Author: admin

It doesn’t seem to matter whether we are a manager, or a supervisor or a skilled worker lurking in the background – at some point in our professional lives we are going to be invited to present to customers, colleagues or at a panel interview.

When this happens it is likely we will experience a mild panic attack, anticipating a stumbling delivery and the hot gaze of people able to see our internal discomfort.

However, it doesn’t have to be like this – we can take care of ourselves and can set ourselves up for success. So, this week here are my favourite presentation skill top tips and I used them recently to support a client group who ended up delivering a great set of presentations back to their colleagues.

7 TOP TIPS

1. I’m Ok – we have a right to be here and can do this!

2. Take 3 deep breaths – we can hold our breath and breathe out slowly in order to get control over rising panic.

3. Practice – spend time rehearsing to hear the words and gain confidence.

4. Don’t read – write out our presentation as a list of key words to avoid reading paragraphs of text.

5. Sip water – if we get stuck we can take a sip to ground ourselves.

6. Meet the brief – check and check again…have we really answered the questions posed?

7. Less is more – use the ‘rule of 3’ to focus our presentation on 3 key messages to avoid overwhelming people with information.

Presentations can cause a surge of adrenalin in us and they don’t have to lead to incapacity and embarrassment. Good presenters are made not born and we can all learn how to control our voice and our nerves in order to deliver our slides competently.

The key to success is to choose to be successful – so this week make a good choice and decide which tips work best for you!

Next week: Do You Back Yourself?

It is tempting to create a bow wave of activity as we build our business and forge ahead with both eyes fixed firmly on the future. We produce new products, set up new services and write wonderful documents and reports. Our previous work is consigned to the filing cabinet of history, or is tucked quietly into the eaves and left to gather dust.

This doesn’t have to be the case!

Instead we can value our archive and can take a fresh look at the resources our business has locked up within it. We can open files, peer into the filing cabinet and browse a hard drive here and a pad of paper there. What riches might we find? What items are waiting to be rediscovered, so that they can be repackaged and resold to a new audience?

It’s likely that we will have forgotten just how good our previous work was and overlooked old courses, hand-outs, booklets, marketing materials and sample products.

This week our task is to spend time looking through our archives and see what we can make use of, so that we can leverage new value from the time we spent creating things in the past. Recently I discovered a batch of handouts that I had forgotten and used them for a leadership workshop I was running. This prompted me to look more closely at my archive and I found several useful resources that I had completey forgotten about.

If you would like a lucky dip into my archive then email me this week via www.richardmaun.com with the words Lucky Dip Please in the subject line and I will send you a handout, to do with leadership, business, time management….or a related subject.

I’m having fun valuing my archive. What will you find in yours?

Next week: Presentation Top Tips

Ps …check out the #BetterBusiness blog archive on www.richardmaun.com …where you will find 250+ blogs spanning the last 4 years. Click on the archive button on the blog page and browse happily!