A friend and fellow ATD Chicagoland board member sent this article to me, 9 Habits of Highly Effective Speakers, and asked what I thought. If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, here is a snapshot of the nine “habits.” They are authentic. They choose phrases carefully. They keep it short. They rewrite. And they rewrite some...
read moreRethinking the Visual Component of Your Presentations (Part 2 of 4)
August 27, 2013 0 Comments
Part 1, Part 3, Part 4 This is the second in a series of four articles about the need to take a fresh look at the visuals you use in your presentations. Here’s the question I posed at the end of the last article. As you know, we define presentations as Orderly Conversations. We need to ask how...
read moreRethinking the Visual Component of Your Presentations (Part 1 of 4)
August 5, 2013 0 Comments
Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 We need a new way to talk about the visual component of business presentations. I didn’t use the term “visual aids” to describe this part of the process for a reason. That term, one that has been around long enough to have been applied to everything from a flip chart to...
read moreMy Mother’s Attic Part 3: The Elocutionists, a Cautionary Tale
July 16, 2013 0 Comments
Part 1, Part 2 This is the final article about the perils of business presenters following the same path as the elocutionary movement. The great thing about The Ideal Orator is that its approach, from our twenty-first-century perspective, is completely over the top. Anyone reading this book today would recognize its unnatural exaggeration of delivery behaviors, its focus...
read moreSix Red Flags for Business Presenters
September 10, 2012 0 Comments
It seems almost every time I visit LinkedIn, I see a post about how to deliver a perfect presentation. This makes me cringe. If you click on any of these articles, you’ll inevitably find that the tips and tricks mentioned are applicable to the speechmaking process — not business presentations. Speeches and Business Presentations Are...
read morePresentation Baggage
January 30, 2012 0 Comments
Recently I had a lively phone call with a potential client. It was clear that he had done his homework on us and our competitors and had prepared some tough questions for me. Here’s my favorite question: “What’s the biggest barrier you face when working with people in your workshops?” I love this question. My...
read moreThe BEST Way to Start a Presentation
September 15, 2010 0 Comments
QUESTION: According to most public speaking experts, the first 30 seconds of a speech are extremely crucial for the success of a presentation. So, what’s the best way to start a presentation? ANSWER: We get this question a lot in our presentation skills workshops. I also read similar questions on discussion boards on LinkedIn. Unfortunately,...
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