Tools, tactics and techniques for when you’ve got presentations sussed – and you want to move them up to really make them have style and impact.
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’m writing this on a train. For me, that’s quite unusual, because I tend to use train journeys for consuming content rather than creating it. In part that’s because it’s easier to read my kindle or listen to podcasts than it is to find elbow room to use my laptop to write things and I …
I’m not particularly one for party games. I’ve had too many experiences of coming last. I guess it says more than I’d like to admit about me and my friends that that matters. But I do rather like Pictionary. For those of you who haven’t played, it’s a quick-fire game where partners (in teams, not …
Last week, I started to explore some of the work of Mayer about how to make presentations have more impact, in terms of what audience’s remember and can apply. There’s more though, and it’s all good stuff. In terms of the jargon, it’s what’s called “principles for fostering generative processing” – or to put it …
I’ve seen lots of doctors make presentations and the brutal version of this blog post could be, frankly “not much”. But that’s odd, because there’s a lot of good research that’s been carried out to see how to improve presentations for medical students. Let’s face it, they’ve got a lot of information to take in, …
Maya Angelou is pretty much my favourite poet. Not quite, but close. But she did write what is probably my favourite poem (Like Dust I Rise). Amongst the many things she’s famous for are pithy bits of wisdom, almost perfectly designed for sharing online. Perhaps one of the most commonly reposted goes like this: People …
Read more “Presentation rehearsal – learning from Maya Angelou”
This one is personal. Unusual for me there isn’t a bunch of research papers behind it (as far as I know no one has written any!) but it’s based on ten years of being a presentations trainer – not a speaker trainer. Well yes, I train speakers, but I think of myself as a presentations …
Foxtrot Oscar? Sorry, what? Well to be honest, I’ve just sworn. Quick badly in fact. If you know what I’ve done great, and welcome to the club. If you don’t let me explain that Foxtrot, Oscar, Whiskey and Tango are part of the phonetic alphabet used when you really, really, don’t want to have the …
Read more “Foxtrot Oscar presentations – or Whisky Tango Foxtrot”
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 …
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 …
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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