The story is the thing – understand that you’ve got a strong message and everything else will follow. So many business presentations have little or poor story structure. Here are a few ideas that will help you to make your points interesting and memorable for every crowd you see. 1 Put yourself in your audience’s…
The soon to be forgotten Jeremy Clarkson has built his career out of this single skill. No, not bullying, whingeing and feeling sorry for himself after behaving appallingly to producers, fellow journalists, wives, foreigners, and anyone who didn’t attend a public school (Chavs, I think, is the word he uses to describe most of the…
Overview Explaining a complicated concept is an art form. In the first post in this series I followed a simple analogy told by Albert Einstein to introduce some broad concepts that might help us explain complicated subjects to lay audiences. It’s easy enough to do when you’re faced with like-minded peers but when you go…
Not long after his arrival in the USA, Albert Einstein was invited, by the wife of one of the professors of mathematics at Princeton, to be guest of honour at a tea. Reluctantly, Einstein consented. After the tea had been served and people had eaten their cucumber sandwiches, the over-excited hostess, thrilled to have such…
Whether you are new to presenting, or an old hand, the structure of your presentation is the key to its success! Of course there are many other elements to creating a great presentation, but if you have your structure right, you are much more likely to make a winning one. I feel a little evangelical…
I’ve been experimenting a lot recently. Always trying to use fewer words on the screen, sharing the thoughts with the audience, trusting them to come up with the relevant items that you can then build on to get to your point. I’ve loved using interesting, engaging and memorable videos, easily sourced from YouTube as a…
Want to know how to give a successful presentation? I can sum it up in one sentence: answer your audience’s questions. Successful Presentations Answer their Audience’s Questions I’ve often seen presentations which were captivating, funny and interesting, with great visuals and well presented by the speaker…which has left the audience disappointed and frustrated. Why? Because…
It’s a horrible moment in a speaker’s career. You build a speech around a story you found. You use it for years. It’s a great start to a session, you rely on it, it has warmth, depth, a point and it carries you on a wave of laughter into Act 1 of your story. Then,…
I am assuming that most people reading this post write frequently, and write well. However, it is worth going back to basics from time to time to consider not just what we write, but how we write it. Whether you are writing for presentations, hand-outs, blog posts or any information sharing documents, it’s a waste of…