Whether you’re chatting to one person or presenting to many, your authenticity will be established quickly – and instinctively. How? They’ll be watching you. Without consciously realising it, listeners will measure your levels of believability by the quality and intensity of your gaze – in other words how well you make eye contact. They do […]
Presentations can be scary. but don’t be fooled into thinking that preparing and delivering them is the only scary part. Having to sit through them can be even more daunting! Reasons include poor preparation, poor delivery, content overload, inadequate logistics or very bad visuals. There’s loads more. I’d like to focus on the nonsense we unknowingly […]
If you’re finding that your business presentations aren’t getting you results, there could be many reasons why. But there is one that stands out above the rest, and it has nothing to do with your delivery. It’s simply this: Have you done your homework? Generally, presentations are an opportunity to get a relevant message across […]
If you’re well prepared for your upcoming presentation but can’t work out why you’re still feeling stressed out as the date looms, perhaps the insights in this piece will be useful to you. The word presentation is synonymous for many of us with the words fear and stress. Yet, we can’t always pinpoint exactly why. […]
I’ve many times posed the following question to groups: “What is a presentation?”. Those that hazard an attempt usually reply that it is the sharing of information. Well, so is an email, a book, a letter or a memo – so I disagree. I’ve always defined a presentation as “a specifically defined period of time […]
Having listened to more presentations than most people, I’ve seen a great many presenters break “the rules”, or certainly ignore a few of them. Some presenters get away with it, but most don’t. Those that don’t simply crash and burn – often going down in flames, cocooned in their content capsule and blissfully unaware of […]
There is wide acceptance that it’s a lot more difficult to persuade an audience about anything if you don’t personally “believe” – no matter what your topic is. Why then do so many erudite speakers who believe fervently in their topics still fail to convince – or get their point across with conviction? It’s simply […]
More presentations are messed up by poor organisation than by inadequate preparation. How can one substantiate such a statement? Quite easily actually, because you are usually asked to present on a topic with which you are familiar, so even if short on preparation, your knowledge may just carry you through. The same cannot be said […]
The very best outcome of delivering a presentation is to achieve your intended result, regardless of the compliments you achieve. That’s why you went to all the trouble in the first place. It feels wonderful to “pull it off” successfully. But successful presentations don’t just happen, they take some work to put together and deliver […]
The sheer terror you experience each time you step up to deliver a presentation may well be all your own fault. You had the time to prepare yourself, and you knew in advance the date, time and venue where you’d be stepping up to speak. But instead of seeing a wonderful opportunity to persuade, it […]