If you’re in the business of creating slides – and who isn’t, in the business world? the education world? Government? – then you might want to consider joining a newly formed organization, the Presentation Guild. Its purpose is to provide a forum for professional slide creators in the public speaking world, to raise the standards […]
Donald Trump exploded on the debate scene in the Republican primaries and his opponents were at first completely flummoxed. He dominated them effortlessly and endlessly. His sheer size, his focused anger, his ability to steal the camera away from everyone else even when he wasn’t speaking thanks to his facial reactions, and his big open […]
The story goes that when George Soros, the hedge fund bazillionaire, was still a fund manager, he would monitor his backaches and use them as a sign that there was something wrong with his portfolio. What are gut feelings? Are they real or imagined? And for public speakers – should gut feelings guide your performance […]
What makes a story? And is it helpful to think of the unfolding US Presidential election contest as an example of one? The usual advice on how to create a great story or narrative is too general to be useful: stories have a beginning, middle and end. So does an ice cream cone. Stories have […]
I’ve written recently about insights, secrets and success factors for public speakers. Attending a conference a couple of weeks ago, I was more struck by the common mistakes that speaker after speaker was making and so I thought it was time to write about what to avoid. Here are five mistakes I’m seeing a good […]
Unless you’ve been living under a musical rock for the last eight years, you know that Adele possesses one of the most remarkable pop singing voices that has ever set teenage hearts a-quiver, belting hit after soulful hit about loss and break-ups and loneliness. So when I had the chance to hear her live the […]
I had the pleasure recently of chatting with Dr. Carmen Simon, a cognitive scientist who works for Rexi Media, a company that uses brain science to transform presentations. She’s also the author of Impossible to Ignore, published this year by McGraw-Hill, a book about crafting memorable messages using insights from brain science to make them […]
One of my favorite blogs is Warren Berger’s A More Beautiful Question. His questions are always illuminating – before even the answers start to flow. And that of course is his point. Recently Berger has identified the changing nature of leadership from authoritarian to more coach-like as part of a cultural move from answers to […]
Most of the research on posture and public speaking has focused on two aspects of body language that seem to offer opportunities for improvement with relatively little work. First of all, there’s all the study of what Amy Cuddy calls “power poses.” The idea is to stand up straight, or to take up more space […]
I regularly write on the fear of public speaking – what it is, how to deal with it, and why you should perhaps even welcome it – because it’s one of the universal experiences of people when they have to deliver a speech to a large, unfamiliar crowd or even give a presentation to a […]
