Welcome to the better presentations blog!
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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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 …
Read more “Stories (and authenticity) in Presentations”
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 …
Read more “handling distractions in your presentations”
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 …
Read more “Christmas”
TED is great. I love TED. I can lose myself for hours in the TED website if I’m not careful. What’s more, I can look myself in the eye afterwards and tel myself I’ve been doing “personal development”. Great. But while (most) TED talks are pretty darn cool (though TEDx is very, very mixed!) there’s …
Read more “Talking about TED presentations”
[jcolumns inbordercss=”1px dotted gray”] Well, it’s All Hallow’s Eve – or hallow’een as we tend to call it. Basically, that’s it. Confidence Month is over (for now! 🙂 ). Let’s wrap up the month with a short and simple observation… sometimes you have to JDI. Think about it – when you learned to ride a …
Read more “Wrapping up Confidence Month”
Let’s face it, technology can be one of those things that adds to our nerves and anxiety – we fear it won’t work; that it hates us; and that the evil gods of tech are waiting for the chance to humiliate us in front of everyone. The solution is simple. Don’t use technology you’ve not …
Read more “Confidence – trust the tech”