Public Speaking

Unleash the Hans Rösling in You

by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 20 October 2020

If you ever talked with me about my favorite TEDx talks, then I am sure I mentioned the late Hans Rösling, one of my all-time favorite TED speakers. On paper, he didn’t really start with an advantage; he spoke English with a strong foreign accent, and his key topic was statistics and demographics, something most of us associate with good sleep, not with great presentations. Yet, Hans’ enthusiasm and passion on stage, combined with his unique way to use numbers to tell meaningful stories, meant that his presentations were always a high point of any TED conference.

To learn or not to learn your speech by heart

by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 6 October 2020

Some people think that to make a great TEDx presentation, they should learn their text by heart. Our collective experience as coaches shows that it’s a good solution only IF: You like to know your speech word for word and it fits your personal style and you know how to do it properly. If you don’t meet one of these conditions, then it’s best to avoid learning your text by heart.

Public Speaking

Don’t rush your start

by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 1 September 2020

Many speakers tend to rush the start of their presentation. During conferences and events, they start to speak even before they put a foot on the stage, talking as they walk towards the center, or as soon as the master of ceremonies stops to speak. It makes them look as if they think they are suffering from the “imposter” syndrome, insecure and unsure that they should be speaking on stage.

How to disable all animations in a PowerPoint presentation

by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 7 July 2020

Do animations in a presentation make you feel seasick? Animations in PowerPoint are great, until they aren’t. A small dose of animation is fine, but presentations with too many animations can be cumbersome to watch in presenter mode. Luckily, PowerPoint offers a simple functionality to disable all animations in one go. In the ribbon, go to the “Slide Show” tab, then click on “Set up Slide Show”. Then simply tick the box “show without animation”.

Virtual Speaking Success: Effective communication in online meetings

by Michael Rickwood — Monday 6 April 2020

As many of us are learning, it’s easy to arrange a virtual meeting, but not so easy to run one successfully. There is quite a steep learning curve. One vital area to work on is speaking in virtual meetings. People often complain of video issues, microphone issues, poor vocal expression, monotonous speakers, and poor interactivity. Step 5 of our Virtual Meeting Revolution process is called Connection for a good reason: when speaking in an online meeting, you need to connect with the other participants, and you can’t connect if they are so bored they are not paying attention, or if they gave up trying to understand what you are saying.

The Top 5 TEDx Talks in number of views

by Pierre Morsa — Monday 30 March 2020

We worked with a lot of TEDx events over the years, and some of the talks have accumulated hundreds of thousands views, some even getting above the 1 million mark. Here are the top 5 talks of events we participated to, in number of views. In fifth place we have Jean-Gabriel Causse, speaking at TEDx Dunkerque, with nearly 600,000 views. Color me shocked, but his is talk about the power of colors is full of interesting details.

If you want to be brief and to the point, prepare

by Pierre Morsa — Tuesday 4 February 2020

A few months ago I recorded an episode for our video channel “The Business Presentation Revolution.” Initially, my content was too long to fit in the 3 to 4 minutes running time that we had planned. Looking at my script, I realized that many sentences could be simplified, some details omitted, and the structure streamlined. After several dry runs and rewrites, we finally managed to get the video down to 3 minutes.

The 3 Magic Ingredients of Great Presentations

by Phil Waknell — Wednesday 29 January 2020

Is there a perfect recipe for a successful presentation? No. Partly it depends on the audience and the context: a boardroom presentation shouldn’t look like a TED talk, even if the subject is the same. And different presentations at the same event – a conference, a demo day, an Executive Committee meeting – should also look different from each other, because otherwise none of them will stand out. So if there is no magic formula, are there at least some key ingredients we should always include?