Welcome to the presentations training blog!
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".
This is a simple blog with simple ambitions! It exists purely as a place for you, gentle reader, to get hold of all the free material I’ve created so far for the. The Reluctant Storyteller itself isn’t free, but these are the free bits. (Most of them are one-take live recordings shot during the Corona-Virus …
Read more “Reluctant storyteller resources”
Intro I did an interview recently with the wonderful (and lovely) Geoff Nicholson for his podcast, talking about the new #ReluctantStoryteller project I’m working on. I’ve popped this into a quick video if you want to watch for three minutes instead of reading 🙂 It’s a the bottom of this post. Step zero This is …
Read more “storytelling – the four steps”
There’s a lot of crap presentations training around at the moment saying “tell stories”… just “tell stores”. That’s about as much use as saying “be tall” to someone struggling because they can’t reach the top shelf. I used to have a problem with Nike’s slogan of “just do it” because I feared it encouraged people …
Read more “Story Matrix for Presentations: A Framework for Using Stories the Right Way”
Credibility as a presenter comes from how much your audience like you (Warmth) and how much they trust you (Competence). You need both.
A while ago, I started to explore some of the reasons for not using not using stories in your presentations (and a few other things). Now I’d like to expand on that. Let’s assume that you’re using them for a good reason, so the question now becomes “why aren’t the stories in my presentation working?” …
Read more “why telling stories in your presentations isn’t working”
What’s an identity variable? I self-identify as male. I self-identify as married. An identity variable is something that is you use to build your self image. If I looked in the mirror and found that instead of a six-feet-tall white man I could see a five foot tall woman I’d be very, very confused! Personal …
Read more “presentations and identity variables”
How your room is set up makes a huge difference to how well your presentation is likely to go. Lots of it is obvious but some not…
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about interacting with the slides themselves (that’s a different blog). I’m talking about interacting with your audience when your presentation uses slides. After all, one of the big things that Prezi claims is that it allows you to jump around your presentation in a non-linear way, making for …
Read more “interactivity in presentation slides”
So you’ve heard of “death by powerpoint” and you’ve all be shot at by the screen-full of bullet points on a slide. And you promised not to do it to your audiences – but you did. Why? Because knowing how to replace bullet points just doesn’t seem ‘do-able’. If the presentations you sit through are …
Read more “How to Replace Bullet Points in Presentations”