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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Just like bands that are revolutionary and have breakthrough albums, and for whom the second album is always ‘challenging’ this is a bit of a ‘challenging’ blog. Last week I gave you a pretty thorough chronology (and frankly a bit of a boring one!) of the preparation that went into a big conference presentation …
Note, a version of this article was originally published on the Presentation Guru website. To slide or not to slide? Yes, I know… I’m asking for trouble here, because it’s an area fraught with some very entrenched positions. I’ve recently been reprimanded on a discussion forum for speakers for describing someone’s opinions as bigoted! Harsh …
Read more “Presentation question! To slide or not to slide?”
Last week, I talked about what presenters could learn from modern art (well, all art, but modern art in particular). I concentrated on the art itself, the bit we look at, but that’s not all there is to a piece of art. The title is also part of it, and so is the setting. I can …
Art -modern in particular – often hangs on what’s not seen. What’s not shown is filled in by the viewer. Come to think of it, that’s pretty much true of even ‘traditional’ art, too. For example, my favourite work of art is Michelangelo’s Pieta. I’ve seen it twice now and both times I’ve stood in …
I’ve been grinning at the humour and inventiveness of some of the banners in the women’s protest marches recently. Personally I feel that a few of them go a bit too far and that the use of bad language gives people who don’t want to listen to their issues the excuse to not do so …
Who’s the Wonder Woman of presenting? Amy Cuddy. I’m bastardising her research a lot here, but the idea is that adopting certain “power poses” can greatly increase confidence and the most famous of these poses is the one typically adopted by the comic character Wonder Woman. You know the one – legs shoulder width apart, …
Read more “Is it the end for the Wonder Woman of Presenting?”
I spent very nearly two and a half decades as a university researcher. My post – in fact more or less my entire research unit, the largest social science research unit in the UK and the second most influential in the world – was funded by taking contracts to investigate specific questions. Many of these …
Look, you know it, I know it and your audience knows it… Boring presentations bore your audiences and as a result, no one takes in what you’re trying to communicate. No one acts on what you’ve said, because, frankly, no one listened. And if anyone did, they don’t care. (Admit it, you’ve probably been guilty …
Read more “How to have creative ideas for your presentations.”
Maya Angelou is one of my all-time favourite authors. She’s written some drop-dead astonishing stuff. Her autobiography runs for seven books and stops when she started to be a writer. (Go read them.) Writing about writing, she said, was a bit of a mess. That means that presentations about presenting are a PITA. For a …
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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