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Tag: Presentations

How to Make Your Presentations Better Without Opening Your Mouth

In this article, published on inc.com by Aj Agrawal, you can see how non-verbal communication is important. The autor also gives some hints to enhance your body language during a speech or a presentation.

  1. Tell your story with your eyes
  2. Get your hands involved
  3. Open up
  4. Smile as much as possible

Cisco says that body language and voice tone account for 63 percent of communication. What’s surprising is how few of us rehearse the way we will move on stage during presentations. So much time goes into developing our story and memorizing our lines. Many times, this allows us to deliver good presentations but not exceptional ones. Then, we’ll see someone on stage who absolutely dazzles us, whose amazing presence captivates the audience and sells his or her vision. While we believe many people are born with this talent, in truth a lot of it comes down to body language.

Read the full article

 

Barack Obama accepts the nomination

 

Image source: Flickr – Scottish Resilience Development Service – (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Do you need PechaKucha?

PechaKucha is a simple presentation format where you show 20 slides that display for 20 seconds each, so that the presenter has only 6 minutes and 40 seconds in all for his/her presentation.

The name comes from a Japanese term meaning “chatter”. The basic idea is to force the presenter to speak concisely, precisely and clearly by using mainly images.

For this reason, PechaKucha is a great format for presentations at schools or for meetings in offices, in those occasions where conciseness is particularly important.

If you want some tips to realize your personal PechaKucha, read more on http://bit.ly/1cBv9QD or just visit the PechaKucha official site.

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Image source: Pixabay (CC0)

Five Presentation Mistakes Everyone Makes

Nancy Duarte has published several books on presentations. The last one is the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations. Here are some of her tips on creating and delivering presentations.

We all know what it’s like to sit through a bad presentation. We can easily spot the flaws — too long, too boring, indecipherable, what have you — when we watch others speak. The thing is, when we take the stage ourselves, many of us fall into the same traps.

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Illustration by Andrew Joyner on Businessweek.com

Here are five of the most common, along with some tips on how to avoid them.

  1. Failing to engage emotionally : Try opening with a story your audience can relate to, for example, or including analogies that make your data more meaningful.
  2. Asking too much of your slides: Create handouts from all that text you’ve pulled off your slides and moved into “notes.”
  3. Trotting out tired visuals:  Brainstorm lots of visual concepts — and throw away the first ones that came to mind.
  4. Speaking in jargon:  If they can’t follow your ideas, they won’t adopt them.
  5. Going over your allotted time:  There’s nothing worse than a presentation that seems like it will never end.

Read more at http://goo.gl/jE9dq

The best stats you have ever seen

In his TED talk, statistics guru Hans Rosling, makes a stunning presentation on broad social and economic trends. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be boring; but in Rosling’s hands trends come to life.

Rosling’s presentations are based on solid statistics, illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends intuitive and clear.

The Power of Body Language

In her TED Talk Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows that body language affects how others see us and it may also change how we see ourselves.

Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions.

The Seven Weak Points of a Speech

Mrmediatraining.com provides a list of the seven main causes that could make a speech uninteresting and boring:

1. Your Introduction Failed to Interest Me
2. One Thought Ran Into The Next
3. You Loaded The Speech With Technical Detail
4. Your Delivery Was Sleep-Inducing
5. You Didn’t Tell Me What You Wanted
6. You Read From Your PowerPoint
7. You Didn’t Manage the Question and Answer Period

Read the full post at: http://www.mrmediatraining.com/index.php/2011/10/27/seven-reasons-i-hated-your-speech/