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You might have heard of the VAK model – the idea that people are either Visual Learners, Aural Learners or Kinesthetic Learners. It’s largely tosh and what you should be doing is matching the medium (V, A or K) to the message, of course. I rant about it here when I suggest you don’t need …
It’s a tricky thing. There are some huge advantages to using music, but some pretty significant pitfalls, too. So here’s your guide to using music well, and avoiding the things can can go wrong. Why use music? An overview Music is intended and designed to be an emotional phenomena. That means you can use it …
As Saturday, June 1st is officially #SaySomethingNiceDay, I thought it might be “interesting” to research (and blog about!) something I’ve personally always found difficult – how to give feedback on a presentation. As that’s a significant part of my work as a presentations trainer, it’s something I’ve done a lot of, but I’m not really …
This post comes in two parts. Part one is about not starting with any “why” at all and the second part is about not starting your presentation with your “why”. The start of your presentation isn’t the right time to tell people ‘why’ they should be interested There’s a whole lot of tosh online about …
Read more “Presentations – don’t start with why! Simon sinek was sort of wrong!”
Let’s be clear, there’s no silver bullet. If fantastic presentations were as easy as we hope, I’d be out of a job… but while the how you do things is more complicated, the what you should should do to get better presentations is more straight-forward. And even just knowing what you’re trying to do will …
Read more “Better presentations – the simple three part model to make them”
There’s something about being perfect that set’s people’s teeth on edge. Perhaps it’s the idea that if something is perfect it must be artificial – not authentic. It’s true both in presentation in real life. Let me give you a couple of examples. About a year ago, my Mum died. At her funeral, my younger …
I’m not a huge fan of “the X secrets to…” for anything. Inevitably the real world is more complicated than the blog post with that kind of title has suggested. Maybe it’s me, but it seems that posts like that always finish with an extra step of “realise you don’t know how to do it …
It’s nearly conference season, so here we go… I have to confess I’ve been driven to write this so that I can sleep better and let my frustrations somewhere to go. Last year I attended some conferences where I wanted to scream at the presenter “I’m sure what you’re saying would be helpful but I …
When we talk about an image being ‘isolated’ we mean that the main object of the image isn’t cluttered up by a messy background – usually there’s no background at all. The image of the girl to the right is isolated. If you want to show someone bored, there’s a good chance that this image, or …
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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