Before you open your mouth to say the first word of your speech, you are communicating with the audience. Your stance, facial expression and body language are a picture that paints a thousand words. Make it calm, confident and pleasant, and you start "on the right foot!" So plant both of your feet, stand up […]
"Are you still doing speeches in the stone age?" This was the question a participant asked of a presenter at a recent conference I attended. The presenter had lugged along a box of transparency slides to show during his half-day seminar, and I admit, I was a little doubtful at first about the lack of […]
Everyone uses it, but is it the best way to present your information? Most people who use PowerPoint of give Presentations have not had much, if any, public speaking or presentation skills training. However, we tend to copy what others are doing. I would like to suggest stop doing what everyone else is doing and […]
When your immune system has it too cushy it may not be prepared to protect you in tough times. Clean living may actually make us sick. New studies comparing sanitized rats to sewer rats reported in the Scandinavian Journal of Immunology found that wild rats had as much as four times higher levels of immunoglobulins […]
To create effective backgrounds in PowerPoint is one of the most challenging tasks for a presenter, as balancing visual impact, layout balance, properly matching colors while keeping great legibility is nothing that I would consider easy. Article continues
High emotion contributes to great opera. It does not, however, serve us well when making judgments about others. This is the argument advanced in "Feeling and Believing: The Influence of Emotion on Trust," a new paper by Maurice E. Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations and information management, and Jennifer Dunn, a PhD student in the […]
When making presentations it is often easy to overlook the importance of your voice. But without a dynamic and strong voice you may as well not be presenting. A friend of mine realised this last week. He makes presentations every day, but he managed to get some kind of throat infection which left him speechless […]
Successful individuals are first, last, and always salespeople. They are constantly selling themselves and their ideas to investors, management, co-workers, vendors, and even their families.An opportunity to sell yourself and/or your ideas can come up on the subway, in the checkout line at the grocery store, after your yoga class - just about anywhere. To […]
To create effective backgrounds in PowerPoint is one of the most challenging tasks for a presenter, as balancing visual impact, layout balance, properly matching colors while keeping great legibility is nothing that I would consider easy. Article continues
Gestures can make or break a presentation. Normally, they flow naturally as a person expresses their thoughts, but if they are wooden or distracting, then they spoil whatever point the speaker is trying to make. My latest free set of tips is about gestures - how to overcome the problems of being distracting or wooden, […]
