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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A friend of mine was recently not chosen to speak at a TEDx conference. That’s no big deal – there are always more would-be speakers for TEDx than could possibly be allowed on the stage. What was a big deal however was the reason why TEDx rejected their presentation idea… The feedback was… wait for …
Read more “Presentations – don’t get ‘feedback’”
I’ve been working in more cities than there are days in the week recently. I’ve seen more training rooms than friends 🙂 (Fortunately that’s changed this week in case you cared! 🙂 ). That got me thinking however, about how the different rooms affect presentations. Room layout: Example 1 Let’s start north of the border …
Read more “Three room layouts for presentations”
One of the biggest issues I face when I do presentation skills training are ‘the SYDs’. Syd is a nice chap, I’m sure but it stands for Slow You Down. A SYD is anything that gets in the way of you getting better at what you do and making progress. There are lots of SYDs …
Read more “How to write presentations quickly”
I love the TES – the articles are an easy read but written by people who know what they’re doing. Admittedly a lot of it isn’t relevant to making presentations (because it’s a magazine for teachers!) but they do cover a lot of stuff on how to get information from one place to another – …
Read more “Getting longer attention in your presentations”
My voice went lower in Spain. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not ‘cos it was Spain, specifically, just that I was there for a week to do nothing. Just recharge. The toughest decision I’d have to make was either red wine or white? shall I do another few lengths of the pool to cool down? …
Read more “Presentations after my holiday”
Welcome back. Part one is here. 😉 So now we know the problems faced by charities in their presentations, what’s the solution? To be honest and brutal, they’re not very different from the ones faced by any business. For reports which are basically reports, the rules are pretty much exactly the same (in principle). The …
Read more “Charity Presentations 2”
There’s a group on Facebook called Speakers’ Corner. In it there are some interesting conversations between professional speakers (and would-be professional speakers). Before you rush off there, let me warn you that there’s also sometimes a lot of fluff and tosh and and even some BadVice. 😉 One of the more interesting conversations recently was …
Read more “Using videos in presentations”
Put simply, the illusion of truth is that we (by which I mean people!) have a tendency to belief/trust those things which are familiar. It doesn’t have to be true for that to work, we just have to remember it. For example, I often say (and hear other people say even more!) “I can’t remember …
Read more “Presentations and the illusion of truth”
Right then, this one is (partially) personal. I’ve incorporated stuff from other people too – partially to broaden the reach of this blog but also to protect my privacy! 😉 The big question is this: if you’re off to a big event such as a conference, how you handle your nerves? I’m not talking about …
Read more “Confidence for Conferences or other big events…”