Your Presentation Best

Yo-Yoing Between Tasks? Why Switch When You Can Batch? A study of Microsoft employees found that when they were interrupted by an email, they needed fifteen minutes to fully regain their train of thought. Switching back and forth between tasks is costly in time and energy. To see this switching cost in action, try this basic exercise:   Say “abcdefgh” then immediately after that say “12345678”. Notice how long it takes you to do this.  Now mix the two: say “a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8”. It takes more time and mental energy while switching between letters and numbers. A useful tool to combat our switching habits at work is “batching “. You can work fewer hours, and work less hard during those hours, by batching your tasks more effectively.  Batching means grouping together similar tasks, so you spend less time and energy switching between different types of activity.  In the “a1b2c3 . . .” exercise, it’s like handling all the letters first, in one batch, then handling the numbers together, in a se

  You Stole 2 Hours Of My Life. I Hate You! “I can't believe we just wasted two hours at that presentation.What was the $%?!&*-ing point? That's two hours that I will never get back. Aaaaaand we’ve still got two hours togo?$%&!!*@!" Ever thought that. Your not alone. What do you want out of a presentation when you are in the audience? It's a good question to ask yourself the next time your preapring your presentation.                                Think about what you hate when watching others present. Maybe it's endless PowerPoint slides filled with lots of text that the presenter is reading to you?  Or a presentation that bores you to death because there is nothing in it for you, your stakeholders, or pain points? Or any number of other things that drive you crazy, put you to sleep, or make you pray that it would just end? If you hate wasting your valuable time at a presentation that sucks, make sure you aren't making the same mistakes when you prese

Rejection Can SUCK…If You Let It. Every time we get rejected it hurts a bit. That’s human. Actually, rejection is nothing more than redirection. The key is to stop, take a breath, and ask: What is that rejection offering me? A chance to improve a chance to let go of something that was holding me back, a chance to better understand what my counterpart really wants, a chance to move on? All of the above? Rejection is actually a valuable lesson to bring us forward, if we choose to see it sa such. A lot of people choose to dwell on the hurt, the „bad guys who just don’t get it“, or any number of negative feelings. Don’t be that person.  Be better than that, and see it for what it really is: An invitation to redirect and keep going… Be Your Absolute Best. Turn Rejection Into Redirection.

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