Time Saving Presentation Hacks
If you’ve got a presentation coming up this week, here’s how to make it better in just a couple of minutes: 1. Don’t start with PowerPoint – start with a blank sheet of paper (or a digital sheet of paper if you’re one of those young people with a fashionable ‘computer’). 2. Write down your goal for the presentation […]
Day Of Presentation Preparation Tips
How do you prepare on the day of a presentation? I’m giving a keynote talk this afternoon in Runnymede where, just over 800 years ago, a dispute over tax gave rise to a fundamental rethink of democracy and how we’re governed – doesn’t that sound contemporary?! Anyway, you might be interested in what I, as […]
How To Keep To Time When Presenting
Recently, I had to deliver a keynote presentation and in the agenda, I had 73 minutes! The precision of this number (which meant it was an hour and a quarter, including a brief introduction and goodbye) reminded me of a conversation I had recently with someone who had to deliver a 45-minute presentation but found […]
Being Judgemental
How would you feel if someone asked you to prepare, and deliver, a 5-minute speech in front of a room of professional speakers? I was recently in Dublin at the Global Speaking Summit (where I won an award – have I mentioned I won an award yet?!). Flatteringly, I was asked to be Head Judge […]
The Myth of Body Language
“What about my body language?” “What do I do with my hands?” “Should I move more?” I get questions like this from people working on their presentations and speeches all the time and if you’re like most people, you will have had similar questions to these as you prepare your presentations, as you deliver your […]
Become a better storyteller with these tips
I had an interesting message from a reader (an agency owner) who’s just landed a *dream* client, and he believes that his ability to ‘tell a story’ is what made him successful. As he writes: ‘On paper, we’re qualified, but I guess not exceptional. However, after a pitch where I was able to deliver our […]
Your audience is never wrong
I recently had dinner with Esther Stanhope, who’s a great speaker and coach and, as peers tend to do, we talked about our industry, and the subject wandered to ‘bad audiences’. I told her a short story about my own experiences with ‘bad audiences’ and Esther found it so delightful that she insisted I write […]
The best business pitch ever
It’s hard, now, to remember quite how revolutionary the iPhone was when it launched, and what an uphill struggle it could have been to get the world to embrace ‘yet another mobile phone’. Yet Apple not only conquered the market, but permanently changed the way we think about phones and connection and – for better […]
How to present to different audiences
One of the best ways to quickly become a better presenter (and communicator in general) is to understand your audience better. Learn about their problems, priorities, and pressures. Tailor your message to what matters to them, and you’re on to a winner. A question I often get in relation to this is ‘But what about […]
How Space Affects Presentations
If you go and watch a professional busker, you’ll notice that they spend nearly half their performing energy and time on ‘organising their space’. They’ll try to make sure that there’s a wall behind them to reduce distractions, and they’ll have a range of methods, jokes and tricks in order to get the audience to […]
