Your Presentation Best

Quick & Dirty Presentation Tip #13 "If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough." Albert Einstein Basically, if you really want people to understand your message, you need to be able to condense the main takeaway into one or two lines. This forces you to take the complexity out and allows you to deliver a message that is simple. A simple message is easy to understand, remember, and share. Once you have that, figure out the main benefit of that simple message for your counterparts and their stakeholders. Simplify that into one or two lines as well. Then cherry-pick the three most important data points that supports your two messages. Boom! Easy for your audience to get and easy for you to deliver. And everybody loves easy. Got a Question About Presentation? Ask Me:  dan@boswell-training.com Be Your Absolute Best. Make It Easy. Boswell Communication Training

Storytelling vs Data & Facts Facts don’t connect with people, people do.  In order to truly engage consumers and employees, business needs people and their stories.  Storytelling can support the fact-based approach, because it help us better understand how KPIs and other data was generated and what they mean.  Data tell us what happened out in the real world.  Storytelling helps us to paint that picture and give it context, emotion, and meaning.  It also makes the data 22 times more memorable and much less boring . When you think about it, thats all KPIs are: a scoreboard for what happened in the past, is happening now, or is projected to happen in future.  KPIs are actually the Story of Life. Storytelling let’s us translate the data into „Human“. That makes it emotional, powerful, and memorable. I sometimes think KPIs should be called Key People Indicators. Takeaway: Facts and data are essential for business. Bringing them to life with Storytelling is even more so. Sign Your Team

  How the Man with the Broom Helped Put a Man on the Moon It’s a fabled story about a janitor’s exchange with President Kennedy during the early days of NASA:  “What do you do?” the president supposedly asked the man with a broom during a visit to Cape Canaveral.  “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping to put a man on the moon. One sweep at a time.” There’s a good reason it’s one of the most commonly-repeated management stories:  it illustrates the idea that a employees are much more engaged and satisfied if they are motivated by a strong sense of higher purpose. If you know your purpose and believe in it, you’ll love ❤️ your job way more than if don’t. Be Your Absolute Best. Know Your Purpose. Boswell Communication Training 

Influencing Your Stakeholders (And Their Stakeholders) Influencing and getting buy-in from your stakeholders is all about preparation and homework.  This includes being able to concisely and concretely share the value-added with your counterparts. Moreover, how will this value added make the lives of your stakeholders and/or their stakeholders better than the status quo?  What’s the roadmap to success look like? Having good answers to these questions, as well as personal stories as real-life illustrations are essential. But so is exploring the emotional needs of the stakeholders you want to influence. The following five questions can help you prepare for this: Five Key Questions for Your Stakeholders 1. What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative? 2. What motivates them in general and most of all? 3. What information do they want from you and what’s the best way to communicate your message to them? 4. If they are not likely

A Question of Why In negotiation, What your counterpart wants is important. Far more important is Why they want it and which Results they are looking for, short, middle and longer term. The What is the demand of your counterpart. The Why is the reason behind the What. The Result is the goal(s) of the Why. Harvard Negotiation Project founders Roger Fisher and Bill Ury have found over the last 40 years, that the What exists because it is one way your counterpart thinks he can reach his Why. There are almost always several possible ways to satisfy the Why. Generating and exploring other options, or combinations of options can be a powerful way to work together with your counterpart and help them get what they really want. If you can understand and make progress towards satisfying your counterpart's Why and help them reach their Result(s), the What becomes unimportant. And that means the likelihood of reaching a more satisfying negotiation result greatly increases...for everybody. Want

The Power Of Storytelling   Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a story using only six words. His response? „For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn.“ What do you imagine when you read these six words? What do you feel? Why? It’s easy to conjure any number of touching, tragic scenarios of what happened, what tears were shed, what could have been... It’s probably also easy to connect this story in some way to our own lives directly or to the lives of those we know or have known. It’s not as easy to connect this story to our business case, but what if we could? What if our product or service might have changed the ending or allowed us to make sure this story didn’t happen again...or as often? Would you grab your audience emotionally if you lead with this story and shared a personal experience tied to it? Would it enhance their understanding and feelings about our product or service? Would it stand out in the mind more? The Takeaway: Storytelling has the power to make you