December 2009
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Use a Mirror to Improve Your Presentation Style. |
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Joey Asher
President's
Perspective |
When we were selling our old house
several years ago, my five-year-old daughter Annie loved
giving tours to prospective buyers. She hustled
husbands and wives around, showing off the kitchen,
bathrooms, bedrooms etc.
Arriving at the living room she would
stand at a spot in front of our large, framed
wall-mirror. Then she would look at the prospective
buyers and say, “This is where my daddy stands when he
talks to himself.”
And it’s true. I practiced a lot of
presentations in front of that big mirror. I still do.
That’s because rehearsing in front of a mirror – one of
the oldest tips in public speaking – is still one of the
best things you can do to improve your presentation
style.
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When Can I start my Speech with a Joke? Rarely. |
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“I like to break the ice with a joke.”
We hear that all the time. But how does a joke break the ice?
Usually jokes thicken the ice because they are neither funny, nor
relevant. Sometimes the joke is offensive, turning off substantial
portions of the audience before the presentation begins.
We have a pretty strict policy against using jokes to begin a
presentation. But if you must use a joke, then make sure it passes
the Speechworks Acid Joke Test.
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How to make Statistics Sing. |
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Many years ago, one of our coaches took a statistics
course at a local community college. His professor had
such a heavy French accent that he literally could only
understand about a third of the words he said. He
learned everything from reading the textbook. Most
presenters that use a lot of statistics don’t do much
better than a professor. The numbers come across to
listeners as a foreign language.
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Listen to the Audio version of "How to Win a Pitch." |
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If you want to learn how to create and deliver new presentations
that win business and sell ideas, consider listening to the
new audio version of “How to Win a Pitch: The Five Fundamentals
that Will Distinguish You from the Competition.”
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Public Speaking Tip from Malcolm Gladwell. |
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“Key to good decision making is not knowledge but
understanding. We're swimming in the former, desperately
lacking in the latter.”
Those are the words of Malcolm Gladwell, author of such bestsellers
as “Outliers”, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink.”
While he wasn’t speaking about public speaking, he could have been
speaking about the value of story-telling. Stories are an
indispensable part of good public speaking because they promote
understanding by putting knowledge into a context.
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