Tactics and tools for when you’re new to presenting and/or don’t know where to start with your presentations
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 is a bit of a personal-reaction blog, because a lot of people are asking me about how to make presentations or have meetings for that matter in rooms where there are lots of distractions. (Dedicated presentation-spaces are few and far between!) There are lots of things you can do and while some of them …
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 …
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!”
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 …
In the previous post in this series, I looked at why presentations without scripts were generally not a such a good thing. This time, I’m looking at what you can do instead. Why do you want a script for your presentation? The main reason – by which I mean the reason almost everyone says they …
I’m a member of an online support group, where there’s been a conversation recently about whether or not scripts are a good thing in presentations. Early opinion was divided – some said “scripts are a good thing in presentations” and there was the obviously opposite camp who said “scripts are bad thing”. At one point, …
Creating a presentation is one thing – checking it is another. (Notice that I don’t say ‘writing’ your presentation, because you shouldn’t be thinking that way.) The painful fact is, however, that mistakes on your slides can give people who don’t want to listen or change their ways an excuse not to do so undermine …
Read more “Proofing (and otherwise checking) your presentation”
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 …
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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