Welcome to the better presentations blog!
I do my best to make this blog a resource for presenters - not pro-speakers, but real people who need to make presentations as part of their 'day job'. If there's something you really want to know about, just email me and I'll see what I can do (no promises except that I'll read your email - use simon@ and you can guess the rest of my address. :) )
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This month's most popular (and useful?) blog posts are:
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I’m a fan of the author Ursula Le Guin. What I didn’t know until recently was that she also did a lot of reviews. In her review of a book called “The mushroom at the end of the world” she observed that “Scientists and artists know that the way to handle an immense topic is …
Read more “Presentations and a finch’s beak”
Images can make your presentation rock. They can also bankrupt you. For example, the 500lb Silverback Gorilla of the image-being world is iStock and they start at £7/image for the absolute basics. For the (over-used) image of a woman looking out of a window while holding a coffee, it’s £20. Two of three of those …
Read more “Presentation Images”
Let’s start with something I tell you not to do in presentations – a long introduction I’m bordering on changing my position on AI. Until recently I’ve found its results pretty risible. If I ask it draw me a female high-jumper in action, for example, it gives her three legs. (On the other hand, more …
Read more “Using AI for making presentations”
“I’m frightened about making presentations” or worse, “I get stage fright”. No you don’t. Well, okay, you /might/ get stage fright, but Stage Fright is a very specific thing. The term’s been bastardised and watered down by people who should know better doing fear-based-marketing. What far more people experience is a normal, healthy dose of …
Read more “It’s not stage fright. Suck it up ;)”
You know the ones. The rags-to-riches story. The against-all-the-odds story. The bad-to-worse-to-victory story. We’re told to use them because they’re inspirational. Whoops, that turns out to be a mistake. Why? Because… Because pretty much be definition such a story deals with exceptional people over coming staggering odds. And, again by definition that means these people …
Read more “Story-telling myth-busting: the big hero story”
We’re often told by experts (for which read “well-meaning friends who’ve read it somewhere online”) that we should start our presentations with a big bang to grab the audience’s attention. A powerful story is often cited as one of the best ways of doing this. Alternatives are a challenging, shocking fact or a provocative question. …
Read more “Story-telling myth-busting: the big start”
This was supposed to be a series of posts about the process of speaking at the summit that I could use for marketing. Marketing? Me? Just imagine! Instead it’s just one long unloading. Enjoy! If you’re not familiar with it, the Speaking Business Summit is Oscars of my industry – or at least that’s how …
Read more “Speaking at the Speaking Business Summit 2024”
We are pattern recognition machines. It’s how we out-survived everything else on the planet trying to eat us. If you’re not sure, take a look at the make of this care. I’m pretty sure that (a) you can read it as Dacia, and (b) those letters have almost no relationship at all to the shapes …
Read more “Using Patterns in your Presentation”
A friend of mine recently asked me for some advice about a podcast interview they were doing at the weekend. They’d not done one for a few years and wanted to be at their best. Below is the result. It was bashed out in a hurry to get it over to my friend so it’s …
Read more “Podcast interviews – some advice”