Hello everybody, my name is Zachary Cohn and I'm here to talk about how to structure a great presentation. So I've been on the board of Ignite Seattle for about 10 years and in that time I've worked with over 400 of our speakers. And there's something I've noticed a lot of times when they come to us at the first mentoring session, they really struggle with figuring out exactly what they want to say. They know their topic but they're not exactly sure what story they're trying to tell or what they would stories they want to tell within it. So I did up to method that I share with them and I'm going to share with you all too. I've used this for me when I've given talks at TEDx Seattle on the Ignite stage and at a couple international keynotes. It's worked really well for me and that's why I'm going to share it all with you. So the big mistake that I see people making is they try to jump into working on their slides first. And it's a really fun thing to do. It's fun to make something make pretty slides. But people tend to jump into that before they even know exactly what story they want to tell and what they want to say. So what I want you to do is grab a sharpie and some post a notes and I want you to write down the major beats of your talk. Now a beat is sort of a major concept or idea sort of the plot points of your talk. If your talk was Star Wars, your beats might be Luke meets Obi-Wan. He rescues Princess Leia. He joins the rebels. Then he blows up the death star. Those would be the major plot points of your talk, major beats. So you're going to write all the major beats down, put them up on a row on the wall. And as you look at them, you're going to decide what order they should go in. And you can rearrange them. You can add some new ones. You can cut some if you need to. And that's told OK, because they're posted notes. And that's really easy to do. As you're writing these down, it is important to keep these short. These are concepts. They're ideas. They're not full sentences. So once you've written down all of your beats, you're going to get a new color post a note. And you're going to write down all of the subbeats, all of the things you want to say about that beat. These could be stories. They could be facts. They could be ideas or specific phrases or supporting evidence. Basically anything you want to talk about that pertains to that beat. Write it down on a different post a note. Then you're going to take all those post a notes and you're going to put them up in a column under the beat that they were connected to. And you're going to do this for all of them. Once it's up there, you can look at it. You can rearrange them. You can notice that something is missing. Maybe you've got too much information or something actually belong somewhere else or breaks out in a new beat. It's really easy to rearrange all these things. So you're going to want to use different color post a notes to help you visually differentiate between your beats, your subbeats. And you can use a third color to remind you about pictures or image ideas or a particular presentation thing you want to make sure you're remembered if that's appropriate for your talk. Now that you've done it for all of your beats, it's time to practice practicing with this method is really easy. You can see the top left corner and you're going to look at that thing that you wrote down that's going to jog your memory about what you wanted to say. And you're going to say that thing and then you're going to move to the next post a note and the next post a note and you're going to go from the very beginning to the very end. And then you've done your practice session, which is going to be really easy to do. And you're going to keep going through this. And as you do, you may notice again that some things just aren't working in your talk. It's really easy to iterate on your talk and modify different parts of it. You can just rearrange post a notes. You can remove one. You can add a new one. It's very, very easy to make any changes you need to make. As you're going through and you're getting a little bit more consistent, you can even add timings on the wall. This conserve as a good mark to hit to make sure you're keeping the right pace. It can also be really important if you're giving anything like see up a nice style talk where you have to hit your certain timings. And you're going to be practicing and it's easy to practice by just reading it off the wall. But as you get more more comfortable, you can start to turn away from the wall. And at some point, you'll be able to give your entire talk without looking at the wall at all. And that is when you're ready to start working on your slides. And so at this point, you'll know what visuals you need to support you and the points you're trying to make, rather than trying to shoehorn a talk into the visuals that you've already created. And you're trying to make that fit. You'll rearrange parts of your talk many times. And this method of leaving your slides to the end means that you can avoid all that inevitable rework that you're going to have to do on the designing of the slides. Because you didn't design the slides till the talk was already done. So that's my method for how to design a great structure for a presentation. And so, you can get a presentation, think about this, and it's going to help you create a well balanced, well structured presentation. Thanks.