Tools for how to deliver your presentations better – the bits when the audience is in the room rather than the preparation.
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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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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
It’s pretty common to be afraid of presenting. Some surveys put it as the most common fear; others as the third most common. But whenever people are asked, presenting is somewhere up at the top, in the company of snakes, bugs, and heights. I spend a lot of time helping people deal with the fears …
Let’s talk load – cognitive load. You can pick up the origins and history of the idea here, but for now, let’s concentrate on how it applies to making business presentations. The key concept is that the human brain has a limited capacity for processing information (while it’s listening to a presentation/communication such as teaching or …
Sex… Not during your presentation (obviously?) but before it. Back at the start of 2006, researcher Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of Paisley, reported his research into sex and stress. 24 women and 22 men kept a diary about their sex lives – how much and what kind – for two weeks. And at …
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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