Good evening Devansh,

How do you beat your Monday blues? A cup of strong coffee with Interstellar soundtrack and I am ready to beat my Monday blues  

To keep up with our weekly tradition, I have another great article for you to read. Today I would like to talk about presentations. You and I have been giving presentations from our college time, if not from school time. But honestly, those presentations were more about putting as much content as we could in slides and the listeners were only our peers and teachers. But presentations nowadays come with higher stakes and expectations - Convincing a big client, raising funds from investors, laying out the team’s work for the next quarter and whatnot. Hence, giving killer presentations has become a necessary skill as you move up the professional ladder.

This article from HBR takes you through the key areas to focus on and practice to elevate the level of your presentations. It talks about how to go about thinking of a presentation, use storytelling devices to engage your audience and how to structure and deliver your thoughts.

This simple but powerful excerpt from the article will break some of your preconceived notions about presentations. And the things mentioned in this excerpt were exactly what we used to do in college presentations!

With so much technology at our disposal, it may feel almost mandatory to use, at a minimum, presentation slides. By now most people have heard the advice about PowerPoint: Keep it simple; don’t use a slide deck as a substitute for notes (by, say, listing the bullet points you’ll discuss—those are best put on note cards); and don’t repeat out loud words that are on the slide. Not only is reciting slides a variation of the teleprompter problem—“Oh, no, she’s reading to us, too!”—but the information is interesting only once, and hearing and seeing the same words feels repetitive. That advice may seem universal by now, but go into any company and you’ll see presenters violating it every day.

Read this article in detail and remember

A successful task is a little miracle - people see the world differently afterwards.

I hope this article will get rid of your Monday blues. Just like ‘Monday blues’ there are some more idioms I would like to share with you.

A few more idioms :

Learn the ropes

• Meaning: Learn how to do things or learn how things work.
• Examples:
• As a professional, you need to constantly learn the ropes to do really well in your career.
• He still needs to learn the ropes, but he has great potential.

That won’t cut it

• Meaning: That will not be enough to do a task or cope with a situation.
• Examples:
• You can cram for the test, but that probably won’t cut it. You will need to study every day for several days in order to really understand the material.
• They seem really upset. A simple apology won't cut it.

The ball is in your court

• Meaning: It’s your turn to make a decision or do something.
• Examples:
• I’ve done what I can. Now the ball is in your court.
• Everybody in this company will support you if you decide to move to another country but the ball is in your court if you decide to change your mind at the last minute.

Now, I am very passionate about sharing my experiences and learning with my juniors. That’s my way of giving back to the system I have benefitted from. And I would love to know something about your experience. Take out 1 minute from your busy schedule and send me a video of what is the 1 thing that you would like to tell someone who has just started their career.

The ball is in your court now!

Adios!!

Best,
Shubham Gupta
Co-founder, BBR