In this video you will learn a presentation expression that will show you how to start your presentation with a story, and you will also learn a second expression to show you how to transition from your presentation story to your presentation. It’s a jam packed video! But hopefully, you learn how to start your presentation with a story and try it in your next presentation.

Why a story?

Starting a presentation with a story is a great way to engage your audience. Learning how to get your audience’s attention and engaging them is usually a hard thing to do. Telling a story at the start of your presentation gets the audience’s attention as they may not realise it’s a part of your presentation. They think it is just “story time” so they pay attention to you! Nice, huh?

Who is this for?

This presentation expression is great for any presentation, especially if you are in school or for business, too. School presentations tend to be the same… Well, for that matter, so are most business presentations. The point is if you need to give a presentation and you want to start your presentation well and get your audience’s attention, then you should learn how to start your presentation with story.

What is the expression to start the presentation?

This is actually a pretty simple and well known English expression that is used when we want to explain something before talking about our main point. What we say is, “Before I get started, let me tell you about…,” or we can say, “Before I get started, I want to tell you about…,”

Your audience will know that you have something you want to talk about without realising it is actually a part of your presentation. Sneaky and effective!

How to transition back to the presentation

Once you have finished your story, you need to connect what your story was about with your presentation. It’s important that you planned and prepared your story to match your presentation topic or content, or else this won’t work!

Anyway, what you say after your story is, “And that’s when I realised…,”

“And that’s when I realised…,” is something you say when you discover something, so your presentation topic must be about something you discovered or realised.

How to use it

Here is the example from the video… If my presentation topic is about motivation, then I could say:

“Before I get started, I want to talk about how much my son enjoys playing with dominoes (he really does!). He can spend all day playing with his dominoes, lining them up and knocking them down, making all kinds of designs… all day long because he loves it so much.”

Then I transition by saying, “And that’s when I realised that motivation is related to playfulness and passion.”

Pretty cool, right!?

So I hope you now have an understanding of how to use a story to start a presentation. This can be for a school or work presentation. It really doesn’t matter. The important thing is preparing your story and figuring out how to connect your story with your presentation topic or content.

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Thanks.