Tips for making better presentations in general with no specific theme or which are too wide-ranging to put into another category! ;)
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. :) )
Also, I have to be honest, this blog only gets updated every month or so. If you want a bit more, consider signing up for the (almost weekly) newsletter instead called "TalkTactics". You can also sign up for a bucketload of freebies too!
This month's most popular (and useful?) blog posts are:
Or scroll down if you're just browsing!
A friend of mine recently asked me for some advice about a podcast interview they were doing at the weekend. They’d not done one for a few years and wanted to be at their best. Below is the result. It was bashed out in a hurry to get it over to my friend so it’s …
I’m constantly asked how to “make my presentations interactive” because people “need to be more engaging”. Let’s set aside the fact that you don’t need to be interactive to be engaging for a moment, and look at how to be interactive – specifically being interactive by using questions – either digitally or physically. Something to think about …
I hate practicing my presentations. So does everyone else. Here I am arguing withe Sid The StoryParrot about putting it off until my wife’s gone out. Why? Because it’s embarrassing to get things wrong in front of people. In my defence, part of that is because the last time I did that for a Big …
Storytelling is a big part of presenting… and frankly of our whole culture. When we go to the pub we don’t sit around in silence, and a lot of that time is filled with sharing stories. Gossip is a story after all. Back-in-the-old days is nothing but stories. When-I-was young… you get the idea. From …
Ever heard someone say, “Find your story“? It’s a popular thing for presentation trainers at the moment as they can then sell you training to do just that. And if what you want is a wee bit of personal development, fine. It’s handy for a bit of feel-good and catharsis, too! You might even get …
Read more “Presentations about “your story”. What’s the problem?”
Presentations are often thought of as being rubbish ways to get over lots of messy information – the complex and complicated. Here’s how to handle it.
Cast your mind back to when you were at school. (Sorry!) Your teacher was almost certainly a dedicated, trained professional, specialising in how to get information into your head. With me so far? And yet despite that, your teacher didn’t just present information to you in a ‘once and done’ approach, right? Nope: I’m betting …
Read more “10 ways to make your presentation more memorable”
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 …
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 …