Emotion in your presentation: 7 ideas that resonate

Your audience nods, takes notes… but your presentation doesn’t truly move them. Especially with experts, emotion seems “not done” – until you realise they’re people too.

When you add emotion to your story, different parts of the brain literally light up. The emotion centre (amygdala) taps the memory centre on the shoulder: “This is important, store it.” What your audience feels stays much longer than what is just “interesting”.

And yet we still build presentations mainly around facts, models and charts. Strong content. Lukewarm response.
Nobody is against what you’re saying, but nobody feels excited either.

Maya Angelou put it perfectly: people will forget what you said and what you showed, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

Even your critical audience – researchers, doctors, engineers, policy makers – responds to emotion. With one condition: they immediately see through fake pathos and big words. So no overblown drama, but real emotion close to their world.

Below are 7 ways to turn a dry slide deck into an impactful presentation with emotion – clear, concrete and fully usable in a business context.

 

1. Start with a person, not with a model

We often open presentations like this: “In this model we distinguish three types of patients…”
Sounds smart. Feels… like nothing.

Try this instead:
“Sofie, 34, biomedical engineer. She is responsible for several trials and sleeps badly because of the error margins in her data.”
One person = one anchor.
Your audience gets a face, a situation, a context. They recognise themselves, a colleague or a patient. After that you can absolutely go to your model – but then the model already feels alive.

 

2. Share not only your decision, but also how it felt

Business presentations tend to focus on: “We decided to…”

Much stronger:

• What did that choice do to you?
• Where did you hesitate?
• What were you worried about?

For example: “We decided to pause the study. Not an easy call. I spent a few sleepless nights over it, because I knew how much work you had already put in. But the risk of drawing the wrong conclusions felt even worse to me." 
You bring the person behind the role to the front. That builds trust – it doesn’t make you weak.

Watch the pitfall: keep it short and relevant. No ten-minute emotional confession.

 

3. Share your obstacles – not just the success story

In many presentations everything looks logical in hindsight. As if every project goes in a straight line towards success. Nobody believes that. But almost nobody tells the real story. Your obstacles are exactly where people recognise themselves.

Example from my own story:
“After my illness and radiotherapy, quite a few people advised me not to continue with Presentation Lab. I sometimes felt really discouraged. I wondered: can I still do this? But that doubt actually sharpened what I want to do – helping people create strong presentations. Doing what I truly love is what helped me bounce back.”

You don’t have to present this dramatically – just calm, factual, honest. Your audience feels: this is real. And that sticks.

And importantly: your obstacles don’t have to be huge.
They can be things like:

• a pilot that failed
• a collaboration that was difficult
• a decision you waited too long to make

As long as it’s true and recognisable, it works.

 

4. Use concrete words – make people feel it

What sounds dull: “We improve the efficiency of the process.”

Nobody feels anything. Try this: “You gain an average of 4 hours a week. That’s the Friday where you can go home at 4 p.m. instead of 6 p.m.”

Or:
Not: “We improve data quality.”
But: “You no longer have to check 300 rows in Excel on Sunday night before you dare to show a graph.”

Or:
Not: “I love flowers.”
But: “I love orange lilies – they fit my interior perfectly.”

The more concrete you are, the more it lands in your audience’s head and body. You see the picture – and so do they.

 

5. Make your logistics human – admit where you had doubts

Many presentations are about logistics: planning, shifts, routes, volumes, staffing.
The risk: you get stuck in schemes and processes, while there is a lot of emotion underneath.

Think of decisions about:

• who works which shifts
• who still has to go out late in the evening
• where the peak hours fall
• who always gets the toughest shifts

We quickly put a sentence on a slide: “We optimised the logistics process.”
Looks neat. Feels like nothing.

In a presentation with emotion, you make it concrete and human:
“We changed the logistics schedule so that drivers are no longer on the road until 10 p.m. as a standard. The idea that they hardly saw their children during the week didn’t sit right with me. So now we deliver earlier to the main hubs and have one late team that signs up voluntarily. Everyone else is home by 6 p.m.”

This does carry emotion:

• you show where things used to hurt
• you show that logistics affects people, not just numbers

You can also briefly say where you doubted:

• “I wasn’t okay with them coming home late every single evening.”
• “I saw what it was doing to the team, and that didn’t feel right.”

That is much more interesting than just saying the process is now “more efficient”. Your audience understands the logistics, but more than that, they feel: someone thought about people here – not just systems.

Pitfall:
Don’t turn it into a meeting report. One sentence of doubt + one concrete example is enough. Then back to your content.

 

6. Choose the image with the strongest emotion

Not every image does something to your audience.

Not: an apple in a fruit bowl – neutral.
But: an apple that has been lying at the bottom of your son’s school bag for 7 days – everyone can almost see and smell it.

Check yourself:

• Does this image trigger anything?
• Or is it mainly pretty and “corporate”?

There’s a reason advertising images are so sought after. They are rarely meant to be purely rational – they are designed to make you feel something. That’s exactly what you want too: a PowerPoint presentation that moves your audience, not just informs them.
So choose the photo in your slides where the most happens in your audience’s mind – not necessarily the most polished stock photo.
Home-made photos are often much more interesting.

 

7. Humanise your graphs and numbers

Especially in scientific or technical presentations, the strong emotions are often hidden inside the graphs.
Example: you show a chart about sustainable mobility.

Not just: “We see a 27% decrease in car use for trips under 3 km.”

But also: “That means 300 fewer families in the traffic jams every morning. Less stress at the school gate. And yes, a little less shouting in the car.”

Small translation, big effect.
Your audience understands the numbers and feels the impact.

 

Important nuance for experts

Your audience is not hunting for pathos – they are hunting for credibility.
So:

• No overblown superlatives.
• No theatre.
• Yes: real doubts, real choices, real people.

Emotion here is not drama, but recognition.
You want your audience to think: “I have that too. I know this. This is me.” And that’s exactly when you get what you want – a presentation that stays with them.