Ever wonder what to do with a microphone?
Lisa B Marshall does it again – everything you need to know about using a microphone.
Archive for the 'Good stuff from other people' Category
Using a microphone in presentations
Published July 31, 2009 Good stuff from other people , Presentations 9 CommentsTags: microphones, Presentations
Chris Says It Better
Published July 28, 2009 Books , Good stuff from other people , Presentations 2 CommentsTags: Chris Witt, PowerPoint, Presentations
Ok, I’m never writing about presentations EVER again.
Because Chris Witt says it better.
**
I finally got around to buying Chris’s book Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint.
Loved it.
Not being a presentation skills specialist any more.
Here’s why.
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First off, Chris chooses some great quotes…
“Safety first has been the motto of the human race for half a million years but it has never been the motto of leaders. Leaders must face danger. They take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.” Herbert N Casson.
“Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Herbert Simon, recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
“A confused mind always says no. ” Len Torres, Primus Design
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Then he says so much that’s true, in a pithy way.
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Here’s Chris…
On leaders
Here’s the paradox: Leaders have to be themselves at all times and yet, when they speak, they speak not for themselves, but for their organizations.
Leaders speak to make a difference, and unsettled times are when their words can have the greatest impact.
Their value to the organization isn’t in what they know; it’s in their ability to present what they know to people in a variety of fields in a way that can be understood and acted upon.
Leaders either stand with, stand for or stand against.
How to use graphs in presentations
Published July 20, 2009 Good stuff from other people , PowerPoint , Presentations , Statistics and numbers , Visual Aids 6 CommentsTags: graphs, PowerPoint slides, presentation skills, Presentations, Seth Godin
Do you use graphs in your presentations?
Seth Godin recently expressed some opinions I agree with (it’s not the first time…).
One point that stands out from his article is to use your graph to tell a story.
Three presentation skills bloggers you should follow
Published April 17, 2009 Good stuff from other people , Presentations Leave a CommentTags: presentation skills, Presentations, technical presentations, technical to non-technical
I’ve been pleased to find that I’m not the only person worth reading in the presentation world. (I know, it’s a shock, right?)
Here are three bloggers I’ve read who, if we weren’t separated at birth, we’re at least close cousins.
So… in a kind of if-you-like-RealSmartNow-you’ll-love… kind of way, but in no particular order, let me introduce Olivia Mitchell, Chris de Witt, and Lisa B Marshall.
Continue reading ‘Three presentation skills bloggers you should follow’
Treat your audience as smart and they might get smarter…
Published December 16, 2008 Effective communication , Good stuff from other people , Presentations 1 CommentTags: attitude, Brafman, presentation skills, Sway
Here’s an interesting study that might improve the response you get from people you’re presenting to.
Ori Brafman, co-author of Sway, describes the study much more succintly than I (full interview here):
In the study, a group of men and women–who had never met each other–were told to have a short phone conversation. Now, before the conversation, each man was shown a picture of the woman he’d be talking to. Unbeknownst to the men, the pictures were fake. And half the men were shown a picture of a beautiful woman, while the other half were shown a picture of a less attractive woman.
The pictures had nothing to do with how the real women looked like, and the real women had no idea that there were any pictures shown.
The kicker is that the women who the men thought were pretty ended up sounding beautiful on the phone. And the women who the men thought were less attractive ended up sounding less beautiful. We take on the roles others ascribe to us.
Interesting, eh?
I wonder how this might apply to presentations.
I know when I’m coaching I hold that person, tacitly, to the highest potential I can imagine for them.
Could you do this with a group?
After doing all of your realistic planning (for the questions that are going on in their heads, and so on) could you then go on to hold your listeners to a higher standard in your mind as you actually speak to them?
Could you go in speaking to them as if you can see their friendly, approachable, fair-minded sides?
Not overtly changing anything in your words or delivery, but going in with that mindset.
Certainly worth a try…
In other news…
In case you’re wondering where the hell I’ve been for the past couple of months, this economic Chicken Little situation has made me look very closely at my business.
We’ve come out stronger, more focused, and feeling good for the New Year.
A big part of that has been spotting gaps in my education and filling them.
Nothing really big has changed.
I’m offering more phone coaching, specifically around planning presentations and meetings and I have a strong awareness campaign planned, particularly aimed at helping senior IT Project Managers with presentations.
What else..
We’ve been in Sheffield and Hong Kong for HSBC, and Singapore for Siemens.
We were lucky enough to be kept in Hong Kong over a weekend, so decided to explore traditional Hong Kong by going… to Hong Kong Disneyland! Of course.
Sunday was the Big Buddha statue on Lantau island – take your thermal undies if you’re going in November. Having lived in Singapore so long, we forgot that other places have seasons, especially in the mountains – d’oh!
We’ve just come back from four days in the ridiculously cool city of Berlin (anyone know any senior IT managers in Berlin who present in English? I wouldn’t mind doing some work there…), and are in the UK for the home stretch to Christmas. I’m taking the time in between family visits to catch up on writing, and put together a detailed plan for the business in 2009.
And that plan includes… blogging again! I think my Inner Writer got stage fright for a bit. Apologies for the disruption in service.
Normal service is now resumed.
Taking Nigella Lawson to bed – learning story telling from how-to writers
Published September 3, 2008 Good stuff from other people , Good writing , Presentations , Storytelling Leave a CommentTags: business presentations, presentation skills, story, Storytelling
via Kaptain Kobold
Despite being 99.95% against scripted presentations (and I’m lying about the .05% to seem fair-minded) I do think we can learn a lot from writers and the practice of writing.
I love how-to books, always have. But bare instruction holds no interest for me. I want to hear the voice of the person talking, and their stories.
I took Nigella Lawson to bed the other night – her cookery books are made to be pored over, not just cooked from. My copy of Domestic Goddess is covered in post-its and scone dough.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee’s writing about knitting is so good I don’t want to waste it.
Then there’s Randy Halberstadt on jazz piano.
Marilyn Paul on becoming organised.
Brad Warner on hardcore punk zen.
These are just some that are by my bed right now.
All of them write like they’re in conversation. With me.
All of them tell stories. Continue reading ‘Taking Nigella Lawson to bed – learning story telling from how-to writers’
9 things not to say in your presentation and presentation 101
Published August 5, 2008 Good stuff from other people , Presentations Leave a CommentTags: Nicholas Bate
My selection from the public speaking blogosphere today is Nicholas Bate’s wide-ranging and funny blog about business life.
Here’s:
~ 9 Things Not to Say in your Presentation
(my favourites are number 2 and number 4)
and
~ Presenting 101 – Nicholas’ list of 101 rules of presenting.
Whilst I don’t agree with every item in the list (can you guess which ones?), it’s an entertaining read.
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Related posts
~ The 106 public speaking blogs and why you don’t have to read them (unless you really want to)
~ How to avoid using Stupid Generic Photographs in your PowerPoint slides
Making statistics and numbers make sense in presentations
Published August 4, 2008 Establishing credibility , Good stuff from other people , Presentations , Statistics and numbers 4 CommentsTags: Andrew Dilnot, Michael Blastland, numbers, SensibleUnits, statistics, The Tiger that Isn't
Following on from this post about making numbers relevant to the people you’re communicating with, here’s a video that makes the numbers about the Iraq war tangible (I make no comments about its politics, just watch it for how it translates the numbers).
via DoshDosh
Make numbers concrete
The rule of thumb with statistics and numbers is to bring them into units that make sense to people. In the brilliant The Tiger That Isn’t: Seeing Through a World of Numbers Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot start with a chapter called ‘Is That A Big Number?’ They recommend that whenever we hear a statistic, especially in national politics, we should ask ourselves exactly that. Because often millions of pounds or billions of dollars turn out to be not much money when shared out over the spread of a country’s population.
In the same way, the big numbers that we want people to get often don’t seem big to the people we’re talking to. Or the numbers that seem big to others actually aren’t when put into context. How do we get people to relate to a Terabyte? How much is 570 staff hours in the context of the whole project’s resource allocation? What does 98.9% uptime mean?
Here’s a website that might help you get thinking.
SensibleUnits will allow you to type in pretty much any measurement and make it sensible. Kind of. Continue reading ‘Making statistics and numbers make sense in presentations’
The 106 public speaking blogs and why you don’t have to read them (unless you really want to)
Published August 1, 2008 Good stuff from other people , Presentations Leave a CommentTags: Andrew Dlugan, presentation skills, public speaking
When I first started seeing if other people were blogging about presentation skills and public speaking, I came across a site by Andrew Dlugan that had gathered a list of twenty-seven sites together. Twenty-seven!
By the timeI had gotten around to getting an RSS reader, the list had grown rather a lot.
I track every one of the (currently) 106 blogs on public speaking. There are a lot of people out there who are writing very pertinent stuff about presentations and public speaking.
My specialism is authentic, spontaneous, conscious presentation skills for specialists. The thing I pay particularly close attention to is feeding your patternmaker, your internal database, with what works in presentations – that’s what the Presentation Analysis work is all about.
My specialism is not PowerPoint, information display, business storytelling, speechwriting, sales presentations or media training. Or even, really, hints and tips about giving presentations.
There are other people who spend their lives blogging about those topics
I presume that, as a specialist, you are pretty involved in keeping up-to-date with your own area of expertise. Becoming a presentation specialist too (unless you already are!) is one thing too many. Also these blogs are aimed at all sorts of different groups of people.
