Give your audience a break: presentations that actually form connections and spare the brain!
There’s something taxing about this set of bullet points below, can you guess it?
To read this slide, your eyeballs are thrown into the passenger seat of a 16-year-old learning to drive a stick shift.
They’re jolting.
Stopping.
Jerking forward
Thank goodness your eye balls are being saved from the embarrassment of stalling out on a hill, in a foreign country, holding up traffic of yelling Belgians. The human brain, which uses its most dotted upon subjects - the eye balls - likes to read English from left to right, and from shortest to longest.
When you ask your brain, and it’s subjects (the eye balls) to read bullet points that are medium, short, long, long, medium long, short, short, medium, you tax the brain. Because B, your friend (the brain), is lazy (it is) and likes patterns, it’ll throw up its non-existent hands and say “no thanks, I’m out.”
It’s at this point that your audience stops reading your bullet points.
Give B an automatic car to drive with smooth transitions and simplified functions:
Park
Drive
Neutral
Reverse
Notice how much easier it is to read these in a cascading order?
Notice also how your eyes gently float from left to right, shortest to longest?
This greatly pleases your brain’s cognitive load.
You want to do everything you can to placate, pet, and reassure your brain’s cognitive load.
What’s cognitive load?
It’s the amount of mental effort your brain needs to process information.
Think of it like the effort it would take you to run a 5k (that’s 3.1 miles). If you’re a runner, that’s a reasonable, manageable distance. You could repeat this same distance tomorrow, or in two days, with no trouble.
A 5k for a runner is a metaphorically low cognitive load.
Now, if the extent of your running is from your couch to the Roku remote, this distance likely seems egregiously long. You’re going to altogether pass on the effort it’ll take to run 3.1 miles. Not even a DNF, a full on no-attempt.
A 5k for a non-runner is a metaphorically high cognitive load.
Whenever you present, speak, and communicate in meetings, you want to consistently consider how you’re impacting your audience’s cognitive load.
Let’s look at this from the running metaphor perspective again
When you present, are you asking your audience to run a 5k when you know they run 10ks every week?
(^manageable, reasonable, and memorable)
Or are you asking them to run a 5k when they get winded walking up a flight of stairs?
(^overwhelming, excessive, and overcomplicated)
Too often in business, corporate America, and on stages, presenters overload their audience’s cognitive load.
You ask them to run a 10k, or longer - often a marathon.
You ask them to cognitively remember too much information.
Their brains, quite actually, don’t have the ability to hold all the information you’re giving them.
You’ve heard this called by another name: information overload.
The usual suspects are:
💀 Data
💀 Facts
💀 Charts
💀 Graphs
💀 Numbers
How cognitive load impacts your audience, and your presentations
When you overload your audience with information, you’re not just filling slides; you’re creating a barrier to understanding.
High cognitive load forces your listener’s brains to expend so much energy trying to process everything that they simply can’t keep up.
Take a look at what happens:
Lost clarity: Your audience can’t differentiate the important points from the noise.
Lost impact: The key takeaways you spent hours perfecting are forgotten in the shuffle.
Lost engagement: Their attention drifts because they’re too overwhelmed to stay focused.
Now, think about your audience.
Are you designing your presentation like a 5k for experienced runners, where the pace feels natural and the flow keeps them engaged?
Or are you unknowingly building - and asking them to run - a marathon full of obstacles, where most people won’t make it to the finish line?
The good news is that you can reduce cognitive load and make your content more digestible, memorable, and actionable.
The Solution? Simplify to Amplify
Structure your presentations to sync with the brain’s natural processing flow. You make it easier this way for your audience to connect with your message. Go for:
Cascading bullet points for smooth readability.
Simple, clean slides that complement—not compete with—your spoken words.
Strategic storytelling that magic-wand-transforms data into something relatable and engaging.
The result? Some good old-fashioned Bippity Boppity Boo. Your message becomes an easy 1 mile yog that anyone can walk, skip, or run, remember, and act on.
Make your team’s presentations unforgettable
I teach corporate workshops centered around hitting the goldilocks of cognitive load. Using brain science principles like cognitive load theory, the mere exposure effect, and social influence, I show teams how to structure content so it connects effortlessly with their audiences.
Let’s nix cramming slides with text and insert telling a story so good even your toughest audience leans in.
Click here to book a meeting about your team’s speaking skills workshop.
PS: Do you still think about that time your content made someone’s eyes glaze over? Same. Let’s make sure that never happens again. Click here to book time with me.
Hannah Michelotti is a public speaking and presentation coach in Portland, Oregon. She helps corporate professionals put personality back in their presentations so they can engage and persuade any audience.
When she’s not teaching public speaking and presentation skills, you can find her climbing up, skiing down, or running around mountains in the pacific northwest.
