Have you ever attended a work conference, and after the first 60 seconds of hearing the speaker in your breakout room, you know you chose the wrong session because the talk is sooooooo boring?

That’s happened to me several times — most notably a few years ago at an HR conference. As soon as the presenter began walking through her slide deck, I thought, “Dang it. This session is going to be bad. I should walk out.”

I felt caught between two bad options:

1. Walk out immediately and potentially embarrass the speaker
2. Suck it up and lose the next hour of my life while trying to not poke out my eyeballs with the free Bic pen in my conference swag bag

But then I remembered a quote from one of my favorite authors:

“Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” -Stephen King

I wondered…could the same concept apply to public speaking?

I figured that it probably could, so I decided to use the session as an opportunity to study what not to do in public speaking. I’ve now done the same thing several times since then, and that reframe has been a great instructional tool.

Here are five tips I’ve learned from watching boring presentations:

1. Provide analogies, but don’t stretch them too far

“Analogies work because they make the unfamiliar familiar; they help the mind navigate new terrain by making it resemble terrain we already know.” -John Pollack

Analogies are useful because they relate novel concepts to tried-and-true ideas, giving us a mental clothesline from which to hang new ideas.

I’m a huge fan of analogies, but watching poor public speakers has taught me there’s a limit to their usefulness.

I once attended a session where the speaker spent the entire time explaining the leadership lessons that dogs can teach us. By the end of the session, 5 percent of the audience thought it was “cute,” but 95 percent of attendees left feeling like they’d just watched an episode of Blue’s Clues.

The speaker could have gotten away with leveraging that concept for a slide or two, but it wasn’t an appropriate vehicle to drive the entire presentation.

As a speaker, it’s tempting to find a whimsical way of presenting your information, but if you stretch an analogy too far, it will break, and your audience will lose their patience.

2. Wrap your data in stories

“Stories are just data with a soul.” -Brené Brown

I’ve watched many speakers barrage their audiences with data: the percentage of people who do X, the number of workers who struggle with Y, etc.

Speakers turn to data because it feels substantial. Hard facts make a presentation feel more concrete, convincing, and compelling. But data without a story is boring, and it’s also harder to remember.

In a recent study, Stanford professor Jennifer Aaker found that 63 percent of people remembered stories whereas only 5 percent remembered data. That is a remarkable difference.

Have you ever noticed what happens to an audience when a speaker says the phrase, “Let me tell you a story”?

Audience members visibly perk up and pay attention. We cannot resist the power of stories because our brains are primed to learn from them. After all, that’s how history was passed down through the ages before the invention of the printing press.

Because we love stories and pay attention to them, we remember information better when it’s presented in story form.

If you want your audience to remember something, rather than throwing data points at them, use stories as vehicles for that data. A compelling story can be your Trojan horse to help the audience remember essential details.

3. Rather than using text as a crutch, convey ideas with images

“Our brains are wired to process visual information—pictures—very differently than text and sound. Scientists call the effect ‘multimodal’ learning: pictures are processed in several channels instead of one, giving the brain a far deeper and meaningful encoding experience.” -Carmine Gallo

One of the things that made that breakout session I mentioned in the intro so boring was the speaker’s PowerPoint slide deck. Each slide was burdened with an excess of text.

I didn’t know whether to pay attention to the speaker or read the novel on the screen behind her. Then, I noticed that the words coming out of her mouth were many of the same ones I was reading on her slides.

Yikes.

Every high school student giving their first presentation in English class is taught to not read off their slides, yet many of us have forgotten that and fallen back into bad habits as adults. There are a few reasons why speakers make this mistake:

• They’re worried they’ll forget to say something if it’s not on the slide.
• They love the exact wording of a phrase and want to be sure they nail it.
• They don’t trust themselves to speak from minimal notes.
• They assume audiences want the information reinforced in written text.

I can understand these motivations, and I’ve felt their compelling tug the same as every other speaker. But they’re all bad reasons.

The best way to give a speech is to throw away your safety blanket (tons of text on each slide) and study your content well enough to speak from the heart about your topic.

Most of your slide content should be conveyed through images. Choose pictures that help the audience visually connect with your topic. Images also lend themselves well to stories, which circles back to point #2 above.

Memorizing lines or reading from a slide leads to robotic presentations, whereas intimately studying the topic and using powerful images helps you come off as more engaging and enthusiastic.

4. Incorporate your audience into your talk

“The key to good performance when I go to a concert or the key to public speaking is, are they willing to throw themselves out into the audience and hope the audience will pick them up?” -David Brooks

No one likes to be “talked at.” Speakers who babble at their audience the entire time shouldn’t be surprised if their talk is met with blank stares, poor engagement, and tepid applause.

Most presentations should include some form of two-way communication. I’ve even seen strong presenters pull this off when they’re speaking to a room of 3,000 people. There are many ways to engage the audience:

• Ask attendees to raise their hand if they’ve ever done XYZ
• Create a QR code attendees can scan to vote on 2–3 questions
• Include a quick icebreaker or audience exercise

Heck, you can even ask attendees to get up and stretch for 60 seconds at the start of the talk. (I’ve seen multiple speakers do this.)

The key is to find a way to get people involved. Give them some skin in the game. The more they feel like they’re part of your talk, the louder they’ll cheer at the end.

5. Offer non-intuitive advice

“Speak only about what is surprising and skip everything else.” -Derek Sivers

It’s always a bad sign when the speaker’s main points are the five things you would have guessed they’d say before you walked into the room.

For example, I’ve attended a couple of talks about communication and listening that offered the same tired advice:

• Don’t interrupt
• Make eye contact
• Nod your head to show you’re engaged
• Practice “drive-thru” listening: repeat what you heard them say, just like McDonald’s employees do in the drive-thru line

None of my fellow audience members left that room thinking, “Wow, I’m going to stop interrupting people. I’ve never thought of that before.”

Most of the advice shared in those sessions didn’t need to be said. Attendees show up to a presentation hoping the speaker is going to dive deep and share something new and insightful—or at least an old idea dressed up in new clothes.

It’s fine to teach your audience classic ideas but if you do that, you need to share them in a novel way. Apply a fresh layer of insight or try approaching the topic from a new angle or with a thought-provoking story.

“Your mission in any presentation is to inform, educate, and inspire,” said Robert Ballard, the oceanographer who discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. “You can only inspire when you give people a new way of looking at the world in which they live.”

We’ve all made mistakes like the ones described above. Nobody is immune to public speaking laziness.

But let’s learn from those boring presenters and pay homage to them by incorporating these five tips into our future presentations:

1. Provide analogies, but don’t stretch them too far
2. Wrap your data in stories
3. Rather than using text as a crutch, convey ideas with images
4. Incorporate your audience into your talk
5. Offer non-intuitive advice