2-Minute Tip: Identify Your Biggest Take Away To deliver an effective presentation, first identify the biggest take away for the audience. If they remember only one thing, this is the thing it should be. To figure that out, start by doing a brain dump on a piece of paper or whiteboard. Then go through all theses random ideas that are in someway related to your topic. What…
2-Minute Tip: Watch Yourself on Fast Forward I met speaking coach and entrepreneur Emily Messner (AKA Sleevs) on the JoCo Cruise earlier this year and she told me about this tip. Gestures are a complicated thing for many folks. Your gestures may or may not feel natural, but it’s hard to tell how they look. We’re not watching ourselves while we speak; we have higher priorities. So if…
2-Minute Tip: Practice in a Mirror The key to success on stage is to practice as much as you can. Prep by using a mirror to give yourself an audience to impress. And often the person in the mirror is the toughest to impress. Practice with your notes at first, and get good enough so you don’t need them. Once you don’t need your notes, that means…
2-Minute Tip: Note Something interesting Everyday It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we are not creative. Or that we have nothing to say beyond the basics of our message. Or that writer’s block is impenetrable. Or that we are just going to bore our audience. That can happen because we take our own experiences for granted. We think our lives are just boring or normal….
2-Minute Tip Much of the communication we have with folks is non-verbal, and facial expressions play a big part in that. When we conduct a presentation, though, we lose much of that subtlety because we are further from our audience. Instead of 2 feet away we are 10 or 20 feet away. To make up for that, we need to use much bigger and more dramatic facial…
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: Restrict Your Practice Time Two of the biggest sins of public speakers are going overtime and rambling. Both disrespect the audience, When you go 5 minutes over, you’re not just taking 5 minutes. You’re taking 5 minutes from everyone in the room. If there are 20 people in the room, you’ve actually taken 100 minutes in total. To address both these issues, restrict your rehearsal…