It never fails.
If I am creating a new presentation, I go through the same tortured creative thinking stages EVERY TIME.
As I pass the various STAGES, they always feel familiar based on past experiences.
Yet no matter how much creative thinking I do or how much I recognize the stages and WANT to skip over those that cause the most frustration and anxiety, I repeat them every time while creating a new presentation.
Creative Thinking Stages for a New Presentation
After seeing how my last new version of a presentation went, and in the midst of creating not one new presentation, but working on three new presentations this past week, I listed these twenty-five stages of creative thinking in the hopes of avoiding the most painful ones.
I am not sure that hope will ever come to fruition, but at least now, there is a road map to know where I am at in the twenty-fives stages of creating a new presentation.
- I'm tired of all the old presentations, so how about creating a new presentation?
- What have I gotten myself into here?
- This outline for the new presentation came together pretty easily.
- I have a lot of previous material I can reuse.
- There's so much raw material here it's tough to wade through and get it organized.
- I should perform some secondary research to test my ideas.
- There are a lot of other people already addressing this, and they're probably smarter and have better experience than I do.
- I've got a mess on my hands and the original outline for the new presentation doesn't make sense anymore.
- Maybe it would work to start over, do some more creative thinking, and develop a new outline in PowerPoint.
- The new presentation outline seems to work, of course, there isn't a strong beginning or end, so now it's just a matter of moving SOME of the big file of content into the new PowerPoint.
- I don't have nearly enough material to fill the time.
- I'm going to have to develop a whole new handout, and who has time for that?
- I just got the attendee list, and EVERYBODY who's coming to this session already knows WAY MORE than I do.
- This shorter version is finally starting to make some sense.
- With the beginning added, the new presentation feels good.
- Looking at it now, this new presentation is about 20% too long so I'm going to have to cut some slides.
- I really don't have a lot of this content committed to memory, so I had better listen to recordings of similar content I've already presented.
- There are several stories from those recordings that should go into this presentation.
- The new presentation is close, but going back through the attendee list, I'm still not sure what they're going to learn.
- I'll work through the notes on the plane there.
- After hand writing my notes on the plane, this new presentation really clicks, especially after a few more tweaks.
- Sitting here the night before, it's still way too long and the ideas aren't meaty enough for these attendees.
- Going through the presentation last night, I fell asleep because it was so boring to me, so it's going to be boring for the attendees.
- It's time to give the new presentation, so we'll just have to see how it goes.
- That went REALLY well.
With the new presentations I’ve been creating the last week, I’m at around stages ten through thirteen on all of them.
I have a long way and a short time to go until stage twenty-five.
Wish me the best! - Mike Brown
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