Fit Your presentation should be built with the needs of your audience at the front of your mind and in all of your preparations you should look to answer the following questions: What do they want/need to know? What don’t they want/need to know? How can you find out before you start to prepare? Focus…
In a previous post here I talked about the importance of making great first impressions when you’re the ‘newbie’ at work. It’s a hard time for every new starter, and a bit of skill here will stand you in good stead. It’s something most of us have had to develop in our lives at work. Here’s…
Here’s a great thought for entrepreneurs. That the skill is not in having the idea, but in being able to convince your customers, partners, employees and investors that there’s merit there. So maybe public speaking, persuasion and influencing skills are second only to having the idea in the first place. From Diane di Resta’s interesting…
Lovely post from Rhett Laubach at ‘Authencicity Rules’ on ways to ‘build a bridge’ between a speaker and an audience. Authenticity Rules: Top 6 Tools to Engage Literally Any Audience. How to ‘get the audience involved’ is worth a category on its own in any blog, and is the second most asked question on presentation skills…
In all of the blah blah blan about Mr Starkey’s appearance on ‘Newsnight’ to discuss the riots and their causes, there’s one point that both sides miss. It’s Starkey’s lack of courtesy, generosity and charm that makes him easy to dislike and difficult to listen to. On ‘Newsnight’ last week he was pretty well behaved…
Most corporate presentations lack that little bit of ‘story structure’ that is the foundation of making sense to, and being remembered by, the audience. A simple, 3-act story requires that your presentation has- A definite beginning- That sets the context, introduces the characters (the presenter and the subject of the presentation), and sets the question to…
I’ve been working in Barcelona again this week, with a global pharmaceutical company, and here’s a small, but significant lesson I learned from Xavi, an IT Director about finding the right ‘hook’ for a speech to his IT colleagues. We were talking about understanding our audience before we start to create our message,- ‘Fit‘ as…
Imagine the scene. You’ve spent days preparing a major presentation to a new client, and you’re coming to the end of the pitch. You’ve moved from what they need, to what you can do for them, how you will proceed, the costs carefully explained in context of the results to be delivered. Now is…
I’ve mentioned Orwell before- See here. And it’s still my view, as a speechwriter and presentation coach, that if more speakers followed these rules than the kind of stuff we tell them on training corses, the quality of corporate presentations would improve beyond measure. They’d be- Shorter Simpler Easier to understand For a simple explanation…