You can present better

If you follow these five steps

👋 Hey, it’s Andrés from Astrolab. Welcome to our weekly newsletter on how to increase your influence. We write for leaders, senior individual contributors, and business owners.

Today: How to prepare for an important presentation

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This post is about the five things I do while preparing for a presentation.

Here they are:

1. What, Why, How

2. Choosing three ideas

3. Ordering your ideas

4. Deciding how to start and how to finish

5. Making sure your slides don’t suck

If you want to become noticed, to build a reputation, and see your work scale, be sure to become better at doing these three things.

Today, some ideas on how to start improving ASAP.

Presentations, in 2025?

There’s a lot of turmoil regarding AI and labor. While we’re still in the beginning of this new era, there’s a lot of evidence that AI is going to change the way we work.

One of the things that still seems distant is AI taking over meetings and conversations. People still meet to share, discuss, and decide on ideas. While AI can help you structure your ideas, you still need to create and share presentations.

Forget about trying to inspire, tell stories, or influence at this level: what senior employees want from you is to recount what you’ve learned. The challenge is to do it in a clear, brief and precise way.

Some time ago I wrote about the five lenses that can help you choose ideas and words. Some of you reached out to ask me how to translate this into a presentation.

Here are the five things I do while preparing for a presentation:

Define What, Why and How

First, I start answering the questions What, Why and How. In a recent post I wrote more about this framework.

Almost fifteen years ago, an Englishman who ran a marketing company in New York popularized this distinction.

In early 2006, he became obsessed with understanding why some marketing campaigns worked and others didn't, and that led him to think about why we do what we do.

For the next three years he devoted himself to speaking about this wherever he could. He asked for 100 USD to speak on the subject. One day he was invited to give a TEDx Talk to a group of 50 people in Seattle. The Englishman accepted, and titled his talk How great leaders inspire action.

Today, that TEDx Talk has over 75 million views, and at the same time, it pales in comparison to the impact that talk has had on the world of business, organizations, and leadership. By the way: he no longer charges $100 per talk. Today, Simon Sinek charges between $150,000–$200,000 per talk.

Now, you don’t need to title your ideas like this. Rather, conceptualize them as questions your audience is going to ask about your message, and make sure you answer them in one way or another.

Deciding the What, the Why and the How of your idea will help you be much clear and precise, but this doesn’t mean you always have to structure your presentation around them, or to share them in that order. What, Why and How could be implicit in your message.

What’s next? To actually choose the ideas you’re going to share.

Choose your three ideas

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two is one of the most cited articles in the history of psychology.

The paper, published by George Miller of Harvard University, asks how many ideas an average human can hold in working memory — or short-term memory — at one time. Miller's question can be codified: How many ideas can we juggle?

Authors argue about the exact number— and it's not true that our attention span is shrinking —but it doesn't matter: We've all experienced limits when trying to remember lists of things when shopping for groceries, or getting lost during a boring presentation.

Most books on how to improve our communication skills suggest limiting the number of arguments to three, and I'll defer to them: three is an easy number to remember—less so than five, seven, or nine!

So, after selecting my What, Why, and How, I choose the three ideas I’ll actually share during my presentation.

Order your ideas

There are many ways to structure a presentation.

A chronological narrative—also known as a clarity or a strategic story, courtesy of my friend Shawn Callahan, is a nice way of ordering your ideas:

• In the past, this is how things were _______

• Then something happened ________

• So now we will do this _______

• And if we do it right, this is what the future looks like: _______.

Contrast is another structuring tool. The idea behind contrast is to introduce cognitive dissonance—when you have ideas or beliefs that conflict with each other, and this makes you feel uncomfortable or confused, to the point where you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance.

The basic parts of a contrast are:

• talk about what doesn't work today (status quo),

• what could be (vision), and then close with

• the action or plan to follow

A third structure is to anchor yourself to What, Why and How. You could literally structure and even name your ideas like this:

• (what) This is my main idea: _______

• (why) Now I'll tell you why it matters: _____

• (how) Finally I'm going to share how I think this could work: ______

Opening and Closing

The only thing left to do is to include a hook to open your entire speech, a basic description of your three ideas before developing each one, and to close with some sort of purpose or statement of relevance (“I want to close by reminding you why this is important…”)

I share with you the index that I followed this talk I have at Penn last year:

1. First I shared a connection story

2. Then, I introduced my topic: “I'm going to talk about X” (what). “This matters because Y” (why). “I’ll talk about X in this order Z” (how)

3. Afterwards, I talked about three types of stories, following a very similar dynamic for each type of story:

   1. Name of the story

   2. What kind of event does each story describe?

   3. An example of that story

   4. Why it works

4. Finally, I recounted what I had talked about (“today I talked about these three types of stories”), and

5. I said goodbye with a relevant statement (“the world is waiting for you”).

Raising the bar for slides

Nobody likes slides that are boring or overwhelming: they drain energy, distract people and destroy value. Really.

Here’s what to do instead:

1. Limit to five slides: one for each of your three ideas, one for your opening, one for your ending

2. Draw them

3. Eventually, turn them into something that helps you transmit your message, not overwhelm your audience

Bonus

1. You can always practice more: look how many times I recorded this talk on Google Slides:

2. Use your adrenaline to your advantage: feeling nervous is not bad. Or rather, it is inevitable. The opportunity you have is to frame that nervous energy as excitement

3. Be kind to yourself: You can practice for a thousand hours, and still do a mediocre or even bad job when presenting. And you know what, it honestly DOESN'T MATTER. You can always bounce back. Learn to let go and move forward—every presentation is a learning moment.

Briefs

1. INSPIRA for South America ✅: This week, Emilio is running our storytelling workshop for group of leaders part of a FMCG company.

2. Design Sprint in North Carolina 🌲: Ana Fer and Gerardo are running an in-person design sprint this week for a leading international personal hygiene group.

3. New Workshop alert 🔥: As soon as we finished running Let’s be Clear for the first time we started working on our next communication workshop. If we’re already covering storytelling and influence with INSPIRA, and clarity, brevity and precision with Let’s Be Clear, can you guess the third topic we’re working on?