The good news is that whether you use Powerpoint, Google Slides, or any other software, slide design is fixable. A few specific changes to how you use slides will dramatically improve every presentation you give from this point forward. Here are the mistakes to stop making, and the principles to start applying.

There's an old study that gets cited in nearly every public speaking book ever written: more people are afraid of public speaking than of death. If they're at a funeral, they'd rather be in the casket than at the podium. Every other instrument is something separate from you. A violin, a guitar, a saxophone. If you make a mistake, you can blame the reed, the strings, the tuning. With public speaking, the instrument is you. That's exposed. That's vulnerable. That's also, paradoxically, what makes great public speaking moving in the first place.

This is the part of being a choir director that we tend to talk about least. We talk about rehearsal technique, audition strategy, conducting craft, recruitment. But repertoire selection is where most of the season's outcome is determined. A great director with bad repertoire produces a frustrated choir. A merely good director with well-chosen repertoire produces a strong season. The repertoire choices you make in summer determine the music your singers actually grow inside of all year.

The executive coaching industry is booming, and the communication-coaching subset of it is one of the fastest-growing categories. Every senior leader I know has at least considered hiring a coach. Many have hired one. Some have hired three or four over their careers, with widely varying results. The differences in coach quality are enormous, and the cost of choosing badly is high — not just the wasted money, but the reinforcement of patterns that the wrong coach helps you double down on instead of correct.

Pastors are not casual voice users. Most of you are speaking from a stage for thirty to fifty minutes on a Sunday, leading prayer at additional services, doing pastoral counseling all week, taking phone calls, meeting with leadership teams, teaching small groups in the evenings, and then going home to your family and using your voice some more. By the metrics that matter — hours per week using the instrument at performance volume — you are using your voice harder than most professional singers do. Singers on Broadway do eight shows a week and rest their voices the rest of the day. You don't get that luxury. You're on every day.

Choir auditions are one of the most accessible and one of the most misunderstood audition formats in vocal music. Singers walk in thinking they're being evaluated on the prettiness of their voice. They are not. Choir directors are evaluating something more specific, more practical, and more revealing about the singer in front of them. Understanding what they're actually looking for is the single biggest lever a choral singer can pull at audition time.

Choir singing is one of the most technically demanding vocal disciplines and one of the least understood. Soloists who can deliver an aria flawlessly often cannot blend cleanly in a choral section. The technical demands of ensemble singing are not lower than solo singing; they are different. The vocal habits that produce a great solo voice frequently undermine ensemble cohesion, and the singers who excel at both are the ones who consciously train the choral-specific technical layer.

Executives rarely think of themselves as professional voice users. They should. A typical senior leader spends six to eight hours a day in meetings, calls, video conferences, presentations, one-on-ones, and high-stakes negotiations. The cumulative voice load is comparable to a teacher's — without the awareness, the warmups, or the recovery habits that teachers slowly develop the hard way.

Understanding pitch is foundational to everything else you'll do as a singer or musician. Before you can develop range, control your voice across registers, or sing harmonies with other people, you need to grasp what pitch actually is and how the three basic categories of pitch (high, medium, and low) function in music.

Teachers are the most overworked professional voice users in the country. The National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association both report that 10–15% of teachers have a voice disorder at any given time, and roughly 1 in 10 teachers will eventually have to modify their job or leave the profession because of a voice issue. Teachers are at higher risk of voice disorders than singers. Most teachers do not know this.

Few professional voice users carry the load a pastor carries. A typical Sunday includes a sunrise service, the main service, sometimes a second main service, sometimes a third, often with a sermon delivered at projection volume for forty-five to sixty minutes each time. Add weekday counseling sessions, life-cycle events, hospital visits, board meetings, and the voice that walks into Monday morning is doing the equivalent of a Broadway performer's full week of shows.

Every audition you run is filtering not just for talent, but for confidence under audition conditions. Those are two different things, and most directors confuse them. Here's how to design auditions that find the talent you actually need.

He sang beautifully as a treble for years. He had a clear, ringing soprano or alto sound. He could sustain pitches with confidence. Then, sometime between fourth and eighth grade — or, increasingly often, well outside that traditional window — his voice started changing. His range shrank. His pitches became unstable. The notes he could comfortably sing one week were inaccessible the next. He started cracking embarrassingly in front of his peers. The reliable musician he was disappeared, replaced by a singer who seems to lose his voice every week.