Here’s a body language tip: It’s called the Sullivan Nod. When you are talking to an audience, and you are listing three or four or five options, smile and nod when you’re describing the one you want them to choose. Chances are pretty good that they’ll choose it. The “Sullivan” of the Sullivan Nod is
Getting up in front of people and speaking may not always be as easy as strolling in a park on a warm Sunday afternoon. Sometimes, it may feel more like a bigger challenge you find yourself immersed in. Our experience with our clients show that, people are usually afraid of making one, two or all
When you deliver a presentation, your audience members will be able to process only one source of information at any given moment. That is, they will either listen to your speech or read your slides, but they will not be able to do both at the same time. Here is a short paragraph on attention,
When delivering a presentation, it is a good idea to keep the audience’s focus and attention on ourselves. In fact, keeping the attention on ourselves it is one of the main pillars of a successful speech or presentation. So much so, that at certain times you may not want to share your audience’s attention even
When you connect your computer to the projector before starting a presentation, what does your audience see first? Do they see a neat and tidy computer desktop with a regular wallpaper? Do they see a cluttered desktop with a lot of icons on top of your two year old niece’s selife? It is commonly accepted
In this speech Jesse Jackson, campaigning for US President in 1984, speaks at a church. There are two things I would like to point out in this speech, and they both have to do with point #3 in overcoming the Curse of Knowledge (make it concrete — use simple words and clear imagery): 1. At
In the Fundamentals we mentioned the Curse of Knowledge, and six ways to overcome it. My personal favorite, though, isn’t on that list. It is: #7: Ask questions. Specifically, ask your audience to describe back to you what you just said. Ask them to describe your world back to you, and see how close they
For you, as a listener, what’s easier to understand? “I… went… to… the… store…” …or… “Uhhh, I, uhhh… went, uhhh… to, uhhh… the, uhhh… store, uhhh.”? Which one was easier to understand? Probably the first one, right? Both of them took the same amount of time — the first one wasn’t any faster — but
When you’re organizing your presentation, the Rule of Three is a good place to start. For example: We’re going to do A. We’re going to do B. We’re going to do C. The human brain loves things that are organized into threes. It tends to forget point #4, but it can always remember three things.
Remember the One Question, the one thing that’s on everyone’s mind. The one problem they’re trying to solve, the reason they asked you to speak. Then tell a story that basically goes, A. I had that question myself once, and B. here’s how I solved it, and C. now I’m here to help you solve
When you’re on stage, what do you do with your hands? It’s one of the most common questions we get. Personally, I suspect you already know what to do with your hands, but the best answer is actually kind of zen, so we reserve it for more advanced courses. In the meantime, here are two
Before your speech, meet some of the members of your audience. Talk to them, get to know them a little. It’ll make you a lot less nervous when you’re speaking, because you’ll be talking to friends, not a bunch of nameless, faceless strangers. How can you do this? At almost every conference, there’s a coffee
Have a friend video you while you’re speaking. And yes, watch it! I’ve never met a person who liked to watch himself speaking. Not once. But there’s something magic about it. Every person who ever watches himself on video decides to become a better speaker. It’s like it lights some huge fire inside of people.
The “Curse of Knowledge” is the inability to clearly explain something to another person, because you know the subject so well. Not a clear explanation as defined by you. A clear explanation as defined by the other person. Why is it so hard to clearly explain something you know so well? Because it’s easy to
When professional actors prepare for a role, they usually rehearse for hours, or days or weeks, learning how to make a particular facial tick appear at just the right time. When she was preparing for the movie Gravity, Sandra Bullock practiced one of the moves for five months, in order to make it look natural
Opening PowerPoint is one of the first things people do when preparing a presentation. However, it’s the wrong place to start. Opening PowerPoint first is like buying paint for the living room before you’ve even started building the house. Asking three particular questions is a much better place to start. Here’s the first one: “Who
There are 9 lessons in the SO Fundamentals course. They are: Lesson 1 : The First Three Questions Lesson 2 : Practice 25 Times Lesson 3 : The Curse of Knowledge Lesson 4 : Reduce Your Ahh Count Lesson 5 : “B” is for Magic Lesson 6 : Video Yourself Lesson 7 : Chat With
“How does this person think?” Maybe your audience members don’t know who you are. They might not even care about your subject. But they probably want to know how you think. It’s a natural human impulse: We want to know how other people solve problems, because maybe they can solve problems we can’t. If you
We all have “tics,” little things that we do, little habits. Some presentation trainers tell people to get rid of their tics, but tics aren’t always that bad. Take, for example, Bob Dole. Bob Dole was a famous United States Senator in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. He fought in World War II. During the
President John F. Kennedy once said, “The only reason to give a speech is to change the world.” When I first heard that quote, I thought, “Wow, that’s a high bar to set.” People who change the world are people like Winston Churchill, or Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. Not me. The thing is, “changing
Yesterday I saw this ad in the subway station… At first I thought, “Oh, that’s such a pretty picture there on the screen… fish, water, blue, nature, sun, how nice!” But then I saw something completely different: A herd, moving in unthinking unison, swimming, spiraling, like brainless automatons towards a bright light, towards a god
Recently I was watching a TEDx speech video with a client of mine. The speaker was a designer with a doctorate from MIT, talking about research he’s doing into innovative mechanical solutions. Here’s the video: Neither my client nor I liked the speech. We both came away with a vague feeling that the speaker was
Sometimes our clients ask us to sit in on their “real life” presentations. We love opportunities like that. Seeing our clients operate live, “in the wild,” helps us do our jobs so much better. When a client lets us watch them give a real-life presentation we can help them so much more than when we
People are like dogs. If you stare at one long enough, he’ll attack. When you are giving a presentation, if an audience member gets aggressive and starts challenging you, resist the urge to spend too much time looking at that one person. Address his questions, but look at the other audience members, too, while you’re
The other day someone asked me for advice. He had wanted to give a speech that would last about 4-6 minutes, but instead the speech went for almost eight minutes. “What should I do?” he asked. “Slow down,” I said. Wait a second, shouldn’t I have told him to talk faster? Why did I tell
The other day, a few of a client’s employees went to a presentation skills training. The trainer told them 70% of presentation is body language, voice tone, etc. My client asked me if I agree. This is what I told her: That 70% figure is bullshit. It’s not bullshit because it’s inaccurate. Maybe that 70%
You know the saying, “You never cross the same river twice”? That applies to speeches too. The other day I was speaking about my walk across Turkey. Because of a timing mixup, I ended up giving the same speech to two different audiences. To my surprise, the two speeches were completely different. The first speech
New Service: Test My Presentation. You send us your presentation, we suggest how you can improve it. Click here for more info. Pro Tip: Use this service once a month, and watch your presentation skills rise up to the next level. It’ll be like your own personal communications seminar! Transcript: Rule number two. Something to
When you start preparing a presentation, don’t you dare start by opening PowerPoint. Mull over these three questions first: Who are you talking to? What do you want them to do? Why should they care? Ask these questions because a good presentation doesn’t happen in the head of the speaker, it happens in the heads
There are many ways of dealing with fear. Here are two of them: 1. Conquer your fear Try to wrestle your fear to the ground. Try to beat it. Try to control it. 2. Look at something else Your job is not to conquer fear, your job is to do something else. Don’t look at
A couple years ago there was a woman who walked from Spain south to Morocco, and then east across Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, then north into Jordan, and then into Jerusalem. She walked alone, and she didn’t spend any money. When I talk about my walk across Turkey, someone invariably pipes up and says, “Yeah,
“The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea.” What is the idea? The idea is that “[i]deas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.” In addition to describing how the spread of ideas is like the spread of viruses, Gladwell describes three kinds of people who are necessary for the
There are different ways to see the world. One of them is “What can I do on the edge?” Another is “How do I get to the middle?” Before you ever open your mouth, before you even start thinking about a problem, you will, consciously or unconsciously, pick one of these, and your choice will
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As presentation trainers we tell our clients over and over, “More eye contact, more eye contact.” But sometimes you’ve got other stuff to do, and it’s okay to look away. Not to read your slides or look at your shoes, no. But to visualize something you’re talking about. Like when you’re telling a story. Sometimes
The other day I was working with a client on her PowerPoint slides. We looked at the first slide, then the second slide, then the third slide. She asked me what I thought. “Should we add this?” “Should we take that out?” The thing is, she had an even more basic problem: her slides were
Some years ago I heard a story about Google. I forget the details, but the gist of the story sticks with me, and I think of it often… In Google’s early days, before “google” became a verb, when the founders of Google were still just grad students at Stanford, they would periodically get an email.
I threw this book across the room. Couldn’t read more than a third of it. Why? I’m no statistician, but, if I understand correctly, analyzing large amounts of data (which is the technique the authors used) is a great way to find a population’s average. However, it is not a great way to understand a
If you can’t explain it simply, you probably don’t understand it well enough. Students come to me often and say, “I want to use more complicated sentences, like a native speaker.” Huh? Expressing yourself well does not mean using complicated sentences. Actually, it usually means the opposite. Expressing yourself well means understanding your idea so
The upshot: If you want to get to the high points, you’re going to have to push through the low points. Most people don’t push through the low points, so the playing field will be nice and clear when you get to the good times. I recommend Seth Godin all the time. I love his
The upshot: Sometimes big, disruptive things happen, and they can’t be planned for, because you don’t know what they’ll be. They will end life as you know it (or as your business knows it), and that’s just the way it is.
Do not look for a summary of this book. In my opinion, this is one of those books you should either submit to, allowing it to change the way you think, or don’t even bother picking it up. Go big or go home. In other words, I loved it. The thing I liked most about
The upshot: Marketing is a conversation. It is a two-way exchange between people, not an opportunity for you to shout at your customers.
The upshot: Blah blah blah, a bunch of stuff. When you are preparing a presentation, segment your audience. Blah blah blah, a bunch more stuff. That one part, the reminder to segment your audience, alone makes the book worth it. All too often, presentation books tell us to know our audiences, but they don’t tell
There’s a scene I love from the movie Cadillac Records. Beyonce plays Etta James, and she is in the studio recording the famous tune “All I Could Do Is Cry.” The producer tells her it’s not good enough, that she isn’t putting enough emotion into it. Beyonce (Etta James) records it one more time, this
Transcript: I recommend, for the first 10 speeches, no visual aids at all, no slides, nothing. We’re there in Toastmasters to learn how to connect with the audience. We’re there to learn how to make eye contact, and how to relax, and how to use body language, and how to get inside of the audience’s
Transcript: People make a big deal out of being afraid of public speaking. When somebody tells me that they’re afraid of public speaking, I just want to tell them, “You know, you’re never going to get over it.” I’ve been going to Toastmasters meetings for 5 years or more, and I still am nervous as
Transcript: Talk to the wall. What does that mean? Sometimes when you’re doing a speech, before you’re even writing the speech, when you’re just at the very beginning and you’re outlining the idea, sometimes a real rational approach, a really well-thought out approach, works really well. A top-down thing. What do I want to say?
New Service: Test My Presentation. You send us your presentation, we suggest how you can improve it. Click here for more info. Pro Tip: Use this service once a month, and watch your presentation skills rise up to the next level. It’ll be like your own personal communications seminar! Transcript: People ask me, “How many