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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Maya Angelou is one of my all-time favourite authors. She’s written some drop-dead astonishing stuff. Her autobiography runs for seven books and stops when she started to be a writer. (Go read them.) Writing about writing, she said, was a bit of a mess. That means that presentations about presenting are a PITA. For a …
What’s the five day challenge? It’s a set of emails, one a day for five days. There’s cracking material in the emails and what’s more, they’ll signpost you to content both specially created for the challenge and part of our bigger training courses. Some of the questions we’ll challenge you with aren’t easy. Some of …
Introduction Let’s face it, unless your whole motivation for giving a presentation is to get from one end to the other without die-ing, falling off the stage or getting abducted by aliens, you want there to be some outcome from your presentation, right? There needs to be a point to it – and that point …
Read more “Your presentations don’t work and here are the most common reasons”
TED is great. I love TED. I can lose myself for hours in the TED website if I’m not careful. What’s more, I can look myself in the eye afterwards and tel myself I’ve been doing “personal development”. Great. But while (most) TED talks are pretty darn cool (though TEDx is very, very mixed!) there’s …
[jcolumns inbordercss=”1px dotted gray”] Well, it’s All Hallow’s Eve – or hallow’een as we tend to call it. Basically, that’s it. Confidence Month is over (for now! 🙂 ). Let’s wrap up the month with a short and simple observation… sometimes you have to JDI. Think about it – when you learned to ride a …
Let’s face it, technology can be one of those things that adds to our nerves and anxiety – we fear it won’t work; that it hates us; and that the evil gods of tech are waiting for the chance to humiliate us in front of everyone. The solution is simple. Don’t use technology you’ve not …
There are many good things about the internet but one of the less good things is that it’s almost impossible to get a definitive version of the quote you want. In this instance, I want to quote a tennis player – but the point of this blog is that no matter how un/confident you feel, …
RP – could be Received Pronunciation, but on this occasion it stands for Reflective Practice. Great, but what’s Reflective Practice? At it’s most simple, it’s the habit of looking back at something (performance, project, meeting, whatever) and asking yourself how it went – but doing it in a structured, objective and helpful way. Why would …
Read more “Confidence and Reflective Practice in your presentation”
Amy Wood Brooks works at the Harvard Business School and in 2014 she wrote a paper called “Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement”. Not the sexiest title for a document but the content is pretty darn exciting. She was looking at handling nerves and so on – and doing so in a pretty hardcore …
Leading a team or doing your own marketing? Awesome! But not having the impact on the world you think you should? Less Awesome.
StoryMaking is my new book that looks at how to tactically use stories in your presentations, your marketing and your sales. It's my usual light-weight style over heavy-weight research!
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The StoryMaking System is the result of reading (in mind-numbing detail) over 400 peer-reviewed research papers, dozens of books, thousands of ours of observational research and blood sweat and tears!
It's the framework for designing a presentation which gives you the fastest way to getting something is (almost) guaranteed to work. It gives your audience what they need - and only what they need - to be impacted.
The key elements are:
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