Business Insider interviewed me last week on the best way to avoid ‘death by PowerPoint’ and improve public speaking and presentation skills. I talked about the simplest and most powerful technique – the ‘B’ key. Otherwise known as blanking the screen during a slide show. They published the piece on Friday as ’10 Reasons You’ll…
Great communicators can translate information into vivid messages. They have the skills to assess a situation and translate the information in ways that a particular audience can relate to. Technical presentation example While on holidays a few years ago I met a man who made his fortune with a company that builds aquariums. $20 million…
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Public speaking anxiety can be dissolved. You can CHOOSE the way adrenaline affects you when public speaking. Could public speaking anxiety be fun? Psychologist Stanley Schacter has conducted experiments on the way people label the physical symptoms of anxiety. Using many inputs, including a drug similar to adrenaline, he set up two different scenarios….
February 24th, 2011 was a significant day. Until then, much of the content found via a Google search was low quality fluff produced by ‘Content Farms’, purely to get higher rankings and expose users to ads. A high percentage of info junk means users waste time on rubbish sites, while good information is obscured. This pollution makes…
1. Lights Up Avoid turning the lights down during a presentation. If your visual support requires a darkened room, ensure it’s not long enough for them to take a nap! 2. ‘Be’ the visual… Use your arms and eyes and expression to show us the size of the fish you caught or how quickly your…
I’m a fan of Janine Allis. A recent article in The Age outlines her story and secret to success with Boost Juice (250 stores, $130 million turnover). In a nutshell: ”What I’m good at is solving problems and keeping things simple.” One of the great things about Janine’s story is that her formal qualifications from Knox Tech (which she…
When preparing for important communication, most people miss the crucial step – the speech outline. They start thinking about what their speech, document or PowerPoint slides should look like and try to sort their thoughts from there. But the most valuable thing you can do to prepare is create an outline. A speech outline… A…
As promised at the end of my last post, ‘Steve Jobs– structure helps engage’, here are the reasons I think Steve Jobs missed his message with the launch of the iPad… The iPad launch on January 27 2010 was not greeted with the positive reviews that Steve Jobs might have come to expect from major…
Over-efforting is an interesting principle. Many of us have been taught the ‘no pain, no gain’ philosophy but, in many situations, the more pressure we apply, the more resistance we experience. When sportspeople are tense, they wear their bodies out faster. Tennis champ Roger Federer is an example of using a minimum amount of effort…