Use Word Pictures

 

Use good word pictures or illustrations to make the main points in your presentation both easier to understand and more memorable. And the thing is that they are all around in your everyday life: in what you read; in what your hear other people talking about; on the Internet; in radio and television newscasts; and in what experiences and information that others share with you throughout the day.

Consider the one I read about in the Globe and Mail newspaper a few weeks back. It described how a university professor found himself stranded on the top of a New Zealand mountain wearing on a light sweater and shorts after his brother-in-law fell to his death.

It looked like curtains for him to as rescue by helicopter was some eight hours away if the weather held up and he had to first survive at least those 8 hours of freezing temperatures.

 

He did survive though by creating a vivid mental image of being alive to see the sun rising the next morning and breaking those eight hours down into 5 second intervals – which he actually counted out – between each icy breath. He broke the night down into these short intervals and did survive.

What you have here is not just a terrific example of courage and determination, and endurance, but also how to break what might seem like an insurmountable obstacle down in smaller pieces and succeed in overcoming the problem.

Needless to say this story went into my file of illustrations to use in future presentations – maybe a number of times as this type of story can be used to illustrate a number of points. I try to make a practice of continually adding to this file as I find interesting illustrations, examples, statistics, or other information that I might be able to use – even if I do not have an immediate use for it. You should too.