To stop your slides taking over a presentation, press the B key. It blanks the screen, every head in the room turns back to you, and you are in control again. Do it between points, and the slides become support instead of the show.
In a training I ran recently, I put up blank slides between my points, and the effect was instant. The moment the screen went blank, everybody looked back at me. That is the whole trick, and it keeps working because it is simply how eyes behave: they go to the brightest thing in the room, and when that thing disappears, they come to you.
A slide is a magnet for eyes
Think about what happens when you put words on a screen. The audience reads them. They read faster than you talk, so they finish early, get bored, and drift. Or they read ahead, and now you are saying something they already know. Either way, you have lost them for a moment, and a good deal of your authority with them.
Your slide is not neutral. It competes with you. And most of the time, it wins, because a bright rectangle is easier to look at than a person.
That is not a design tip. It is a power tip. The person who controls where the room is looking controls the room.
It is never a PowerPoint presentation
I say this to every group I train, because it changes how people prepare:
You are the presentation. The slides are an accessory, like a pointer or a glass of water. If you built your talk by opening a blank deck and typing, you built the wrong thing first. Start with what you want to say, to whom, and what you want them to do. Then ask which, if any, of those points are made better by something on a screen.
A big number is a good reason for a slide. A photo that makes people feel something is a good reason. A paragraph you plan to read aloud is not a reason. It is a script wearing a costume. (I have a whole piece on that: why you should not read your slides to the audience.)
How to use the B key without making it weird
People worry that a black screen will look strange. It does not. Audiences read it as a pause, which is exactly what it is. A few places it works well:
- When you tell a story. Nobody needs a bullet list behind a story. Blank the screen, tell it, then bring the slide back.
- When you take a question. The slide you showed ten minutes ago is not helping you answer. Blank it and look at the person asking.
- When you want a moment to land. You have said something that matters. Stop clicking. Let the room sit with you.
- At the very start. Open on a blank screen, or a title slide with almost nothing on it, so the first thing people attend to is your voice.
If you want a blank slide that is part of the deck rather than a key press, drop a plain black or white slide in at those moments. In many rooms you will have a clicker that does the same job. Whatever the tool, the principle holds: do not leave an old slide up when you are no longer talking about it.
Ask whether the slides help at all
This is the part people resist. I tell groups to ask themselves honestly whether a deck makes the talk better, or whether it is simply what everyone does. There was a world before PowerPoint, and people presented in it. They told stories, asked questions, and persuaded each other, all without a laser pointer.
Some people in the room will have a boss or a client who says, "Do you have your deck ready?" Fine. Have a deck. But you can still choose how much of the talk lives in it. One option I like for pitches and small meetings: send the deck ahead of time as a handout and spend the live time on conversation. For a story of a pitch that worked this way, read the pitch that won without slides.
And if you do keep the slides, keep them sparse. One idea per slide is a good rule, and I cover it in one idea per slide.
What it sounds like when slides take over
Here is the version I use to get a laugh and make the point. Imagine the presenter opens with:
Nobody would say that out loud. But that is the promise a text-heavy deck makes the moment it goes up. The audience hears it even if you do not say it. Blanking the screen is how you break that promise before it hurts you.
This works on video calls too
On a webinar or a Teams call, the same thing happens, only worse. Your face shrinks into a tiny box in the corner while the slide fills the screen. Stop sharing for a few minutes. Let people see you at full size. When I run a session online I will often say, "I can see all of you, by the way," because the people watching forget that there is a human on the other end. Then the room laughs, and they are back with me.
What to do next
Take the next talk you have coming up and mark three places where you will blank the screen. Practise saying those parts with nothing behind you. If it feels thin, that part probably needed to be a story, not a slide. If you want help turning a slide-heavy talk into one that holds a room, get a quick quote and we can talk through it, or read about executive presentation training.