It’s your instrument and most people don’t really know how to use it. Rehearse in the place where you’ll make your speech if you can, it makes a full dress rehearsal and readies you for the real thing. If you can’t use the venue, use somewhere like it. Project to people at the back of…
So many people ask how do you start well in a presentation, and in a previous post I talked about learning from Shakespeare to make maximum impact in those first few seconds. It’s a 2000 year old lesson to learn and is the foundation of story structure. Remember that the first 2 minutes are the…
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’s a short post on the simplest structure for business presenters. Once you’ve got the gist of the three-act thinking, here are a few other ideas that will…
There’s so much you can do before the event to make sure that you have a great experience on the day. Call the venue to specify how you’d like the room set up well before the event, confirm in writing after the discussion and expect that it won’t be done when you get there. Arrange…
It’s a really good question for presenters. Every slide, every story, every image, every point. Ask yourself ‘So what?’ because it will lead you to shorter, more focused and more powerful messages. And it’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s always the question that the audience will be asking themselves at some stage during your speech. …
Andrew Marr, of the BBC, is becoming one of the hardest to watch ‘car crash’ presenters in the UK. He’s finely poised between horribly self-conscious and excruciatingly self-loving and I can only watch him with my hands over my eyes, through the gaps in my trembling fingers. It’s not him as a person that I object to,…
There’s a word for it. It’s called ‘a tell’. It’s when a speaker ‘tells’ the audience about something without saying anything. There are congruent tells, where the subtle message reinforces the real one, like smiling sincerely and saying ‘I’m really happy to be here’; and such congruence makes for a powerful message. Then there’s the…
I know that George Orwell, English novelist, liberal and writer, only wrote 4 decent books (The Road to Wigan Pier, Down and Out in Paris & London, 1984 and Animal Farm- in my opinion). As a novelist, he was probably better at the ideas than their expression, but the was a truly great journalist. He set the standard for lean,…
Who could have said this without irony? They’d have to be in Management Consulting or HR wouldn’t they? “Having finished my deck of (presumably PowerPoint) slides I shall now ping you over to Paul who will, no doubt be granular in providing you with the long-tail solutions in implementing the TOM by the TIMs through…