Lee Westwood, world No2 ranked golfer, made a great example of how to bring a dull stat to life yesterday and make it mean something. Speaking at a press-conference, when asked about his fitness regime, lee responded with this- “Coming to this heat I just felt I needed to lose some weight and have been…
I once bought a book by Edward de Bono, called ‘How to be Interesting’. It wasn’t. But it’s a great title isn’t it? Why might someone as fascinating as me buy a book like that? Well, it’s simple, I was seeking an answer to all of the questions I’d been asked around ‘how do you…
In a previous post- here– I shared a definition of charisma that I found really useful in getting my clients to understand that they are naturally charismatic and generally trained out of it. Here’s the definition. Charisma is- “the ability to transfer an emotion that the speaker has to his audience.” Simple isn’t it? And…
In the aftermath of the terrible events in Japan of the past 2 weeks, there has been a rush to ‘trash’ the idea of nuclear power as a ‘safe’, carbon-free technology for electricity generation. Germany led the way by closing its power stations for safety checks, the EU then followed up by issuing an unintelligible…
The rule of three is powerful technique that any presenter should learn to use. First noticed by the ancient Greek orators, followed by the Catholic Church, and reinvented by marketeers in the 20th Century, it’s a simple tool you can use to plan, deliver and drive your presentations. It’s based on the fact that people…
Here’s a collection of thoughts on the pursuit of brilliance. More of a ‘stake in the ground’ than a statement of fact, and I’d be delighted to get your views too. Brilliant presenters have to sacrifice- The warm feeling that not caring about how you were received can give you- You’ve got to care to…
This was going to be a reasoned summary of all of the latest thinking on retention & memory, to help presenters get their audiences to remember what they’ve spent ages preparing to tell them. But it’s now something different. Why? Because I began to wonder, yet again… Why it is that when I’ve read Macbeth…
It happens a lot doesn’t it? We have a proposal to present to a group of clients, and we know that the clients don’t agree on how to proceed, but we have a plan and we have to present it. Our success depends on our ability to find favour with all of the influential interest…
Here’s a refreshing article from ‘Presentation Magazine‘- about a Venture Capitalist, the improbably named Guy Kawasaki, who has spent many of his working years as follows- “…I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending”, “first mover advantage”, “all we have to…