Visualize a presentation that piques your curiosity … and you’ll not likely come up with a lecture or even a staff meeting you've attended lately. Why is this?
Interestingly, your unique spatial intelligence to solve problems craves art a
nd shapes along with colors that connect to meanings – and that’s why words alone can bore you. Not surprisingly, when we graft in images or icons to presentations, we also appeal to an audiences’ multiple intelligences. How so?
Here are 8 strategies that add visuals to presentations - in ways that engage participants’ full mix of intelligences:
1. Place a unique art piece on display or in a slide and invite people to share with the person next to them. Ask... “What do you see in this art that sparks new questions about our topic?" This strategy draws on people’s interpersonal intelligence.
2. Invite participants to describe artistic influences that could help their work day. Then guide the group to apply one tactic they come up with - to solve a sticky problem at work in a bit of a new way. Ok, now you have drawn art from participants’ intrapersonal intelligence.
3. Use images and icons to build people’s curiosity ... and help them to imagine their end results for the next project they’ll complete at work. In so doing they’ll draw art from their own spatial intelligence.
4. Jot down a well-known quote, with word pictures - and relate it to the presentation topic, through participants' discussion about how it could help resolve a difficult process at work. Create a three step practice using the quote’s core idea, and you’ve added visuals to the mix – through people’s linguistic intelligence.
5. Build something, mime something – or invite people to move in ways that engage your presentation ideas. Through movement people begin to see and draw more visuals from kinesthetic intelligence, than most realize are there.
6. Share numbers as symbols and arrange new images such as recent growth rates into charts your dept made or plans to make in the coming week. It’s that simple for spatiality to take shape through numbers that use more mathematical intelligence.
7. Open shades to take in nature’s beauty, welcome a brief walk together over lunch, or include a peace plant to enhance your presentation area, and people’s naturalistic intelligence springs alive visually.
8. Open your presentation with upbeat or inspirational music– and watch musical intelligence work its wonderful cadence into pretty much any setting. Or play a humorous 1 minute YouTube video such as Cowboys Herding Cats, that drives home a core presentation point.
How would you color and shape presentations with more visuals than words - if you were … say … Picasso or Renoir? Why not start there and communicate visually in ways that inspire people to apply what they learn from your presentation. What do you think?
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