Create a Presentation Your Audience Will Care About - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 9:00 AM October 10, 2012 Generating ideas is the easiest part of creating a presentation. The hard part is deciding what to keep. Many of your ideas may be fascinating or clever, but you can’t squeeze them all in — and no one wants to hear them all, anyway. The people in the audience are the stars of your show. If they don’t buy what you’re saying, it won’t go anywhere. Spell out the big idea: Your primary filter should be what I call your big idea: the one key message you must communicate. Try expressing your big idea in a complete sentence to make sure it’s fully baked. Once you’ve spelled out your big idea, generate lots of supporting material to give yourself more to choose from when it’s time to pick your best stuff. By the way, you don’t have to start from scratch when generating content: Dig up other presentations, industry studies, news articles, reports, surveys — anything that’s relevant to your big idea.
Kastika. Micro-Blog. - 10 recomendaciones para construir buenas historias Structure Your Presentation Like a Story - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 8:00 AM October 31, 2012 After studying hundreds of speeches, I’ve found that the most effective presenters use the same techniques as great storytellers: By reminding people of the status quo and then revealing the path to a better way, they set up a conflict that needs to be resolved. That tension helps them persuade the audience to adopt a new mindset or behave differently — to move from what is to what could be. And by following Aristotle’s three-part story structure (beginning, middle, end), they create a message that’s easy to digest, remember, and retell. Here’s how it looks when you chart it out: And here’s how to do it in your own presentations. Craft the Beginning Start by describing life as the audience knows it. After you set that baseline of what is, introduce your vision of what could be. What is: We fell short of our Q3 financial goals partly because we’re understaffed and everyone’s spread too thin. Let’s go back to that Q3 update.
Tell Web Stories with Farfromhomepage 22 December '11, 01:51pm Follow At first, it’s tempting to look at Farfromhomepage and think, “Why would I need this?” However, dig into it and it’s actually a very interesting way of presenting and sharing online content in a way that tells a story. The idea behind Farfromhomepage is ‘Creative Browsing’, the term that the German team behind it uses to describe the idea of taking websites, YouTube videos and audio clips from SoundCloud and turning them into a multimedia presentation called a ‘Tour’ that others can play back in their browsers. Tours are created by using a tool that allows you to make clippings from web pages and import YouTube and SoundCloud content just by pasting in a URL. While the tools available can take a little getting used to, they are being used to great effect by some early users. Farfromhomepage is still in an experimental phase, but a paid-for version is planned for next year, enabling users to embed tours on their own websites. ➤ Farfromhomepage
Disarm Your Audience When You Present - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 8:00 AM November 12, 2012 When you walk into a room as a presenter, it’s easy to feel as if you’re the central figure: You’re up front, and people came to hear you. In reality, though, you’re not the star of the show. The audience is. It’s in their power to embrace — or reject — your ideas. You’re presenting because you need them to change their beliefs or behavior in some way, and people find it hard to change. Resistance doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Here are the most common types of resistance and some tips on getting ready for them: Logical resistance: As you plan your presentation, try to come up with arguments against your perspective. Practical resistance: Is it physically or geographically difficult for the audience to do what you’re asking? Anticipating resistance forces you to really think about the people you’re presenting to, and that makes it easier to influence them.
Authentic Presentations Take Practice - Nancy Duarte by Nancy Duarte | 12:00 PM November 28, 2012 Lots of us fall into the “smart” trap when presenting: we work so hard to be polished and articulate that we overcompensate and come across as flat, boring, and egg-headed. We’ve all certainly heard (and suffered through) talks like this. So how is it that great communicators manage to engage and entertain their audiences while sounding smart? We all have different personalities, of course. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, there’s Susan Cain, whose style was very subdued when she gave one of the most buzzed-about talks at TED 2012, “The Power of Introverts.” She spoke quietly and convincingly. The funny thing is, it takes practice to be as natural as Steve Ballmer and Susan Cain in front of a group. Use your physical expression to its fullest by: Peeling yourself away from your slides. Opening up your posture. Using gestures to amplify what you’re saying. It’s easy to get caught up in what the audience thinks about you.
What to Do With Your Hands When Speaking - Jerry Weissman by Jerry Weissman | 9:42 AM January 11, 2012 The most frequently asked question of presentation coaches is “What do I do with my hands?” In past writings, I have cautioned against choreography; I’ve seen far too many presenters attempt to illustrate their narrative with specific gestures and wind up tying themselves into pretzel knots. Ronald Reagan provides an alternative point of view. Reagan had followed this style since his formative years as a presenter. You might call this the “Look, Ma, no hands!” An unnatural approach is to treat gesturing as performing, which is what speakers who consciously choose the Reagan approach — or any other — are doing. If you are reading this post, it is highly unlikely that you are a performer or that you were auditioned for your position or that you were hired because of your acting skills. Heed the advice of Irving Berlin’s song in the classic musical, Annie Get Your Gun, “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly.”
The Benefits of Speaking Aloud - Jerry Weissman by Jerry Weissman | 11:17 AM October 5, 2011 Writers have long known that speaking aloud what they have written in silence helps them to shape their ideas. In a Wired article on voice recognition, Clive Thompson tells of 16th-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne and 19th century American writer Henry James, both of whom wrote by dictating their work to their secretaries. Moving to the present, Thompson cites the example of writer and critic Tim Carmody, who “found himself staring at an empty page, not knowing where to begin. He had no problem talking to friends about his ideas, so Carmody booted up Dragon (voice recognition software from Nuance) talked aloud for hours, and got past the block.” Carmody was experiencing the front end of a spectrum of benefits that comes from combining the written words with the spoken. Giving sound to what had been a silent process puts writers in the role of their readers. Presentations are of course all about speaking aloud.
Improve Your Public Speaking with a More Effective Mindset - Peter Bubriski by Peter Bubriski | 8:35 AM February 24, 2011 [For more, visit the Communication Insight Center.] Over the last few years many executive coaches have been urging leaders to learn to communicate more powerfully through examples from the acting profession. With inspiring and often very talented actors leading workshops in the corporate workplace, the sights and sounds of group improvisation, storytelling and even Shakespearean verse abound. Too often the acting angle elicits rolling eyes, tightly folded arms and comments like “Darryl over there might enjoy this — he’s a bit dramatic anyways — but this isn’t for me.” I know from long experience; I’ve had those eyes rolled at me. I graduated with a drama degree from Yale and acted professionally for years while also teaching executives communication skills. If you’re in that category, try this instead: think of practicing speaking skills as practicing a sport. With a sport, you’re not pretending to be someone else. Here’s the funny thing.
The role of emotion in public speaking « Public Words Emotion – is it a good thing or a bad thing? For many years, people struggled to keep it out of business, thinking that to be emotional showed weakness, or indecision, or lack of judgment, or something equally damning. Today, attitudes have shifted, and we now recognize the importance of emotion in motivation, in communications, and in leadership. Indeed, we’ve learned from brain research that without emotion there is no memory. So it is literally true that if you want someone to remember you, or your ideas, or your pitch – you have to be emotional. Emotion and politics So aware are the politicians of the importance of emotion that they’ve taken all the thinking out of their speeches, leaving us only with emotion. The 2012 Convention Speeches – the Highs, the Lows, and the Baffling Why is emotion important? There’s still a lot of personal fear of showing up with emotion in a business setting. So business people have to get themselves out of the trap of thinking that bland is OK.
10 steps you can take right now to improve your presentations « Public Words Improving your presentation skills can be hard work. Changing behavior takes time. But there are some easy things you can do right now that will make a concrete difference in your presentation success rate. Some are physical, some are about a change in attitude. But they’re all practical, simple, and immediate. 1. When you put up PowerPoint slides you ask the audience to look at 2 — or 3 — things at once: you, your slides, perhaps a printout of your slides. 2. We all look more attractive when we smile, and studies show we pay more attention to attractive people. 3. A common mistake presenters make is to explain an idea the way they learned it. 4. Wait 3 seconds, making eye contact with the audience, before you start speaking. 5. So many speakers wander around the stage because they’re filled with adrenaline. 6. Adrenaline causes us to take shallow breaths. 7. Talk to us — Audiences expect to have a conversation with and from speakers. 8. What makes a presentation interesting? 9. 10.
Presentation Zen Last week, a mere two days after he wrote an article entitled "A Leave of Presence," the acclaimed and beloved American film critic Roger Ebert died. Like millions of other people, news of his passing deeply saddened me. I loved Ebert's writing, his wit, and his determination battling illness these past years, but I will always remember him from the '80s with Siskel & Ebert. Greatest film of all time? As a tribute of sorts to the great Roger Ebert, I am reposting a piece I wrote a couple of years ago on Citizen Kane below. Lessons from Citizen Kane (redux) Citizen Kane is considered by most film critics and filmmakers to be among the best American films ever produced. Story Structure. Although the unconventional (for the time) nonlinear narrative approach is a tad confusing at times, Citizen Kane made clear use of the basics of storytelling structure: Exposition (beginning), Conflict (middle), and Resolution (end). The non-linear structure of the narrative.
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