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! ;)
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".
Jargon has a bad press – and in very many ways thats for good reason. We’re constantly told not to use jargon in our presentations but that’s simplistic advice from trainers trying to sound good with cool-sounding-tips. BadVice alert! Let’s look at what jargon actually does first, before we give it a blanket ban in …
Let’s talk about your presentation’s impact. (Oh, and if you’d rather watch video than read, skip to the bottom of this blog – I’ve recorded to very short ones for you.) I wanna differentiate between first, second and third-order impacts – so let’s start with some definitions. Stay with me – it gets interesting later! …
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 …
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 You Hate Seeing Yourself Present (And What To Do About It)”
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:
This will close in 20 seconds