10 No-No's for PowerPoint Use

Following these 10 points won't make your Power Points remarkable, but they will keep them from being horrible...

• No bullet points
• No shadowed text
• No clip art
• No red backgrounds
• No text larger than 64 font
• No text smaller than 24 font
• No slide transitions
• No reading of the slide content
• No more than 15 slides... ever

Buy Yourself 15 Minutes of Attention

If your group meets in the same place on a regular basis and/or if you are presenting at a day-long or longer conference, buy yourself at least 15 minutes of attention by moving the group to a new location. Facility fatigue can set in over time and make it more difficult than it needs to be to get and keep your audience's attention. Move to a new room and they will become new listeners!

Energy Gaps

After spending the week traveling Colorado and speaking to over 1,600 high school students, I am reminded of the power of one simple strategy you can use in your programs (either keynotes or workshops) to increase the learning, the interaction and the energy:

Remove the Energy Gaps!

What does this mean? This means you need to...

1. Get the audience members sitting as close to each other as possible.

2. Remove the space between you and the audience.

3. Get everyone's physical direction and mental direction turned towards you.

Do these three simple things and your programs will seem more powerful because they will be more powerful!

The Introduction Formula

When you need to give an introduction of a speaker, sticking to these five elements will keep it short and sweet.

The 5 Elements of a Great Speaker Introduction


1. Say their name and say it RIGHT. Spell it out phonetically if you have to. (Example - Law-buck, instead of Laubach.)


2. Say their current organization and how the work it is doing relates to the audience members.


3. Say their expertise and how it relates to the presentation's focus. (This is more about the content.)


4. Say a little about why this particular speaker is credible. (This is more about the speaker.)


5. Say something unique (interesting, fun, etc.) about the presenter. This will require you doing some research either before the day or right before the speech.

Bonus tip: Do what you can to get the main points of these five in your head and easily accessible. Get them learned to the point where you don't have to read the introduction word for word, but don't memorize it word for word either. Good luck!

Quick Tips on Television

Click on the following link to view an interview I did about 5 Quick Speaking Tips with Oklahoma City's News Channel 5.

www.koco.com/video/14136094/index.html?taf=okl

The Five Misconceptions of Speaking

1. I have to get rid of my nervousness. "Your task is not to get rid of the butterflies, but get them to fly in formation," Zig Ziglar. Your goal is to control your nervousness, harness it and turn the negative energy into positive energy. To do this, you need to accept the fact you will be nervous, take deep breaths, confidently know your material and break down the barrier between you and the audience as quickly as possible.

2. I have to give a ton of information to look credible. Albert Einstein said, "Any fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction." Especially in today's busy and noisy world, audiences appreciate a presenter who makes things simple and who takes less time than they are given. Credibility is not accomplished by data volume, but by presenter authenticity.

3. I have to please everyone in the audience. There are at least four different personality types in your audience at any given time. The fun-loving people want interaction and humor. The fact-loving people want data and logic. The people-loving people want stories and emotions. The order-loving people want you to know what you are doing. You can't please everyone all the time, but you can please everyone at least more than once.

4. I have to run a meeting or presentation a certain way because "that is how it has always been done." This misconception is all about risk. It is shocking how many professionals hamstring their personal effectiveness and their presentation's impact simply because they don't understand risk always comes before value.

5. I have to assume people are not going to listen and are not going to get involved because they don't for anyone else. If the presenter doesn't take control of the room, the room will take control of the presentation. The speaker to audience ratio makes the old axiom, "expectations equal behavior" hold very true for presentations. Most audiences don't actively listen to presentations because they aren't worth listening to. Yours should be different.

The Presentation Expert's Seven Skills

The following seven skills are at the core of what we teach to our professional, pageant and student presentation coaching clients...


1. Be Authentic. Authenticity is your number one goal. The best communicators know who they are, have a real-life bond with their content and strive to make a genuine connection with their audience. The biggest challenge on the road to speaking success is getting out of your own way and letting the best of the real you shine through.


2. Be Nervous. Nervousness and excitement are chemically exactly the same.To the human body, there is no difference between being very nervous and very excited. Don't worry about getting rid of your nerves. Begin down the path of controlling your nerves by simply thinking about them differently. Accept that it is ok to be nervous and leverage your nerves to keep you on your toes.


3. Interaction is the Key. Engage your audience quickly to control their attention. Almost as important as controlling your nerves is controlling the audience's focus. Get them involved in your presentation right from the start. Ask a question. Have them share with a partner. Get them physically moving. Make them laugh. Etc.


4. Concrete, Visual, Simple. Send your message through the CVS test. In today's noisy world, the most effective messages cut to the core quickly. Make sure your messages are Concrete (don't make me search too hard for the meaning), Visual (help me see it) and Simple (I'm busy - your message shouldn't be.) The quickest way to achieve CVS is through good story-telling.


5. Index and Filter. Great presenters are great at preparing their content. They index information based on a set range of categories, topics, types of content, etc. they deem necessary for their presentations. We refer to these as buckets. Then they fill these buckets as full as they can. The important step comes during preparation - filtering down the information based on authenticity and the CVS test.


6. Talk With Your Eyes. Your body language sends thousands of messages while your words only send a few. The most important body language is eye contact. You should make it with specific people and make it often. Think of any presentation as a string of smaller conversations with a number of different people. Beyond that, think moderation and variety when it comes to hand movements, walking, pace, volume, and facial expressions.


7. You can do it. You can and should develop your ability to communicate. Communicating effectively is one-part technical, one-part mental and one-part habitual. No matter your experience level, all three of these can be sharpened and improved. More importantly, because our relationships, influence level and in many cases, earning ability are dramatically impacted by our speaking skills, you should work to implement these skills this week. If you need more help, contact us. We would love to work with you.

How Giving Driving Directions Matters

When you give driving directions to other people, you belong in one of the three following camps:

The Left/Right Camp
The North/South/East/West Camp
The Combo Camp

Which camp you belong to indicates something about your communication effectiveness.

1. The Left/Right Camp
The Left/Right campers communicate primarily from a "self-experience" bias. Giving directions with the perception-based language of left and right is good if you are giving directions to yourself as you are driving, but bad if you are giving directions to others. You don't know from which direction they are approaching turns, thus each correct turn could be left or right.

To say it another way, consider two guys standing on either side of a street looking at each other and a car drives by. If these two gentlemen are Left/Right campers and you asked them which way the car was traveling, one would say left, one would say right. Even though they seemingly have totally opposing viewpoints, they actually agree on which way the car was traveling. They are simply communicating from a "self-experience" bias.

In the real world, this type of communicating can and does cause real problems. It is too self-focused. It doesn't take into account how the information will be perceived by other people with different experiences. If you find yourself wondering why people can't get on-board with your ideas, why others don't seem to see your point of view, or why people don't pay enough attention to what you have to say, you could very well be a Left/Right camper.

2. The North/South/East/West Camp
This camp is full of people who communicate in a more concrete, visual and simple manner. They use North/South/East/West when they give driving directions because of two reasons:
N/S/E/W is a universally accepted standard that everyone understands and has used all of their life. Understandably, some people have difficulty finding them from time to time, but they are findable.

N/S/E/W is unchanging. No matter which direction you are headed, North is always North, South is always South, etc. Therefore, the language is not "self-experience" based, but rather "everyone-experience" based.

To apply the North/South/East/West driving directions dynamic to your everyday life as a communicator, you must locate common-ground very quickly with people. You must form a frame-of-reference from which everyone can communicate. It is very similar to how members of the Armed Forces communicate. No matter where you go, the language and the corresponding action protocol is exactly the same from every Armed Forces soldier everywhere. This sameness allows them to work more efficiently and quickly and avoid the confusion and misdirection that ambiguity and "self-experience" language creates. You need to do the same.

3. The Combo Camp
The Combo Camp's positive inclusion of concrete N/S/E/W language is negatively offset by giving too much information. Direction givers in the Combo Camp think the quality of their directions goes up as the quantity goes up. This results in the problem of information overload.

But Combo campers know it, so they say it. This is the same dynamic that happens in the real world. People typically give too much information when communicating ideas. A perfect example is PowerPoint slides. The typical PowerPoint presentation includes too many slides and too much content on each slide (the most effective PowerPoint presentations are visually-based, not text-based.) Great communicators filter out the unimportant and only give the absolutely vital.

Your task as a communicator is to be concrete, simple and visual like the North/South/East/West campers, to avoid the "self-experience" curse of the Left/Right campers and to avoid the information overload that plagues the Combo campers.

[Thanks to David Graham for the "two guys across the street" analogy.]

Putting the Power Back Into PowerPoint Presentations

Chances are good you give PowerPoint presentations. Chances are even better you are doing it wrong. You are not to blame though. Your peers offer poor examples of how to leverage the power of PowerPoint. This article is about how to help you put the power back in PowerPoint.

As a Professional Speaker and Executive Presentation Coach, I have seen PowerPoint used for good and for bad. When used effectively, it is visually stimulating, communicates only the most important points, and makes complicated ideas more digestible. When used poorly, PowerPoint is a distracting crutch that actually diminishes the audience’s retention of your ideas and concepts. Poor PowerPoint is information heavy and wordy.

The changes you need to make will take the focus off the screen and place it on the connection between you and your audience. All presentations are emotional at some level. Therefore, your goal as a presenter is to transfer emotion. Even highly technical presentations aren’t about the numbers alone. They are about either how you feel about the numbers and/or what you are or aren’t going to do about the numbers.

Make your PowerPoint presentations more interesting, more informative (less is more), and more powerful by following these strategies…

PowerPoint should be used only when you need to add visual support (pictures, graphs, videos, etc.) to your presentation.

If you are going to give out copies of your PowerPoint slides to the audience, wait until the end of your presentation.

Go to http://www.istockphoto.com and http://www.canstockphoto.com to purchase engaging images as cheap as $1 per image.

Fonts should be at least 30 point and never more than 20 words per slide.

No more than 15 slides. Ever!

Use dark backgrounds and light text (or vice-versa) and never use red or yellow text.

Never read what is on the slide (unless it is a very short phrase).

Type “Really Bad PowerPoint Seth Godin” into Google to access a free PDF with more tips on improving your PowerPoint use.

Continue to visit this blog to access more useful presentation strategies. Call us at YourNextSpeaker and let us put the power back into all your presentations. 405.216.5050.

How to Build a Compelling Story

From one of the 40 blogs I read on a daily basis, Angela Booth's Writing Blog...


I'm a fan of "one minute" fiction. These are short stories of around a thousand words or less.
These short fiction pieces make a great change of pace for your journal. If you're new to fiction, here's a fast way to structure a story. This works for short stories of course, but you can also use it in an extended form (keep adding complications) for a novel.

Here’s the Quick Story Structure:

• Introduction

• Complication

• Consequence

• Relevance

The Introduction is the setup, the "engine" that sets the story in motion. A static situation changes, as when a man wins the lottery, or when a wife discovers that her husband is having an affair, or when someone is fired, or whatever.

The Complication makes a bad situation worse. If the man wins the lottery, he can’t find the winning ticket. Cluster or free write 20 complications. Force yourself to think of 20, and don’t stop until you've reached that number.

The Consequence is what happens as a result of the conflict that's created from the Introduction and the Complication.

Your story must have Relevance. It's the theme, whether it's love conquers all, do as you would be done by, don't take anything for granted, etc. You should know what your story's theme is, but you don’t need to state it explicitly.

A prompt for your one minute fiction

I give my writing students short prompts to kick start their one minute fiction. Here's a prompt students enjoy:

You're on a crowded commuter flight. You're on your way to give a presentation to tender for a contract. If your company doesn’t get the contract, it will be forced into bankruptcy. The person next to you is a talker. You need to work. You...

Write around 500 words, telling us what happens next.