Continuing further with that new influx of shorter blog posts over here on this blog and since, lately, I seem to spend plenty of time, effort and energy on becoming a better public speaker doing plenty of reading, rehearsing and learning from those who do it best, I keep bumping into rather interesting resources on doing presentations right: engaging, inspiring, interactive, passionate, involving and rather energising, so I do love learning along the way not just with practice, which we all know makes perfection, but also reading the theory about how other people face having to deliver a presentation, whether they are well seasoned or just getting started. There is always something that we all get to learn. The key thing though is whether we are all ready to absorb, change and adapt our presentation skills to make even better pitches to engage our audience(s), which, I guess, is what matters at the end of the day… But what happens when you inadvertently kill your own presentation without even knowing? What can you do then?
That’s the exact same premise that Jeanne Trojan addressed on a presentation that she put together a couple of years ago, and that when I bumped into it, just recently, by chance, I couldn’t help thinking how scarily accurate it was, and still is, with regards to the engaging art of delivering presentations and what pitfalls to avoid in order not to run into trouble far too soon. Thus I thought I would go ahead and share it over here, so that you would have an opportunity to see those “7 Ways to Kill Your Presentation” and ponder whether you would need to do something about not only addressing them, but fixing them for your upcoming presentation(s) for this year:
After going through that lovely presentation put together by Jeanne, I bet you may be wondering what could be done in order to improve your own presentation skills, now that you have been made aware of those 7 pitfalls, right? Yes, I know, I had that very same thought, so I kept digging and saw how Jeanne herself has put together another presentation, from just a couple of days ago, where she has collected some extended advice on Presentation Tips from the Pros, which is pretty packed up with some excellent advice on how to not just deliver an engaging, passionate, meaningful and refreshing presentation, but also how you can prepare it, and prepare yourself, beforehand in a proper manner, so I thought I would go ahead as well and take the liberty of embedding it right here for other folks to enjoy as well:
Finally, here’s one other helpful source from a good friend of mine, and fellow IBM colleague, Louis Richardson, quite an amazing public speaker I have had the real pleasure of watching him live a few times now by the way, about what to expect when putting yourself in front of an audience to deliver a presentation and what you can do to get the better of you out there to engage those who are investing their time AND their attention on you, the speaker, and your message, while on stage. Check out “Top 10 Tips for Stepping Up Your Presentations“:
The really good thing about bumping into these rather helpful and insightful resources on Presentation Zen and with such a good timing, is that I will be able to put them all into good practice as soon as a couple of weeks from now, when I will be co-sharing the stage with both Louis Richardson himself and my other good friend Luis Benitez (Yes, indeed, The Three Luis’!!) at the IBM Connect 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, January 29th at 5:30 to 6:30 pm ET, under the session heading “Pardon the Interruption on Social Business” that both Louis and Luis have been blogging about it already in their blogs, respectively. The best part of that presentation? Well, amongst several other things [*cough* beer *cough*] I could probably say it’s YOU setting the agenda of the session by participating through this Twitter hashtag right as we speak > #pitsocialbiz as that’s where the three of us are currently gathering questions from the audience that we will be addressing each and everyone of us live at the event around the area of Social Business, and, maybe, why not?, around Open Business, too!
It promises to be some really good fun and I am hoping that these presentation tips I have shared across from both Jeanne and Louis would help make it all an event better experience for the live audience and for those of you folks reading along.
Will we be seeing you there though?
[We surely hope so! Come and join us!]
Luis, for our session at Connect we have to investigate if we can sneak in a cooler (*cough* beer *cough*). I’m really looking forward to sharing the stage with you and Benitez. Should be a lot of fun #ptisocialbiz
Hi Louis! Thanks a lot for noticing the blog post and for dropping by, my friend! Yes, we will have to think about how we can manage to improvise on that important aspect, but it’s not the first time that I see it become a reality… So will ask around and see what we can do about it … hehe Really looking forward to seeing you both in a couple of weeks and tomorrow it’s my first day back at work, so will be catching up with you folks online!
Speak soon! 🙂