Presentation and Public Speaking News

• Public Speaking
• Events
• Tips

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. To create an event that is truly memorable, impactful and enjoyable you need a blend of four key ingredients: 1. Purpose 2. Teamwork 3. Creativity 4. Action

• Public Speaking
• Debate

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. Other parents know this and usually try to look the other way. And those other parents who intervene usually only make matters worse, because they’re actually looking to shame the child’s parents, which solves nothing and reinforces the child’s power.

• Public Speaking
• Leadership
• Business

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.

• News

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.” They possess the secret key to turn anyone into an excellent speaker. They don’t work miracles, but they have enough magic to turn awful presentations into brilliant ones.

• Public Relations
• Communication
• Crisis Management
• Business

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. But there is something else Zoom needs to fix: its crisis communication approach. One thing in particular made users and the security community extremely unhappy: the “others do it too” attitude. It’s exactly when you reprimand your child because he did something wrong, and he answers, “but other kids did it too!” As a parent, it’s only going to make you even more annoyed. Why? Because that shows he doesn’t get the point, and that instead of learning from his mistake, he’s trying to get approval for his incorrect behavior. And this is basically what Zoom’s initial answer was: “We don’t need to fix this problem, and it’s not really a problem because others do it too.”

• Public Speaking
• TedX
• Fear
• Events

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”. The longer they wait, the worse the problem becomes.

• Public Speaking
• Storytelling

You know these presenters who speak for 20 minutes before they finally understand what they are talking about? I had a colleague who was just like that. When I asked him why he couldn’t do a shorter introduction, he said that he felt that all the details he gave in his opening were indispensable to understand the presentation. In other words, he was taking the time to explain the context before talking about his subject. That sounded good in theory. The problem was, because nobody knew what the exact subject was, the elements of context had no meaning and were extremely boring. Making matters worse, because my colleague had not started by identifying the subject, he rambled for much longer than what was really necessary.

• Public Speaking
• Oratory
• Body Language

Should we move on stage when speaking, to avoid looking static? Or should we stay put on our feet, avoiding any unnecessary movements? Strangely, if we ask different coaches, we’re likely to get different answers. I remember meeting several coaches who followed classical theatre training at “La Comédie Française”, and they would recommend that you don’t move on stage when you’re speaking. I also remember other coaches telling startup pitchers that they looked like dead trees devoid of any energy because they didn’t move enough. So who is right?