Your Presentation Best

Top 10 "What I hate in a presentation" List   (audience perspective) 10.   Dark or dim room 9.  Too many filler words / "um" "uh" "er" 8.  Too much jargon / mysterious abbreviations & acronyms 7.  Too many details 6.  Presenter showing back / low eye contact 5.  Too many slides 4.  Monotone / boring voice 3.  Too much info on slides 2.  Too long 1. No Benefit / No Reason to Listen for ME       List based on input from approx. 225 persons in several different companies/industries Do the Right Thing.  Do the Opposite.

Bring Your T-Shirt Sales to Life Help your audience visualise your KPIs.   How much is 1.2 million T-shirts? Imagine the Allianz Arena filled more than 18 times...That's a  lot of T-shirts! A gentleman I worked with at a leading sports brand wanted to highlight the number of graphic T-shirts  his business unit was selling.   Rather than do the usual boring PowerPoint sales chart, he used powerful imagery of the Allianz Arena to bring the sales figure, one of his KPIs, to life.   By placing this imagery at the beginning of his presentation, he captured the audiences imagination and was able to make a much more interesting and memorable KPI report. He follwed with the "standard" PowerPoint KPI charts, but the Allianz Arena slides gave the audience a great and unconventional way to put thsoe numbers in context. Don't be afraid to be creative.  Don't be afraid to be different. The only rule is that you must clearly link ...

The Godfather of Great Presentation Steve Jobs makes a great point.  Any presenter who truly knows their message needs to be able to bring it to life without outside media.  It's called painting a KISSS picture with your words. Last time we looked at the PowerPoint slide from Hell and how slide complexity can be a killer. (Death By PowerPoint should be criminalized.) If you do use outside visual media, it should also be KISSS. (Keep It Short Sweet and Sexy). Particularly with slides, make sure they are clean and user-friendly.  People can "get" a great slide right away. Then the presenter can verbalise any further details.  (the presenter is the key audience contact point, NOT the slides.) If there is more data you need to put on your slide, no worries.  Just do what Steve Jobs typically does:     Start with a KISSS slide...and build it up as you go, piece by piece: Jobs is in complete control of what hi...

The PowerPoint Slide from Hell Wanna Kill Your Audience?  Make Your Slides Complex Almost every time I do a presentation workshop or one-to-one coaching, I am amazed how stressed-out presenting complex and/or very detailed PowerPoint slides make my clients. Actually, I'm not really amazed, because complex and/or very detailed slides would make just about any presenter stressed-out.  What amazes me is how often presenters use PowerPoint in a way that makes it basically impossible to use in an easy, comfortable way--for themselves and the audience. The more stuff you have on your slides, the more difficult and stressful it is to present.   The less stuff on your slide, the easier and less stressful. It's that simple. So, the take-away is:  if you want to lower your presentation stress, make sure your slides are as simple as possible.  Use visually oriented slides and minimal text.   A headline is often enough. Your job as the presenter is to ...

Why Do Most Presentations SUCK?! Think about what you hate when you watch presentations at work. Then ask yourself:  "Is that Me?"

The All Blacks get ready for action. Prepare, Practice, Ritual:  How to Manage Presentation Stress and Nervousness, Part III And now let's take a look at Ritual.  As anyone who's had to perform knows, there's always nervous energy before the big show. It doesn't matter if it's an athlete, a rock star, an experienced actor, or a presenter. The human body is hard-wired to automatically go into fight or flight mode at the first sign of danger. Now, genrally speaking, performing isn't dangerous, but the feelings we get before we perform send the same signals to the brain.   That means that no matter how prepared and practiced you are (and the more, the better), the brain will still swtich to fight or flight mode.  The question is not do you have some nervous energy, the question is what do you do woth it? Do you let it rule you as fear or do you channel it into a productive way? A personal Ritual before you perform can help you to focus that ne...