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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“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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
How “big” should the stories be in our presentations? How “epic” and inspirational? The answer isn’t quite as spectacular as it might sound…
There’s a lot of tosh talked about body-language in presentations. To be honest, it’s not often something I get to work on with clients because there are so many things that are more important for “normal people” but one of the big observations about body language is that it’s not something you can “add on” to your …
I’m constantly asked how to “make my presentations interactive” because people “need to be more engaging”. Let’s set aside the fact that you don’t need to be interactive to be engaging for a moment, and look at how to be interactive – specifically being interactive by using questions – either digitally or physically. Something to think about …
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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