emendatio

“Oh no! Not another boring PowerPoint presentation! My eyes, my eyes…!!!”

How much does it suck to be in the audience for yet another drawn-out, boring, lifeless slideshow? Worse yet, how much does it such to be the one giving it?

The truth is, bad PowerPoint happens to good people, and quite often the person giving the presentation is just as much a victim as the poor sods listening to her or him.

Here are ten tips to help you add a little zing! to your next presentation. They are, of course, far from comprehensive, but they’re a start. Feel free to share your own tips in the comments.

1. Write a script.

A little planning goes a long way. Most presentations are written in PowerPoint (or some other presentation package) without any sort of rhyme or reason.

That’s bass-ackwards. Since the point of your slides is to illustrate and expand what you are going to say to your audience. You should know what you intend to say and then figure out how to visualize it. Unless you are an expert at improvising, make sure you write out or at least outline your presentation before trying to put together slides.

And make sure your script follows good storytelling conventions: give it a beginning, middle, and end; have a clear arc that builds towards some sort of climax; make your audience appreciate each slide but be anxious to find out what’s next; and when possible, always leave ‘em wanting more.

2. One thing at a time, please.

At any given moment, what should be on the screen is the thing you’re talking about. Our audience will almost instantly read every slide as soon as it’s displayed; if you have the next four points you plan to make up there, they’ll be three steps ahead of you, waiting for you to catch up rather than listening with interest to the point you’re making.

Plan your presentation so just one new point is displayed at any given moment. Bullet points can be revealed one at a time as you reach them. Charts can be put on the next slide to be referenced when you get to the data the chart displays. Your job as presenter is to control the flow of information so that you and your audience stay in sync.

3. No paragraphs.

Where most presentations fail is that their authors, convinced they are producing some kind of stand-alone document, put everything they want to say onto their slides, in great big chunky blocks of text.

Congratulations. You’ve just killed a roomful of people. Cause of death: terminal boredom poisoning.

Your slides are the illustrations for your presentation, not the presentation itself. They should underline and reinforce what you’re saying as you give your presentation — save the paragraphs of text for your script. PowerPoint and other presentation software have functions to display notes onto the presenter’s screen that do not get sent to the projector, or you can use notecards, a separate word processor document, or your memory. Just don’t put it on the screen – and for goodness’ sake, if you do for some reason put it on the screen, don’t stand with your back to your audience and read it from the screen!

4. Pay attention to design.

PowerPoint and other presentation packages offer all sorts of ways to add visual “flash” to your slides: fades, swipes, flashing text, and other annoyances are all too easy to insert with a few mouse clicks.

Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and focus instead on simple design basics:

• Use a sans serif font for body text. Sans serifs like Arial, Helvetica, or Calibri tend to be the easiest to read on screens.
• Use decorative fonts only for slide headers, and then only if they’re easy to read. Decorative fonts –calligraphy, German blackface, futuristic, psychotic handwriting, flowers, art nouveau, etc. – are hard to read and should be reserved only for large headlines at the top of the page. Better yet, stick to a classy serif font like Georgia or Baskerville.
• Put dark text on a light background. Again, this is easiest to read. If you must use a dark background – for instance, if your company uses a standard template with a dark background – make sure your text is quite light (white, cream, light grey, or pastels) and maybe bump the font size up two or three notches.
• Align text left or right. Centered text is harder to read and looks amateurish. Line up all your text to a right-hand or left-hand baseline – it will look better and be easier to follow.
• Avoid clutter. A headline, a few bullet points, maybe an image – anything more than that and you risk losing your audience as they sort it all out.

5. Use images sparingly

There are two schools of thought about images in presentations. Some say they add visual interest and keep audiences engaged; others say images are an unnecessary distraction.

Both arguments have some merit, so in this case the best option is to split the difference: use images only when they add important information or make an abstract point more concrete.

While we’re on the subject, absolutely do not use PowerPoint’s built-in clipart. Anything from Office 2003 and earlier has been seen by everyone in your audience a thousand times – they’ve become tired, used-up clichés, and I hopefully don’t need to tell you to avoid tired, used-up clichés in your presentations. Office 2007 and non-Office programs have some clipart that isn’t so familiar (though it will be, and soon) but by now, the entire concept of clipart has about run its course – it just doesn’t feel fresh and new anymore.

6. Think outside the screen.

Remember, the slides on the screen are only part of the presentation – and not the main part. Even though you’re liable to be presenting in a darkened room, give some thought to your own presentation manner – how you hold yourself, what you wear, how you move around the room. You are the focus when you’re presenting, no matter how interesting your slides are.

7. Have a hook.

Like the best writing, the best presentation shook their audiences early and then reel them in. Open with something surprising or intriguing, something that will get your audience to sit up and take notice. The most powerful hooks are often those that appeal directly to your audience’s emotions – offer them something awesome or, if it’s appropriate, scare the pants off of them. The rest of your presentation, then, will be effectively your promise to make the awesome thing happen, or the scary thing not happen.

8. Ask questions.

Questions arouse interest, pique curiosity, and engage audiences. So ask a lot of them. Build tension by posing a question and letting your audience stew a moment before moving to the next slide with the answer. Quiz their knowledge and then show them how little they know. If appropriate, engage in a little question-and-answer with your audience, with you asking the questions.

9. Modulate, modulate, modulate.

Especially when you’ve done a presentation before, it can be easy to fall into a drone, going on and on and on and on and on with only minimal changes to your inflection. Always speak as if you were speaking to a friend, not as if you are reading off of index cards (even if you are). If keeping up a lively and personable tone of voice is difficult for you when presenting, do a couple of practice run-throughs. If you still can’t get it right and presentations are a big part of your job, take a public speaking course or join Toastmasters.

10. Break the rules.

As with everything else, there are times when each of these rules – or any other rule you know – won’t apply. If you know there’s a good reason to break a rule, go ahead and do it. Rule breaking is perfectly acceptable behavior – it’s ignoring the rules or breaking them because you just don’t know any better that leads to shoddy boring presentations that lead to boredom, depression, psychopathic breaks, and eventually death. And you don’t want that, do you?

Reblogged from Stepcase Lifehack.

Ever wondered what’s the most important skill in your daily business is, no matter whether you’re a construction worker, a lawyer or a sales guy like me: its listening! Listening to your customers, your colleagues, your boss and even your belly. Now you might say that these are different kinds of listening skills, but I dare to say they are not. Listening is so very important as it maximizes effectiveness of aural business communication, no matter who you’re talking, err listening to.

Why is listening so vitally important for good communication? Because we think at a much faster rate than we listen. Which means that although we might listen to someone talking to us, our mind is working on the words it is processing on a much faster rate. Our brain will take whatever word it hears and construct new words, ideas and thoughts around this. Very often we tend to literally get lost inside this process and stop listening and following the conversation. Therefore listening is not only about asking the right questions, but more importantly about stopping yourself from “thinking too fast” and forcing yourself to focus on the conversation.

The best way to stop yourself from dwelling away is practicing it. Whenever you are in a conversation and you notice that your thoughts are drifting, force yourself to stop. You can only think about one thing at the same moment, therefore you have to focus. The lifecoaches blog suggest the following little exercise to train this ability:

Take a moment and think about where you would like to go on your next vacation. What would you like to do? How much fun would you have? Okay, so you got the dream vacation? Now, what do you have to accomplish at work or home tomorrow? What did you notice took place when you went from thinking about your dream vacation to work or home? What happened in your mind? Did you switch gears from vacation to work? You were so focused on creating that dream vacation and then you easily began focusing on work or home. This exercise is what we must practice when having conversations with people. It will help us to stay focused on what the individual is saying.

This will be the first and most important skill for improving your listening skills. Force yourself to focus on what’s being said, focus on not letting your mind drift away. In a next step you should fine-tune your listening skills, here are a few methods how to do it:

1. Learn to “listen ahead”: By “listening ahead”, trying to anticipate where a discussion is leading to, during the dialogue, determining the conclusion in advance of your required response allows you to relax and improve information absorption. This might sound contrary to what I’ve said above, but it means that your mind should focus on the conversation, not on anything else.
2. Learn to periodically validate communicated information: By mentally striving to validate the accuracy and completeness of information points made by the prospect, especially during pauses in the dialogue, (which can be achieved with note taking), you can allow yourself to absorb more information easier, especially information forthcoming in the continued dialogue.
3. Utilize “Active Listening” techniques: By periodically, mentally summarizing the major points communicated by the prospect and voicing, reaffirming your interpretation of the points made back to the prospect you add a tremendous amount of clarity to the information exchanged thus far.
Strive to understand versus “Judging”: By working to consciously understand what the prospect is saying versus the natural tendency of judging - approving or disapproving what is said will allow you to absorb what is actually said more than any other listening development technique.
4. Use your eyes to “get the rest of the story”: By listening with your eyes, paying attention to the prospect’s body language, their nonverbal facial and body movements or hand gestures you can see what the whole body is trying to tell you, not just the mouth!
5. Maintain a mental repertoire of common responses: By mentally developing and rehearsing how you are going to strategically respond to common sales prospect purchase objections, for example, in advance of a sales call, allows you to listen more effectively. A comprehensive mental inventory of common responses will also give you more confidence in any selling situation.

Listening is the most effective way to build trust, establish a strong relationship, maximize your time by properly disqualifying dead end opportunities and protecting your own and your company’s resources. When you listen with interest, you encourage communication. This allows another person to open up to you. If they feel safe, they will trust you. Encourage communication by showing interest in what someone shares with you by nodding when they speak. You don’t have to agree. You’re just showing that you’re listening. Don’t interrupt when someone is speaking just so that you can have your turn.

Good listening skills are directly connected to good questioning skills. I will talk about them in one of the next posts here. Meanwhile I’d like to recommend googling for more information on listening skills, there are tons of stuff on the intertubes.

You may have heard it already, maybe your mum said it or someone during a health course at school: breakfeast is the most imporant meal of the day. But why is that so you may ask. Well first of all because it gives us energy for the few hours in which we’re most productive and it empowers our brain.

Providing enough “fuel” for your brain is important to activate the brain neurotransmitters. These are the four most important neurotransmitter and their effects:

1. Catecholamines - activity and aggressiveness (adrenalin)
2. Acetylcholine - learning aptitude, flexibility and memory
3. Serotonin - concentration, motivation, drive, relaxation, well being
4. Endorphin - euphoria and sensation of pain

There are multiple ways to activate each of these neurotransmitters. Endurance training like walking, hiking and jogging will increase your inner Endorphin production (and will also save you from diseases and depression). Acetylcholine and Serotonines can be activated through protein rich food like meat, fish, milk products and through carbohydrates. Those can be found in all kinds of food, though the most effective way to get them is through cereals as they give away the carbohydrates over time and not all at once.

Breakfast will therefore not only provide you with “brain fuel” but it will also improve your stress resistance and tolerance through micronutrients. You all know micronutrients by heart: vitamin B, C and E, beta carotene and magnesium. The most vitamins can be found in the most colorful kinds of vegetables and fruits, rule of thumb: the more red the more beta carotene. In addition to this micronutritions like vitamin B and magnesium will decrease the production of stress hormones.

To summarize this, a good breakfeast should provide you with “brain fuel” through micronutrients for activating your neurotransmitters. Therefore a perfect breakfast should consist of carbohydrates combined with micronutrients rich and colorful food. Eat a small bowl of cereals, take yogurt instead of milk and add some fruits. This will give you enough energy for the entire morning and over time reduce stress and keep your brain healthy.

PS: don’t forget your 2 liters of water per day… and remember, coffee is not water!

Fact is, for repetitive actions, using the mouse is the longest, most inefficient way to get it done.

I couldn’t agree more to this quote. What the assembly line has done for mass production is what shortcuts can do to our personal workflow. They reduce the time we have to spent with things that can be done smarter otherwise.

Via:  Lifehacker.com - Reboot your Workflow this Fall

The Life Coaches Blog posted four videos of personal coach Tony Robbins explaining what he calls 3 pillars of an extraordinary life.

Check them out!

PS: As a bonus you might also want to watch this 12min interview with Tony Robbins.

Todd Goldfarb from the wecanchange.com blog gives us eleven ways on how to improve our memory. I’ll list them below, follow the link to read the detailled explainations.

1. Eat Brain “Superfoods”.
2. Stretch.
3. Teach Others.
4. Take a Break.
5. Listen to Music.
6. Try Ginkgo Biloba.
7. Use Acronyms and Other Mnemonic Devices.
8. Cross-pollinate Your Interests.
9. Sleep Well.
10. Collaborate.
11. Write About It.

Link: Todd Goldfarb - 11 Ways To Improve Memory

Recently I changed my job due to a promotion now facing a lot of new tasks and project While some of them are a welcome challenge some others grow fear in me. Not fear on their own but fear to fail. In Scoutt Youngs blog I found nine ideas on how to overcome this growing discouragement and found them really helpful.

Link: Scott Young - 9 Ways To Overcome Discouragement

Scott Young wrote a phantastic (no pun intended) blog post on the question whether you should read more fiction. As I am a huge fiction literature fan myself, mostly phantasy, I can only agree to all of his points. For me fictional books increase my thinking and take me away from problems I face in real life. That doesn’t mean that I’ll ignore them, it just creates a "happy place" where I can relax and regain my strength.

Good fiction has a far broader range of guiding philosophies. The Fountainhead centers around the virtue of human selfishness and ego. [...] The stories that guide these books center around completely different ways of viewing the world.

Link: Scott Young - Should You Read More Fiction?

When you’re working in a tough environment you might have experienced that some people from time to time disappoint you. Maybe you’ve learned it the hard way by being let down by someone you trusted or you made the experience by listening to others stories. Nevertheless losing trust in colleagues also affects your overall trust sensation. In a business world were everybody first of all thinks of his/ her own you have to keep a strong mind and believe in people in order not do fall into depression and paranoia.

Steve Olson gives us in his blog 20 ways to expand your trust radius. I’ll take them down here as my own personal list and recommend the detailled explainations in his blog:

1. Write down the names of the people you absolutely trust.
2. Suspend your own position and gain understanding.
3. Admit your mistakes.
4. Admit your fears (at least to yourself).
5. Use authentic words.
6. When someone shares deep feelings or crazy ideas don’t judge them.
7. Never intentionally hurt someone.
8. Keep agreements, commitments, and promises.
9. Have faith in those you choose to associate with.
10. Embrace differences.
11. Embrace disagreement.
12. Act in the best interest of others.
13. Be willing to ask others for help.
14. Listen to and consider criticism.
15. Give direct, specific, non-punishing feedback.
16. Tell people you trust them.
17. Have open free flowing dialogue. Never try to dominate a conversation.
18. Accept people for who they are. Never demand they play a particular role.
19. Practice Trust.
20. Sit down when you interact with people.

Link: Steve Olson - 20 Ways To Expand Your Trust Radius

Do you know the feeling? You are planing to do something, work on a new project and you’ve completed all the necessary steps: preparation, gathering material, setting everything up… and right at start line your power withdraws. Ok lets get a bit more specific: On your way home you make a plan on how to spend the afternoon, maybe work on a private project, write on a paper, get back to some important emails. When you finally arrive at home, the energy is gone. Although you had the best intention you’re tired, lazy and the only thing left in your head is watching some crappy show on tv.

Over at the Livecleverblog the guys describe this as the "strike of a lightning bold" that takes all your power. They continue on giving you some advice on how to accept this situation and finding out why and how you’re reacting this way. Furthermore they also give you advice on how to live with the lightning, how to accept and enjoy it and even work around it.

Link: The Lightning Bolt