Public Speaking, Presentation & Leadership Skills

Be yourself Probably you have come across this advice more often than not. Certainly I’ve come across this advice about making presentations in quite a few places over the years. It seems to be quite good but somewhat limited and occasionally wrong. When this is said, it is generally meant to be good – usually spoken by a friend just before a terrified speaker goes up on stage in a last minute attempt to reassure them that all will be well – but the truth is that being a good speaker requires more than being yourself. If one need to be yourself to be a good speaker, then everyone of us would have been a good speaker. In other words - You need to “be yourself” and you need to “perform” at the same time – in other words you need to be yourself and have good presentation skills. Difficult? Of course it is or we all would be doing it. Think of the techniques to help you to perform the day to day activities like walking. Once we know how to walk,...

Differences Count When You Are Presenting You’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? You want to get your understanding itched into the audience. You want to surprise them with your presentation. What can you do? Setting the stage on fire can be great but impractical way to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations? Audience Attention is drawn to perceptible differences Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There are probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. All o...