With this blog I mainly want to inspire you. The posts are based on my experience. It can be a coaching I did, a presentation I have done, a TED talk or another youtube movie I have seen from which you can learn. The posts cover the topics that are very important for me like storytelling, how to deal with stress, body language, how to use PowerPoint, pitching and presenting to the board. The posts are in English or Dutch. As I have been blogging for years on this topic you will see that the oldest posts go way back to 2008 when I started writing articles on this topic. I have transferred all my posts to this website which unfortunately means that I have lost all the comments and reactions which is a pity but hey…you can leave new comments right 😉
I got all emotional yesterday… I had a workshop for 11 people. One of the participants, Paul, didn’t like to present at all and that showed in his first exercise. He did not look at the audience at all though focussed on the ground, and...
Yesterday I heard a great story from a manager at the European Commission. He was invited to be one of the speakers at a conference in the South of France. He was originally speaker number 10…but the organization had decided at the last moment to let...
Believe it or not, the easiest thing you can do when confronting an audience is to stand as close to them as possible. It might sound frightening but just try it out…. Every audience has an energy and most of the time they are really...
I had the pleasure to see Jef Staes presenting this week! What a speaker… But what strikes me most is this: he sinned against so many ‘presentation rules’ and still managed to leave a lasting impression. He sat down, something I would never recommend. He...
Some 2 years ago I learned what pecha kucha was all about, a presentation style with a fixed number of 20 slides, these slides can only contain images and the slides change every 20 seconds. This reduces every presentation to some 6 minutes and 40...
This is a presentation tip from presentation coach Olivia Mitchell. Her advice is to use conversational language and as I completely agree with her I will explain what it means. Language you use daily in conversations is what we’re most used to listening to. We find it...
It is the strangest thing but when people come in front of an audience, they change their speech style. It is as if they have an internal switch that says ‘change to presentation mode’. The main problem is that it oftens looks unnatural with a...
This is a great article written by Speech Coach Susan Trivers on how incredibly important it is to prepare and rehearse for a presentation (written February 2008) : Public speaking and presentations provide great opportunities to the person doing the speaking: status grows, promotions become possible,...
I have always believed that a presentation is pretty much like a story though I never looked into the techniques of storytelling. I just foud this nice manual written by Barry McWilliams on storytelling and was pleased to see that many of the techniques and...