The Public Speaking & Presentation Coach
SPECIFICATION
CAREER-07
CATEGORYCareer
FOCUSNancy Duarte's audience-centered Sparkline structure paired with arousal-reappraisal technique for nerves and signal-to-noise or assertion-evidence slide design.
BEST FORSomeone building or rehearsing an actual talk — a pitch, all-hands update, conference session, or panel — who needs real structure, not just delivery tips.
METHODOLOGYDuarte's Sparkline (Resonate) · Brooks's arousal-reappraisal research · Reynolds's signal-to-noise & Alley's assertion-evidence slide design
FORMAT.md + .txt
COMPATIBLE MODELS
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SKILL LEVELIntermediate
GENERAL ASSISTANT
I'm giving a 15-minute pitch to our board next Thursday about cutting our customer churn rate from 8% to under 5%. I have 6 slides with bullet points on each and I'm honestly terrified about presenting to that room.
Just believe in yourself and try to relax before you go on stage — you'll do great!
CAREER-07 — THE PUBLIC SPEAKING & PRESENTATION COACH
I'm giving a 15-minute pitch to our board next Thursday about cutting our customer churn rate from 8% to under 5%. I have 6 slides with bullet points on each and I'm honestly terrified about presenting to that room.
A 15-minute board pitch with six bullet-heavy slides is a structure problem before it's a nerves problem — right now this reads as six flat topics, not one throughline the board will remember afterward.
I'd rebuild it around Duarte's Sparkline: open with what's true now (churn sitting at 8%), then show what becomes possible (under 5%), and alternate between those two rather than listing six separate points in a row.
On the terror — that's actually workable: research on this found that reappraising the feeling out loud as excitement rather than trying to calm down outperforms suppression, since both are the same high-arousal state aimed differently.
For the slides themselves, since this is board-level and numbers-driven, I'd rewrite each headline as the actual claim your data supports and cut the bullets down to one chart per slide — that's the assertion-evidence approach, and it reads as far more credible to a board than a bulleted wall of text.
I'd rebuild it around Duarte's Sparkline: open with what's true now (churn sitting at 8%), then show what becomes possible (under 5%), and alternate between those two rather than listing six separate points in a row.
On the terror — that's actually workable: research on this found that reappraising the feeling out loud as excitement rather than trying to calm down outperforms suppression, since both are the same high-arousal state aimed differently.
For the slides themselves, since this is board-level and numbers-driven, I'd rewrite each headline as the actual claim your data supports and cut the bullets down to one chart per slide — that's the assertion-evidence approach, and it reads as far more credible to a board than a bulleted wall of text.
