When I visit companies to speak about presenting, I don’t give the same talk to every company. I don’t even give the same talk to every function in a company. They are all different, and while a standard talk would meet their needs, you should be more ambitious than just meeting their needs. You should aim to delight them. A presentation is a gift. You could just give everyone a pair of socks for their birthday.
When it was first published, Garr Reynolds’ first book Presentation Zen took the traditional world of presentations by storm. It brought the presentation revolution to a wider audience of enthusiasts. We propose to revisit five essential principles from the book that have stood the test of time and can still be considered as best presentation practices today. Plan analog. There are many theories that try to explain how creativity works, but one thing is sure.
2021 already presents many challenges, not only for leaders and executives but for everyone in the white collar sphere who needs to communicate with their colleages, clients and partners. With online talks raising the bar and audiences increasingly critical, leaders with confidence issues, performance anxiety and low self-esteem have to stay on point. The task of gaining confidence while battling nerves and getting out in one piece is exhausting. Coaching, meditation, rehearsal, visualisation and psychotherapy are all strategies that professionals have turned to over the years to conquer the fear.
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that means “a reason for being.” Ikigai is the intersection between what you love, what you are good at, what you can be paid for and what the world needs. If you ever want to speak at TED or TEDx event, you should find the ikigai of your presentation. It should be at the intersection of: What you love, or in the context of a presentation, what you really care about.
I write this on the first full day of the 46th President of the United States Joseph Biden’s tenure in the White House. After 4 exhausting years for America and the wider world, the page has turned from the failings of an introspective, corrosive and divisive mandate into a bold, courageous and reactive new era, acknowledging first the gravity of America’s collective problems and seeking to solve them through consensus and action.
Zoom has become one of those tools that most people use, but how many of us have actually followed a training course on how to use Zoom properly? Not so many. At Ideas on Stage we have been using Zoom for years, so when the 2020 pandemic hit, we didn’t discover Zoom, but we did start to discover new features: some that we hadn’t needed before, and some that Zoom introduced as its usage exploded.
The COVID 19 pandemic has forced all of us to adjust and has pushed roughly 35% of the workforce to an exclusively online existence. While this is fortunate and frankly would have been impossible 15 years ago it doesn’t come without its challenges. As we struggle to maintain our routines, stay connected with our co-workers we have to continue the regular meetings attendance, trainings and webinars and we often have to give them ourselves.
Many of us are starting to approach presentations in the right way, taking the time to fix our objectives, analyze the audience, study the context, put together some coherent arguments, good visuals and even find the time to rehearse. Just as we are now spending longer to prepare our presentations properly, in a world of ever-increasing social media and ever-dwindling attention spans, our presentations are getting shorter in order to be more effective.