You– not your slides– need to be the focus of your presentation. That’s just a fact.  Sorry to confirm you worst fears, but whether you’re successful or not depends on your performance. If you’re relying on your slides to make your case for you, if they are the most important thing about your presentation, you’re doing it wrong.  But many presenters use their slides (or a script they can read or memorize) to hide behind instead of taking advantage of the live event in order to engage their audiences and make an emotional connection with them.  Remember that this is your best shot at persuading them– facts on slides aren’t going to do it for you.

Here’s the good news.  By the time you actually get around to delivering your presentation you should have already done all of the groundwork that will make it possible for you to succeed.  You’ve refined your objective, figured out your audience, researched your topic, written your talk, designed your materials and practiced your delivery.  By this point you should know your talk backwards and forwards.  What could go wrong?