This blog a resource for presenters — not pro-speakers, but real people who need to make presentations as part of their 'day job'.
I have to be honest, this blog only gets updated every month or so. If you want a bit more, sign up for the (almost) weekly newsletter instead called "TalkTactics".
What, you wanted a blog about making better presentations? Today? This close to Christmas? It would just have been full of corny jokes about presents-vs-presentations. I’ve got a better idea… Get offline. Find friends you’ve not told recently how much they matter to you, then tell them. Then find your other friends and tell …
One of my pet peeves when I’m training people in making awesome presentations is that when I ask the, they don’t know what they’re presentation is for. I get waffly answers relating to what it’s about, but that’s not the same thing at all. See this big, bad post. About a quarter of the way down …
Slides make bad handouts. We all know that (though a depressing number of presenters act as though they don’t, and still insist on giving slides as follow up material). And in any case, giving people handouts during your presentations sucks the energy out of the room in a big way, as the pieces of paper are …
Read more “Handouts and followups for your presentations. Enter Talkbook”
Right then… let’s face it. Most presentations fail because (as I’ve said until I’m blue in the face!) presenters don’t know what it is they’re trying to do. I’ve posted about that before and I’ll post about it again next week but here are the basics. Decide what effect you want to have in your …
For a long time, I ran the Presentation Skills Blog over on my training company’s site. As I write there are very nearly 450 posts! At a guess I’d say that barely 50 of them were self-indulgent, or adds of any kind (I may be flattering myself, of course) so that’s about 400 useful bits …
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 …
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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