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".
I think we’re all agreed that presentations are intended to do something, right? Better presentations make that outcome more likely – don’t they? We don’t stand up and present (or sit !) just for entertainment’s sake. So why do we spend so much of our time faffing about with our presentations instead of getting the …
I while ago I presented at a big multi-speaker conference, and the speakers got compared… it’s inevitable in a way, I suppose. It wasn’t the speakers who were comparing each other (except to help each other out, nicely)… it was some people in the audience. It’s absolutely natural and inevitable! But there was one particular set of …
Read more “I wasn’t the most impressive presenter at the conference”
TEDx presentations are a special kind of presentation – here’s mine. It was recorded during the Covid19 lockdown, so there was an empty audience! Eeeeek!
“What do you want your presentation to do?” It’s not a hard question – well not any more than “What’s the meaning of life?”. 🙂 Typically, when I ask it, the answers I get are to do with process, not outcome – and that’s entirely naturally and normal. It’s my job to get past that …
Read more “designing your presentation with just one question… and then more questions”
Content and structure are the Cinderellas of presentations. Everyone fusses about Delivery but that’s not where the bread-and-butter of presenting happens. The real magic lies in knowing what to say and what order to say it in. So here’s a simple-but-powerful tool that’s going to make your presentation structure… well… better. It’s about a five minute …
This is a simple blog with simple ambitions! It exists purely as a place for you, gentle reader, to get hold of all the free material I’ve created so far for the. The Reluctant Storyteller itself isn’t free, but these are the free bits. (Most of them are one-take live recordings shot during the Corona-Virus …
It’s all about the story, we’re told. Tosh. Stories are great – fantastic even – and they’re an amazingly powerful tool in your presentation tool kit but they’re not the answer to everything. They might be the closes thing there is, but they’re not everything 😉 One of the reasons is that the people who …
Intro I did an interview recently with the wonderful (and lovely) Geoff Nicholson for his podcast, talking about the new #ReluctantStoryteller project I’m working on. I’ve popped this into a quick video if you want to watch for three minutes instead of reading 🙂 It’s a the bottom of this post. Step zero This is …
There’s a lot of crap presentations training around at the moment saying “tell stories”… just “tell stores”. That’s about as much use as saying “be tall” to someone struggling because they can’t reach the top shelf. I used to have a problem with Nike’s slogan of “just do it” because I feared it encouraged people …
Read more “Story Matrix for Presentations: A Framework for Using Stories the Right Way”
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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