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8 Counterintuitive Ways To Be The Best Presenter On Stage: No 8

8  WIN THE AUDIENCE Sage advice from Aristotle and other wise men…

Don’t recycle hackneyed ideas but do feel free to steal from the web before you start. See what’s been done. Evaluate what’s dull and what makes your pulse race and use that as a starting point for riffing.  The world is awash in content, so slice it, dice it and allow it to stimulate your thinking. If you do borrow, credit your…

8 Counterintuitive Ways To Rock Your Presentations: No 7

7 END STRONG         

If possible, wrap up your presentation with some action the audience can take right then and there to improve their lives or solve a problem. If your presentation is powerful, people will be fired up to take immediate action. Give them something to do.

Other ideas:

The Rule of Three: a series of three elements is a well-known feature of public oratory and a proven way of…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage: No. 6

6 Open with a Bang!  Four alternatives to the same old same old

Starting strong is always useful, if for no other reason to get the audience away from those weapons of mass distraction: their smartphones. We live in an over-conferenced world so I want to encourage you to experiment with less predictable ways of launching in.

If you are a conference junkie you’ll know that posing a question has…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage: No. 5

5  Move Your Body!

You don’t need to do contortions, but moving mindfully and purposefully on stage accomplishes several things:

It changes the energy in a room, which is a good thing after an audience has been listening to you for over 10 minutes.

It signals that you are changing topic or tack, so pay attention!

And it demonstrates your confidence, whether you have confidence or not. Remember,…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage, No. 4

4 Your most undervalued resource: 

A simple fact: If your voice is flat your presentation will not sound energetic, you will not sound vital and people will tune you out.

You own this instrument so why not put it to use? A good way to explore the power of vocal variation is to play with word emphasis. What words can you accentuate to spark up the power of your content? How can you raise or lower…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage, No. 3

3 SLIDES: Don’t Show It Before You Say It!

When it comes to slides: Don’t allow the audience read it before you say it.Why? The eyes absorb so much faster than the ears. If you use a slide with 10 bullet points I guarantee you they’ll have scanned and absorbed all ten points by the time you’re still warbling through point one. Net net? They’ll be bored and they’ll tune you out or revert to their…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage, No. 2

2 BE HUMAN — AND AUTHENTIC IN  YOUR PRESENTATIONS It beats more charts and graphs 

Rather than adding more slides with yet more data and charts, tell a story. Turn a dull list of information into a problem-struggle-solution narrative. It’s easy to do and applies to so many business presentations. Storytelling is so crucial to powerful presentations that we make it a priority in all our business…

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage

8 Counterintuitive Ways to Be the Best Speaker on Stage

In our over-conferenced world these facts are undeniable: If your presentation doesn’t impress, you won’t be invited back, you won’t be asked to speak elsewhere, and you will have wasted a lot of time and money missing days of work, traveling and stressing about delivering a talk that failed to engage anyone’s attention.

This daily series of…

Stephen Colbert’s secret to owning a stage? Exhaustion!

  It wasn’t seamless going from playing Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report to being Stephen Colbert on The Late Show. On a recent episode of Fresh Air the comedian-turned-talk-show-host shared some good insights with Terry Gross about how he finally relaxed into his new role.

The lessons he learned can also be applied to anyone onstage who is hoping to win an audience. According to Colbert the…

“I get so nervous every time I speak in public. No matter how much I rehearse I forget my script, get swept up in self-consciousness. What can I do?”

I hear this question all the time, and and I feel your pain. We all have different anxiety responses and your symptoms are fairly common.

What I’m going to say may sound simplistic, but often the best wisdom is right in front of you. If you can…

At the end of every presentation skills workshop, we ask for feedback from the participants and encourage them to be as honest with us as we’ve been with them. I have never posted any of the feedback previously, but this critique describes our “Presenting with Power” workshop–and the universal principles upon which it is based — so eloquently that I requested and received permission to use it…

Is Your Mission Statement Meaningful? (And the hidden dangers of it being meaningless)

Is your mission: Clear, inspirational and realistic? Chances are it’s not.

Lately, several young companies have asked me to help them compose their mission statements before taking their presentations on the road. I quickly learned that most mission statements are terrible. They are vague and unclear. They rely on jargon which is abstract and non-specific, and they have unrealistic goals. A good…

NYC PRESENTING WITH POWER WORKSHOP: OCT 29, 30, 9am-1pm

In today’s business environment where one meeting can make the difference between success and failure it’s crucial to make your presentations as concise, compelling and, yes, entertaining as possible. While your audience may love your product or service, they’ll also be evaluating you on leadership, confidence and your ability to field tough questions on the fly. How you communicate is crucial…

New Rules of Public Speaking

    OK, the info contained below isn’t all that new, but it’s useful useful. The 9th rule — and most important rule — is to find a great coach or trainer who can help you hone in on you issues, offer corrections and assist you in finding the tools that move you from Good To Great. Reading about improving presentation skills isn’t enough. You must put them into practice. Read it here

http://www.f…