Blog posts on Content
How to open your talk with a question
Do you sometimes struggle to decide how to open your presentations? We know that the way we begin is important - it creates the first impression that the audience will receive so there's a bit of pressure around getting it "right". The CRC (Context - Relevance -...
Has PowerPoint sucked you into this trap?
One of the many clever things that PowerPoint can do is allow you to dump lots of information into it. Unlike your human audience, you can just keep on adding information into a slide and the font size will adjust to allow as much information as you like. See how it...
Does your audience want to fast-forward you?
Maybe I've got spoiled by my TV set-top box but, in so many of the presentations I've attended recently, I would love to have a remote-control with a fast-forward button! I'm sure you know what I mean - you really want to hear the useful and valuable information that...
The sobering truth about what an audience remembers
Last week I spent three awesome days at the Presentation Summit. In this post, I want to explore what audience members remember from a presentation, using the first three keynotes of the conference as my examples. I asked as many people as I could what they remembered...
How to Become More Bold and Confident
Do you think to yourself, if only I had more confidence I could do so much more with my life? Are you waiting for confidence before taking action? Confidence doesn't work like that. Waiting for confidence before taking action is like waiting for strength before you...
The Fastest Way to Create an Ignite Presentation
The Ignite presentation format is a 5 minutes long presentation with 20 slides and with the slides advancing automatically every 15 seconds. It’s the presentation equivalent of a haiku or sonnet. I set myself the challenge of preparing my first Ignite presentation as...
6 Secrets to get People to Take Action after your Presentation
How can you increase the likelihood that people will take action after your presentation? Chip and Dan Heath reveal many of the secrets in their latest book Switch. I’ve added a few more tips that I’ve learnt over my years presenting and training. 1. Script the...
Mindmapping your Presentation: Are you Making this Mistake?
In the past month I’ve sat through three presentations by professional speakers. They were all planned by mindmapping. None of these presentations reached their potential. Here are the flaws the presentations suffered from: They had no unifying theme. They jumped...
6 reasons you shouldn’t give an overview presentation
Garr Reynolds said you can’t go both deep and wide in a presentation. A deep presentation explores one aspect of a topic in depth, whereas a wide presentation gives an overview of the entire topic. I agree with Garr, but would go one step further – deep is better than...
4 ways to move people from attention to engagement
In my last post, I argued that you already have attention at the start of your presentation. The task is not to grab attention, but to actively nurture the attention that you have and transform it into engagement. Here’s the difference between attention and...