2-Minute Tip: Believe Them When your audience members tell you that you did a good job, believe them. In our zeal to be the best we can be, many speakers have an inaccurate and often negative view of our own performances. Often we see how it could have been better. Or we notice a mistake no one in the audience did. We can obsess over those…
< 2-Minute Tip: Schedule Your Practice We mean well. We put “practice” and “rehearse” on our To Do lists. Unfortunately, that often gets bumped by other, more urgent matters. Or meetings get scheduled in our open blocks of time. That’s why it’s important to schedule practice time on your calendar. Set up a meeting with yourself to rehearse. Reserve a conference room if you don’t have a…
2-Minute Tip: Photograph Your Space The brain plays tricks on us. It can be difficult to see clutter and distractions in the space around us because we tune them out. That can be true in a home office, in a conference room, or on a presentation stage. Try taking a picture of your presentation space with your phone. Better yet, have someone take a picture, or…
2-Minute Tip: Create a Folder Many of us have thousands of files on our computers, in our clod drives, and attached to email messages. Getting to the right one can take some work. That’s fine when we are by ourselves and have a few moments to spare. During a presentation, or between presentations, it can be more challenging. Sometimes we may need to drop out of…
2-Minute Tip: Slides are not Time How many slides should be in a 15-minute presentation? How long is a 10-slide presentation? I don’t know because the number of slides is a poor proxy for presentation length. I would rather see a presenter add more slides than to use a small font. Splitting one slide into multiple slides doesn’t lengthen your presentation. It just makes content more legible….
2-Minute Tip: Use Nose Contact Using eye contact effectively is an important skill for speakers to master. It helps the audience feel that the speaker cares. It emphasizes how the speaker and audience members are all participating in a shared experience. Looking at audience members’ eyes can be unnerving for some speakers, though. The solution is nose contact. Instead of looking at the eyes of the…
2-Minute Tip: Don’t Change Your Caffeine Consumption It can be tempting the morning of a big speech to load up on coffee and enjoy that miraculous substance. If that’s part of your standard morning ritual, that’s fine. Go for it. But don’t suddenly double or triple your standard consumption. I get that you may feel tired or nervous, but excess coffee will not help. Instead, you will…
2-Minute Tip: Avoid Dairy Before Speaking I love a big bowl of sugary cereal or a nice cheesy pizza. I used to drink mochas like water before I decided to switch to Americanos for weight loss (by the way, switching from mochas to Americanos will NOT make 30 pounds just fall off). So I like my milky, cheesy goodness. But not right before speaking. Dairy consumption…
2-Minute Tip: Use an Event Form I used to travel from Seattle to Irvine, CA, quite a bit. It got to the point where I thought I knew where I was going down there. That was a false confidence. I began making wrong turns because I didn’t think I needed a map to help me. As we do more public speaking, we can easily make that same mistake. It’s…
2-Minute Tip: Conduct Q&A Before Your Conclusion Many speakers go through their entire talk, and then open things up for questions. This is a mistake. You will be more effective if you take question before you launch into your conclusion. The end of your speech is a golden time. It’s the last the audience will hear before they go out into the world. Since its the last thing,…