Archive for March, 2007

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Compressing Your Powerpoint Presentations

Tuesday, March 13th, 2007

You’ve slaved away on your PowerPoint Presentation for weeks, perhaps even months. You’ve got great graphics and nice charts. You’ve patted yourself on the back for having lots of great pictures and not just the typical boring data dump of words and bullet points.

But there’s one little problem. Actually, it’s a BIG problem. Your PowerPoint file is now so big that you can’t email it to colleagues. Your file is too big to go through the pipes of your email system. Or, you send the email OK, but the client you are sending it to has a size limitation on his/her corporate email system so the file is rejected.

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Good First Impressions: Pills and Public Speaking

Monday, March 12th, 2007

Many people are big believers in the benefits of vitamins, minerals, daily aspirin and other supplements. I’m not going to enter a health debate here, but I do want to warn you about taking pills before a speech or media interview. If you want to take pills or medicines of any kind, do so in private where no one can see you.

If you are seen popping a harmless Vitamin C pill in a TV studio’s green room, another guest may assume you are taking powerful narcotics to calm your nerves. If you are seen taking a multi-vitamin at the water fountain before giving a speech in a hotel, one of the audience members may assume you are addicted to valium.

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Listening Exercises: The Oral Pop Quiz

Thursday, March 8th, 2007

How do you get audience members to pay close attention to every thing you say? I have one extreme technique that is highly effective, but it can only be used by teachers in a classroom setting. Warning, if you are a business person, consultant or professional speaker, this solution will not work for you. In fact it will make you enemies.

If you are a teacher and you have responsibility for students learning and a desire to make them pay close attention, here is one technique you can use: ask students in your class to paraphrase everything you just said in the previous 60 seconds.

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Posted in Audiences, Q & A, teachers | No Comments »

The “So-What” Test: Streamline for an Effective Speech

Wednesday, March 7th, 2007

A lot of people talk a good game about trying to make their presentations short, concise and to the point. But very few people stringently apply the “so what?” test to everything they say during a presentation. If you really want to pare down your speech to the essentials, then ask yourself “so what?” after everything you say. If you can’t convince yourself that the average person in your audience is going to truly care, then get rid of it.

Here’s how this works in real life:

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Authentic Acts: Politicians and Accents

Tuesday, March 6th, 2007

Hillary Clinton was mocked and ridiculed for using an exaggerated Southern accent while addressing a church audience in Selma Alabama on March 3, 2007. When I listened to the audio (as posted on the Drudge Report), it does, indeed, sound contrived.

What’s going on here?

One. If you are a national politician in the limelight, you will always be criticized for any change in style, no matter how unconscious your efforts. The easiest way for a reporter to make a name for himself or herself is to point out some notable change in your appearance/presentation.

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A Silk Purse

Monday, March 5th, 2007

If someone came up to me with the following proposal in 2001, I would have laughed them out of the room:

“Hey TJ, give me a million dollars and let’s make a movie. The movie will be entirely made from a lecture by Al Gore. And it will be a PowerPoint lecture on global warming. We’ll use lots of numbers, statistics and scientific data. It will be great; we’ll make $50 million and we’ll be the toast of Hollywood.”

“Ha! Ha! Ha!” I would have said.

But I would have been wrong. “An Inconvenient Truth” the Al Gore Documentary has done all of these things.

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Keynote Speakers and Audience Interaction

Friday, March 2nd, 2007

There are a lot of trainers and teachers who are engaging, fun, and insightful when conducting seminars, workshops and other long-form presentations and learning situations. But if you put these same articulate individuals in front of a large group of people, say 200 or more, to give a keynote speech for only 60 minutes, they would bomb.

Why would they fail?

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An Unpredictable Audience

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

It’s nice to be loved by an audience. It’s great when people listening to you laugh, cry, ask probing questions and give insightful commentary to the subject matter you are discussing.

But don’t count on it.

As a general rule, the more responsive an audience is to you, the better—but not always. I have spoken in front of audiences where it seemed I could do no wrong. I had them in the palm of my hand. They laughed! They engaged. But they didn’t buy, refer me business, or connect with me in any meaningful way after the speech or training.

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