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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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 …
Read more “Confidence without calm :)”
This is an embarrassingly simple tool for handing nerves, so that you can find your confidence. It’s particularly handy for when you’ve in the middle of some big event or other. It could be an interview, asking someone for a date or a raise, or a presentation. It works like this.. When you’re very nervous …
Read more “Confidence in the heat of the moment”
Worked up? Well, sort of. I’m thinking of how you tighten your muscles in Progressive Muscle Relaxation? (Let’s call it PMR for short.) This is a pretty short article because, frankly, it doesn’t take much explaining. Just do it. 🙂 [jcolumns] What’s PMR? There are lots of systems, definitions and so on, but according to …
Read more “Getting confidence by getting more worked up”
I don’t think I’m saying any strikingly new when I suggest that confidence can come from two sources – inside and outside. I’m not suggesting their totally independent, of course: for example, dressing nicely and being complimented that you look good is an external thing, but it can have an effect in your internal confidence. …
Read more “Confidence Month – inner and outer games”
Let’s start simple. I outlined what I mean by confidence here. And for me, assertiveness how you act – but before we look at the two together, we need to be sure what assertiveness is. What it isn’t is riding over other people, their needs and wants and rights. Demanding you get the best table …
Read more “Confidence Month – confidence vs assertiveness.”
More content coming 🙂 Keep watching this space! [jbox color=’red’ title=’Update box’] We’ll update this list when we publish new blogs. It’s the start of the month, so there’s only one other post so far 🙂 Confidence is how you feel – assertive is how you act. I’ve unpacked it in a blog post here – in …
Read more “CM”
With the launch of the upcoming Presentation Genius course, I’m getting a few questions about the workshop/training. (You don’t know about the course? See here.) I’ll answer them all individually, of course, but to try and save myself some work in the future (yes, honestly! 🙂 ), I’ve recorded some FAQ videos over the last …
Read more “Presentation Genius – Quick and dirty FAQs!”
and how the hell do you know? Let’s talk about success in presentations, and whether yours are any good. Because, let’s face it, one of the reasons we don’t like making presentation is the fear of being thought of as rubbish. That, in turn can make the situation worse, as we start to think, and …
Read more “Are your presentations any good?”