When you can make presentations without your audience die-ing of boredom but you want to make better presentations to be different from the rest and to have more impact.
Slightly trickier tools that assume you’re okay with the basics like facing the audience and not reading your slides! ;)
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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Let’s be clear, there’s no silver bullet. If fantastic presentations were as easy as we hope, I’d be out of a job… but while the how you do things is more complicated, the what you should should do to get better presentations is more straight-forward. And even just knowing what you’re trying to do will …
Read more “Better presentations – the simple three part model to make them”
There’s something about being perfect that set’s people’s teeth on edge. Perhaps it’s the idea that if something is perfect it must be artificial – not authentic. It’s true both in presentation in real life. Let me give you a couple of examples. About a year ago, my Mum died. At her funeral, my younger …
I’m not a huge fan of “the X secrets to…” for anything. Inevitably the real world is more complicated than the blog post with that kind of title has suggested. Maybe it’s me, but it seems that posts like that always finish with an extra step of “realise you don’t know how to do it …
Before I was a presentation skills trainer – not quite in my youth – I spent about seven years touring as the technical director of a dance company. I learned a lot from them to do with discipline and hard work. I learned about focus and I learned what effort looks like. (I might even …
Once upon a time I was taking instruction on playing the piano with a view to becoming a professional pianist. I never got that far (I was never that good, not even close!) but it gave me an interesting perspective on how professional performers work. And it’s not like it’s portrayed in the movies. (C’mon, …
Read more “How to present better: Presentation stage management”
Your brain is a wonderful thing. Some brains are more wonderful than others, of course (such as my wife’s) And people have been researching how they work for a long time. Even before neuro-science became popular (or even possible!), people were looking our learning capacity… How does this research apply to presenting? Way back in …
Read more “How much can tell your audience in a presentation?”
If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard someone complain about seeing themselves present on video, just look at themselves on a photograph, or even listen to a recording of their own voice… well I’d be rich enough not to do this 🙂 As it is, however, no one pays me when they …
Read more “Why do people hate seeing and hearing their own presentations?”
You’re known to have good presentation skills, so you’ve been volunteered… It’s coming up to that time of year again – the one when you have to do ‘reviews’… presentations which look back on how the year has gone… that sort of thing. Frankly (and personally) they tend to fill me with dread, ‘cos most …
In the last couple of posts, I’ve talked about: why literal scripts aren’t a good idea for your presentation; and a few things you can do instead of using a script while you present. Now it’s time to wrap up the series by looking at how you memorise what you’re going to say, whether or …
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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