If you give long presentations, people probably forget most of what you presented. In fact, the research says that people can maintain high attention for about 10 minutes. So if you want people to actually remember your presentations, every 10 minutes you need to insert a slide with a short one-line message summarizing what you just said. In other words, every 10 minutes you need to put a tweet up on the screen.
We all have our own presentation style, but have you ever thought about how your particular style compares to others? And the strengths and weaknesses of your presentation style?
After years of research, my team and I have found there are four primary presentation styles: the Closer, the Data Scientist, the Director and the Storyteller.
Not only does stopping the presentation keep you from (figuratively) crashing into a wall, it also awakens your audience. So few presenters have the courage to stop a presentation that it’s a surprise. And with presentations going badly, it’s a very nice surprise.
Most presenters fall short when it comes to engaging audiences while driving home their point. Too many slides, the wrong kinds of slides, rambling, lack of an objective and a weak argument are just a few of the presentation sins most speakers commit.
PechaKucha, a weird Japanese presentation technique devised by Tokyo architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham can help.
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, CEO or middle manager, virtually everyone has to create (and present) business plans. And while there are literally thousands of business plan templates available, they will all fail if you don’t answer these three critical questions (that you might have never heard before) when you’re creating and presenting your business plan.
Here’s a different kind of communication skills tip: If you give enough presentations, eventually you will have one not go well. You will have one go off the rails. Now, when most people do this, they have this feeling that I just have to power through no matter how bad this is, no matter how much sweat is pouring down my back, and how irritated and annoyed the audience is.
Given the huge amounts of information most of us have to cram into our presentations, getting people to remember everything is a tall order.
Now, we all have different presentation styles and different ways of making our message memorable.
One thing you need to watch out for when you’re giving motivational speeches, whether you’re in front of a formal, seated audience, or in a more informal setting like with a group of your employees (this even applies when talking to your customers), is violating the narcissism ratio. And the narcissism ratio, very simply, is the ratio of the number of times you say “I” and “me” versus the number of times you talk about “them.”
We all have our own presentation style, but have you ever thought about how your particular style compares to others? And the strengths and weaknesses of your presentation style?
After years of research, my team and I have found there are four primary presentation styles: the Closer, the Data Scientist, the Director and the Storyteller. You can discover your own style with the quiz What's Your Presentation Style?
