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: 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: 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 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…
Top 10 Public Speaking Tips As we wrap up 2017 and plunge headlong into 2018, we are also approaching the first anniversary of 2-Minute Talk Tips. Let’s take a look back at my favorite public speaking tips of the year. That’s right, it’s time for a clip show. That also makes this a great episode to introduce someone to 2-Minute Talk Tips, or to form the basis of…