I obsess over. What did I do wrong?  Why don't they like me?  Sometimes I carry that around for days.  But eventually, I return to reason and direct my focus to making my next presentation better than the last one. 

When I am on stage delivering a presentation, I feed off of my audience. If I feel them slipping away, I try to adapt my talk to regain their attention. Sometimes that makes me rush through my material and skip over a key point or two.  Other times, it makes me soar. But I have learned that this too can be survived.

Successful comedians learn how to survive what is called "dying on stage". It happens when no one laughs at their joke. They accept it as part of the job. Those who endure  learn to use the audience feedback as a way of constantly perfecting their craft.  I don't know how they do it. 

And here is a podcast on the subject thanks to The Bean Counter . 

Both of my children arrived on this earth with keen visual powers and an advanced, almost photographic memory. They see and remember everything. Had they both not looked exactly like their father, I would have wondered if they were my children at all. 

As far back as I can remember, I have always been terrible with names. But it is worse than that. 

I seem to have skipped major moments of my childhood. I have vivid patches and then holes. As one of four children, there was much to remember and many points of view applied to every major event. But there are times when I have absolutely no connection to events that involved me. My brother tells of the time I sat on his ukulele and reduced it to sawdust. Who? Me? But I clearly remember the day I fell off the top of the slide and then rode my bike all the way home to tell Mom about my near death, losing-my-breath, experience.

Lest you add your own sinister interpretation to my tale, there was no trauma beyond the occasional spilling of milk that could have caused me to wipe out portions of my childhood life. I had a wonderful middle class childhood. I did have to share a room with my sister, but I’m not sure that counts as major trauma. I don’t have anything awful that needs forgetting, except that time I slammed my little brother’s finger in the front door. I will never forget that moment or the fact that I was mad about something and slammed it with a mean spirit. I am sure I was forgiven years later when I knelt upon that velveteen kneeler and confessed my sins to Monsignor Baum through that leather-and-furniture–polish-scented little door at St. Mary’s Catholic Church.

But now I am a grandmother at 53 and I don’t want to forget any moment of the life that lies ahead or behind me. I wonder if I have been carrying the Alzheimer’s gene from birth; if sections of my brain that weren’t crammed full of math equations and Trigonometry were already failing. I fear for the ever widening gaps that might be filling my brain - erasing letters and words from my brain even as I sit here and type. And if my memories fade, who will remember that I never had a great memory, that I have always been this way.  

I hope that if I fade, if some of my already feeble brain cells go dark, that all of the negative memories will be the ones that are first erased, the fears of failure, the mistakes I made as a mother, the words that slipped out unattended. I pray that if my memories fade, I will be left with only the good ones. And please, dear God, let me keep all of the funny stuff.  I pray that my un-artistic brain ends up making my life into something that resembles a painting where everything is blurred and smudged in the form of a fine pastel–colored print. Perhaps this is at last how I too become a great artist like my son and sister.

I want to vividly remember the moment my children arrived, those moments of babyhood when they held to my shoulder for dear life, the smell of their freshly bathed skin, the moment they cried with joy at the Christmas puppy that appeared in a stocking.  I want to forever prize my time in the delivery room with my daughter as she brought forth her own precious miracle. I need to hold on to that road trip across the country with our Basset Hound, when we stopped at every moccasin store seeking out new colors and styles. I want to remember my son releasing his artistic talent to the world. Will I remember that clay soldier that looked every bit like the ones unearthed in China, the one his sixth grade teacher refused to acknowledge?  Every painting that he has done is indelibly inscribed on my heart – but will I remember them? I don’t want to forget the moment he turned scraps of fabric into a gorgeous ottoman in less than a day. I want to remember our stop that day in a casino in Reno, when we didn’t try our hand at the slot machine but conspired instead to place a $5 bill in a corner of the casino hoping to make one person that day feel lucky.

And finally, I want to remember the snow that fell that day in May, the day before the accident I can never forget.