That’s because the audience fails to emotionally connect with the message, even though they may agree with it.

That’s part of the premise behind a new book called Switch: How to Change Things, When Change is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath, the brother duo that produced the 2007 beststeller Made to Stick.

In order for people to not only want to change, but also be motivated to do so, the authors say you need to appeal to two types of personalities: the Elephant (people’s emotional side) and the Rider (the rational side).

The authors acknowledge this is difficult, because the Elephant often overpowers the Rider. When you fail to stick to a diet or push the snooze button, that’s your elephant overpowering your rider, they note.

To change behavior, you’ve got to direct the Rider, motivate the Elephant and shape the Path. If you reach your audience’s Rider, but not their Elephant, they will have direction without motivation.

How do you develop a presentation packed with the proper emotional/rational combination?

Some people think the persuasive presentations is filled with analytical data, with a formula like:

ANALYZE > THINK > CHANGE

But that formula will only work for small changes, the authors note. For big changes, however, the Heath brothers, citing a study called the “The Heart of Change,” say the formula is:

SEE > FEEL > CHANGE

To illustrate this, the authors describe Jon Stegner’s dilemma in the Heart of Change study. He was tasked to correct the poor purchasing habits of a large manufacturer. He discovered, in one example, all the departments were buying work gloves from many different distributors at a wide range of costs: $5 – $17. The no-brainer solution would be for all departments to buy the same $5 gloves.

But how do you motivate all the people in charge of purchasing to care enough to do so?

The ANALYZE > THINK > CHANGE approach would be for someone to produce a spreadsheet showing all 424 gloves and their costs.

But the SEE > FEEL > CHANGE approach would be to do what Stenger did. He collected the 424 different types of gloves and tagged them with the price tag. Then the gloves were gathered up, brought to the boardroom and dumped on the conference table. Stegner invited all the division presidents to come visit the Glove Shrine.

That’s what the Heath brothers call making “a gut-level emotional connection.”

In your next presentation, ask yourself: Am I making a gut-level emotional connection with the audience?

But if you think about it, there’s really only one reason: to have impact.

Many people dread being forced to endure PowerPoint presentations, because they are often painfully boring and poorly prepared. But they don’t have to be. I will be revealing some secrets to preparing engaging presentations with outstanding visual slides this week at a few locations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

On Wednesday, I will be presenting at L.E.B. Toastmasters, located at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The meeting runs from 7:15 pm – 9 pm. Guests are welcome.

On Thursday, I will be at the HP/Hilltop Speakers (Toastmasters), located on the Hewlett Packard Campus, Building 20, 3000 Hanover Street, Palo Alto. The meeting runs from noon to 1 pm. Guests are welcome.

On May 6, I will be customizing the workshop for lawyers who attend the Legally Speaking Toastmasters in Palo Alto. They meet at the Keller Williams Realty office, 505 Hamilton Ave., Suite 100.

Protoasties, an Advanced Toastmasters for Professionals Who Speak, has settled on a stable new home at Trapeze Restaurant in Burlingame, Calif. Meetings resumed in February, following a rocky 2009, stemming partly from the closure of the Portofino Grill, the club’s former longtime meeting location in Foster City.

Many of the 2009 regulars have returned and a rejuvenated leadership team is in place, including myself as president, Robert Tang as treasurer, Jeffrey Bruno (vice president of education) and Kimi Ziemski (vice president of public relations).

The club meets on the same day and time as before: the second and fourth Tuesdays of every month, from 6:30 pm – 9 pm.

Professionals join Protoasties because they are driven to make their presentations and speaking engagements stand out. They know that this is the fast-track to increasing their sales, raising venture capital money, motivating their employees, and getting an edge on their competition.

Members of Protoasties are professional speakers, presentation skills trainers or people who present in a professional capacity. They serve as CEO’s, corporate board members, entrepreneurs, published authors, sales/marketing executives, among other disciplines.

Protoasties was launched in 1998 as a platform for members of the Northern California chapter of the National Speakers Association to sharpen their speeches and presentations through peer feedback before hitting the road. Protoasties was founded by NSA Hall of Fame speaker Patricia Fripp and Craig Harrison, founding board president of Pro-Trac, NSA/NC’s speaker college.

As an advanced Toastmasters club, most Protoasties members have earned at least CC status (completed the Competent Communicator manual), through another Toastmasters club, or have already mastered certain public speaking fundamentals. Although you may not yet qualify for membership, if you are aspiring to join some day, you are welcome to come as a guest.

Meeting Format: Unlike the traditional Toastmasters club, which splits time evenly between prepared speeches and table topics, Protoasties allows its members to rehearse longer than the typical 6-8 minute speech. In addition, a roundtable of members may verbally critique the speech, rather than a single evaluator, which is the norm at most Toastmasters chapters. This often reduces the amount of time available for table topics, a two-minute impromptu speaking exercise, designed to sharpen skills in communicating under pressure.

Incorporating video to your presentation has many powerful benefits to keep your audience engaged. It’s a great way to illustrate a point, or even show visually rather than only tell how something has occurred.

In fact, it’s a great way for “businesspeople… to show new stores or products in action or to show interviews with customers,” notes design guru Garr Reynolds in his new book, Presentation Zen Design, which is sort of sequel to his 2008 best-selling book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery.

Reynolds says adding video to a long presentation is especially useful to break up the pace, since research shows audiences’ attention tend to drift after about ten minutes, unless some aspects of the presentation are altered.

If you are a Mac user, embedding video (from your movie folder) onto a slide in Keynote 2009 is a simple drag and drop process (see video tutorial).

PowerPoint 2010, which is expected to be released in June as part of Office 2010, promises to include the ability to embed videos. A beta version is already available from the Microsoft site.

Presentation Zen Design: Simple Design Principles and Techniques to Enhance Your Presentations includes other great tips on designing effective presentations that contain text, graphs, color and images.

Reynolds first book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery, provided the framework for planning, putting together and delivering presentations.

A friend of mine spilled coffee down his white polo shirt moments before taking the stage for a presentation. Quick on his feet, he opened his speech explaining his dining mishap. Then went into his material.

This was a great technique: to allow the audience to notice the stain, and then forget it. If he had ignored the stain, the audience wouldn’t have. They’d be thinking: Does he know about it? How’d it happen? Has he been wearing that shirt all day?

Rarely fonts can make a presentation, but if misused, they certainly can ruin a presentation, just like a distracting stained shirt.

Choosing the appropriate font for your slides is important, because the right font will make your text easy to read. But even more importantly, it can keep your audience focused on your message. That’s because a bad font or misuse of fonts are often distracting.

Here are some basic font rules to follow:

1. Keep it simple: Don’t mix font styles. If you find the need to use more than one font, make sure they are complimentary fonts (e.g. – Arial and Arial Bold)
2. Serif vs. Sans-Serif: Serif fonts have  tails on the edge of the letters. By contrast, sans-serifs don’t (sans means “without”). Serif fonts (e.g. – Time New Roman) are commonly used in magazines, because they are easier to read when there is a lot of text. However, on a PowerPoint or Keynote slide, it’s best to use a sans-serif font. Some of the most common are: Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma and Verdana.
3. Don’t capitalize full words: Because it’s like screaming at your audience. Instead, use bold or italics to emphasize a word or thought.
4. Font Size: Try to avoid using a font smaller than 30 point. If you need to reduce the font to squeeze all the text on a slide, chances are you’re using too much text. As an alternative, replace most of the text with a visual that indicates the same message.

Following these steps should keep your audience focused where you want them to be: on your message, rather than on your coffee stain.

Whenever you hear someone describe Apple CEO Steve Jobs, they often use words like “charismatic,” “showmanship” “electrifying presenter.” His presentations look so effortlessly that people often believe it’s innate.

But that’s hardly the case. Steve Jobs is no doubt one of the world’s best presenters, but that’s because he is relentless at rehearsing and refining his presentation until every aspect shines.

BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo examines many aspects of Jobs’ presentation techniques as well as his tireless preparation in his new book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience.

Gallo analyzed dozens, if not hundreds, of Steve Jobs’ keynotes and other presentations, which resulted in Gallo crafting a playbook, per se, on how you can learn similar techniques to electrify an audience.

Most speeches fall into four categories: informative, inspirational, persuasive or to entertain. Gallo notes that Jobs aims to cover at least three in every speech.

“Steve Jobs presentation is very much like a dramatic play – a finely crafted, well-rehearsed performance that informs, entertains and inspires,” Gallo writes.

Aside from delivery and preparation techniques, Gallo also covers how Jobs uses storytelling to grip his audiences as well as prepare outstanding visual slides to complement each story. No bullet points.

Related Article:
7 Tips to Sell Ideas The Steve Jobs Way

If you struggle with time management, perhaps a presentation I recently developed for a variety of audiences will be useful to you. It focuses on Goal-Oriented Time Management, and the method can be used to make your busy life more manageable, to jumpstart a career move (change) or even to develop a talent.

Presentation design expert Garr Reynolds posted a fascinating blog item today about the kaizen approach to improve, or ways to continuously strive to improve your presentation skills. (BTW – many of the 15 tips can be applied in other areas of your life or career beyond public speaking.)

In his lengthy blog item, he stresses the importance of daily, continuous steps toward a goal are far more valuable than most people think.

“Tiny improvements are o.k.,” he writes. “Over the long-term, these add up to great improvements.”

Reynolds is a former Apple Computer manager, author of Presentation Zen and a marketing professor at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan. As a result, his design methods are often heavily influenced by the Japanese culture.

If you ever wondered why some presentations and keynote speakers really connect with you, it’s often because they use the power of storytelling and great images (rather than bulletpoints) that help their audiences to visualize their message.

In this fascinating Ted Talk recently posted online, information designer Tom Wujec discusses why animation, graphics and illustrations are powerful ways to create meaning for audiences emotionally.

One of the key points that drives home Tom’s message is in a slide shown half way through the talk about the fact that we make meaning by seeing. If you consider that for the next time you prepare a slide deck, remember Tom’s three points:

1. Use images to help clarify what we are trying to communicate.
2. Make the images interactive so we engage more fully
3. Augment your memory by creating a visual persistence