It’s your turn to present. You’ve launched your presentation and enter the stage. But how do you know if your presentation remote is working? If you start clicking back and forth between your first and second slide to see if it is working, everyone will notice what you’re doing, and you will not make a great first impression. Luckily, someone shared a simple tip on twitter. Just duplicate your first slide.
Moving with purpose on stage is good. Moving around aimlessly is not. It’s what we call derivative actions, things that we do unconsciously that betray our stress, lack of confidence or lack of preparation. Luckily, it’s very easy to stop parasitic movements, but the solution sounds counterintuitive: use eye contact to “anchor” yourself on the ground. Yes, that’s right. Making eye contact with your audience will stabilise your attention and will prevent your feet from moving you around the stage.
What is it about designing events that I love so much? Suddenly I think of cookie dough, the small crunchy granules of sugar blended with butter, the heavenly flavour of vanilla extract and the sublime melt of dark chocolate chips. Even before I bake the cookies, the main event in this case, the ingredients themselves have satisfied. Designing events are similar because I love what goes into making them delicious–I mean, shine.
Some adults behave like bad, spoiled kids. They whine, they threaten, they become petty if they don’t get their way. They don’t hesitate to lie, or even worse, use the emotional card to play the victim, make you look bad and make you submit to their will. These people are easy to recognize, but very difficult to deal with. Just think of the child rolling on the floor screaming. His parents will look bad whatever they do: scold him, do nothing, leave… they have zero good solutions.
There is one key objective at the heart of all presenting. Persuading the human mind. Today there is a war on for attention and space, with the human mind as object of the conquest. In 2019, emotions rule the stage and calm reasoned logic seems to have gone out of fashion. Individually and collectively, most of us are getting our information from sound bites, news summaries, and short burst headlines provided by our iPhone feed; while opinions change from one glance at the screen to the next.
Recently I had the chance to do an internship with Ideas on Stage, which has been by far one of my best experiences. At first, I didn’t quite know what I had stepped into. It was a totally new place and I walked in full of curiosity. You might know the famous saying “Behind every successful man there is a woman.” Well, within this week I understood that “behind every successful presentation there is Ideas on Stage.
You may have heard about it, a basic security problem was found in Zoom for Mac, that allowed attackers to turn the camera on remotely. Zoom is an application used to organize videoconferences on the web. It works well and has been widely adopted by corporations and individuals seeking to provide a quality service to employees working remotely or on different sites. The security problem itself was easy to correct, and, at the time of this article, should have been fixed.
One of the most stressful moments when speaking at an event is actually not during your presentation, but the hours before your presentation. To some speakers, the wait can be so stressful that they completely lose their presence. As mother nature didn’t give humans an appropriate instinctive response to face the stress of a presentation, they adopt one of the basic survival techniques for protection: they fight the public, they flee, or they “play dead”.