big picture headlines

The ticket to communicating effectively, with communications consultant, Carmine Gallo (who's not afraid of blowing his own trumpet at every opportunity - but how else do you convince these Stanford Business School grads that they are indeed learning from the best?).

Carmine suggests the following techniques for more powerful and engaging presentations -

• unlocking your passion to persuade
• appealing to the heart not the head
• use the discipline of the 140-character Twitter to get your message across
• decluttering your presentations so the message is clear and singular, like Steve Jobs would
• employing narrative theory to tell the story, like the battle between good and evil

You can learn more about these kinds of techniques, and practice them too, care of Toastmasters International.

Because seeing awesome presenters in action - and unpicking what they're doing well - is one thing, developing the same skills is a whole lot more challenging.

better presentation: don't TELL

The key to a good presentation is pitching it right so before you begin ask questions; really 'show don't tell' and not with clip art; and give the main ideas centre stage – cut the supporting cast of characters, says Dan & Chip Heath in Fast Company.

Spoiler alert (possibly akin to telling you Romeo and Juliet both die) but nonetheless spoiler:
Curiosity must come before content. Imagine if the TV show Lost had begun with an announcement: "They're all dead people, and the island is Purgatory. Over the next four seasons, we'll unpack how they got there. At the end, we'll take questions." We've all had the experience of being in the audience as a presenter clicks to a slide with eight bullet points. As he starts discussing the first one, we read all eight. Now we're bored. He's lost us. But what if there had been eight questions instead? We'd want to stay tuned for the answers.

Presentation tips on using Powerpoint

If you find yourself so rarely giving presentations that when the time comes to do one, you forget everything you know and return to your default position:

• stand in front of the screen,
• flip through colourful slides with or without clever animations,
• accidentally forget to delete a couple of irrelevant slides,
• and
• continually look back at the screen while you talk to remind yourself what it is you're saying while you see eyes glaze and feet shuffle in the audience in front of you...

then these little tips should help sharpen the saw and remind yourself to put you, the presenter front and centre, not the slide pack. Be happy to be there, be confident, talk to the audience like they're having lunch with you, not that they're locked in a room with you against their will and you should be able to keep them interested in the content of what you are saying, not your very chilled not-too-fancy not-too-clever visual aids behind you.