Archive for August, 2010

Advanced PowerPoint: 3 Tips The Pros Use

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010
Image Credit Great Looking PowerPoint Slides Are Easy To Create – If You Know How

Great Looking PowerPoint Slides Are Easy To Create – If You Know How

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

It’s All About Look & Feel

The PowerPoint slides that a speaker uses to augment their speech should look professional. Now this doesn’t mean that they needed to be done by an expensive design house, just that they shouldn’t look like they were put together by an amateur (even if they were!)

The most important part of this is to make sure that the slides have a consistent look and feel to them. The first step in making this happen is to decide on a PowerPoint template and then use it for your entire presentation.

However, that’s not quite enough. All too often I see presenters who’ve had a presentation that has been force-fit into a new template. That it doesn’t fit is pretty clear because the text and images spill over the edges and on top of the template’s decorations.

As a presenter it’s your responsibility to make sure that this doesn’t happen to you. Review your slides and make sure that they are living in harmony with the template that you are using.

Getting From Here To There

PowerPoint is a powerful tool. It has a lot of features that either enhance your presentation or take away from it depending on how you use them. One such feature is the “slide transitions”.

When you move from one slide to the next, PowerPoint can do a number of amazing things on the screen. These are what is called a transition. Transitions can range from the simple (old slide fades away only to be replaced by the new slide) to the complex (new slide zooms out from the center of the screen).

My advice to you here is to keep it simple. Just as your PowerPoint slides should not overwhelm your speech so too should your transitions not overwhelm your slides. If your audience is eagerly awaiting seeing your next transition, then you’ve done something wrong.

PowerPoint will let you use a different type of transition for each slide. Don’t do this. Instead pick one type of transition and stick with it for the entire presentation.

No Surprises

Technology is a wonderful thing – until it turns on you! The professional speakers know that although the PowerPoint presentation that they put together while sitting at their desk looked one way, it might not look that way when they are standing in front of an audience.

There are a lot of reasons for this: you might be using a different computer, the display system might change one color into another color, etc. The way to overcome such surprises is to be prepared.

When you are going to use PowerPoint slides as a part of a presentation, always try to show up early in order to run through your slides on the system that will be used to display them and in the space where you’ll be giving your speech.

The reason that you want to do this is that you’ll be able to see what your audience will eventually be seeing. Issues with a slide being too dark, the colors being messed up, or some other technical snafu can be quickly identified and corrected on the spot.

What All Of This Means For You

As speakers, we all need to make use of whatever tools we have available. PowerPoint is one such tool. However, if not used correctly, PowerPoint can actually end up diminishing the impact of our speech.

We can avoid the pitfalls and make the most of PowerPoint if we follow some simple rules. Making sure that all of the slides in our presentation have a common look and feel is important. Picking a slide transition that doesn’t distract from our slides and then using it consistently will boost our impact. Finally, taking the time to preview how our slides are going to look before a presentation can prevent any technical glitches from showing up.

Technology is here to stay and speakers need to learn how to harness it. By using PowerPoint the way that the pros do, you can create and deliver powerful multimedia presentations that will leave your audience saying to themselves “That looked professionally done…”

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that just skipping using any fancy transitions would be the best way to go?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So I’m not sure if there is really any big payoff for taking the time to write about how to become a better speaker; however, if there is, then it’s in getting the opportunity to review new books. Oh, and I get the books for free with no obligation to give a good review – how cool is that?

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Posted in PowerPoint | 1 Comment »

The 100 Hour Secret To Creating Speeches Everyone Will Want To Hear

Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
Image Credit Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Yes, I Do Have A Secret To Share With You

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

The Secret To Creating Great Speeches

If you want to be able to give a great speech, then you’ve got to be willing to invest the time to create a great speech. I’m not talking about shutting down for a couple of days and holing yourself up somewhere and banging out some fabulous bit of text – that never seems to happen when you need it to.
Nope, what I’m talking about is actually spending the time that it takes to really create a fantastic speech. How much time is that you ask? Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 hours. Oh, oh – now I’ve gone and done it. It looks like you don’t think that this is possible. Turns out that you’re wrong – spend the time keeping a journal and you’ll have all of the high quality content that you’ll need to quickly make a great speech.

How To Spend 100′s Of Hours Creating A Speech

I’ll grant that you are correct that the next time someone asks you to give a speech, the last thing that you want to have to tell them is “could you get back to me after I spend a 100 hours just whipping up a speech for you?” Maybe there’s another way to do the same thing.
Keeping a personal journal is something that all too few of us speakers do, and yet all of us probably should do more of it. Life comes at us fast and if we’re not careful, it will blow right by us and we won’t even remember what happened to us. That’s why a journal is so important.
If you take the time either once a day or perhaps for short times throughout the day to write down what you are doing, how you are feeling, what challenges you are facing, then you will be able to remember everything that has happened to you. This is the raw material that makes for a great speech.

Strong Words Make Strong Images

Anybody can jot a few words down on a piece of paper. It takes a truly skillful speaker to capture just exactly how you are feeling when you update your journal.
One of the keys is to record how you are feeling using all of your 5 senses. Yes, this means taking note of what you are smelling (perhaps your own fear?), tasting, hearing, seeing, and feeling. These are the small details that you will need to use when you use your journal entries to create a fantastic speech.

What All Of This Means For You

The truly great speakers are the ones who have taken the time to create a speech that will resonate with their audience. This means that they have crafted both the words and the stories that will not only allow them to get their points across, but that they have also found a way to get their message to stick with their audience.
You have the ability to create this kind of speech also. What you are going to have to do is to take the time that is needed to create such a speech: 100 hours or more. It turns out that you can do this by keeping a journal – the time that you spend working on the journal will pay rich dividends when it comes time to create your next speech.
By recording everything that you are experiencing at any given moment in your journal, you’ll be able to go back and relive those moments when you are in the process of creating your memorable speech. The secret is to not gloss over how you feel, but rather to record everything that is going on so that you can recapture it. Nobody said it was going to be easy, but it will be the best 100 hours that you’ve ever spent doing something…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: How often do you think that a speaker should update their journal? Once a day or more often?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

PowerPoint is a double edged sword when it comes to giving a speech: it can be both a powerful way to add a multimedia impact to your speech or it can end up distracting your audience and taking their attention away from what you have to say. The experts know how to use this tool correctly and here are three of the ways they tame the PowerPoint beast…

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Posted in speech writing | No Comments »

Mastering The PowerPoint Beast In 3 Easy Steps

Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Image Credit There's No Need To Fear PowerPoint, Show It Who's Boss!

There's No Need To Fear PowerPoint, Show It Who's Boss!

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

Get Your Head Straight

The first thing to work out isn’t what your slides need to look like, rather it’s what role PowerPoint should play in your next speech. The answer is, always, a supporting role.

This means that you need to make sure that your audience doesn’t end up spending your entire speech looking at your slides and not you. Likewise, you don’t want your slides to confuse your audience – almost as if they are telling a different story than what you are talking about.

Speech First, Slides Second – Or Third

If you only remember one thing from reading this, I’m hoping that this is it: always, always write your speech first. Don’t you dare pop open that copy of PowerPoint and start creating slides until AFTER you’ve gotten your words all worked out. Remember: the slides are there to support your speech, not the other way around.

I fully understand just how easy it is to instead of picking up a pen (or a keyboard) and spending some time doing the hard job of writing (unfun) that you open PowerPoint and spend a lot of time drawing (fun!) The problem with this is that you’ll end up creating a lousy speech.

When your words have to follow your slides, the slides will take center stage and you’ll be shoved off into a corner. There won’t be a natural flow to your words. Instead it will appear as though you are just reading off of each slide as it is displayed. This is no way to give a speech.

Slides Are Like Diamonds – They Should Be Rare

Sadly I suspect that at one time or another we’ve all had to sit though one of those speeches where the presenter showed up with like 300 slides and come hell or high water, they were going to show each and every one of them to us.

After you’ve created your speech and when you start to design some slides, you need to make sure that you don’t turn into that person with 300 slides. A good way to prevent it is to take a step back and look at your speech. What is the main point that you are trying to make? You should probably have a slide for that. What are the three ways that you support the main point that you are trying to make? You should probably have slides for those. If you can stop here, that would be a good thing.

Cut Down On The Slides That You Have

The last thing that you’re going to want to do is to throw away some of your slides. “What?” you say. You heard me, you’ve got too many slides. I don’t care which ones you throw away, just get rid of some of them – they can’t all be critical to the message that you are trying to make.

This may be difficult for you to do, but do it anyway. Your audience will benefit from it and they’ll thank you in the end.

What All Of This Means For You

Repeat after me “PowerPoint is my friend”. It can be an important tool that can make your next speech even more powerful; however, you have to know how to use it.

The key things to keep in mind are simple, but critical. You must remember to write your speech before you start to create slide. You have to keep the number of slides that you make to a minimum. Finally, you need to make a second pass and throw away as many slides as you possibly can.

Adding multimedia to your next presentation can only make it better. Just remember, you are the star of the show, not your slides!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How many slides should you use for a 30 minute speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you ever gone to hear someone speak and just been blown away by what they had to say? I mean their words just seemed to flow out of them and the stories that they told were right on the mark – a perfect complement to the point that they were trying to make? It turns out that you can deliver speeches like this too…

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Posted in PowerPoint | No Comments »

Speech Writing Success: How To Make It Happen

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010
Image Credit You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

You Can Be A Winner, You Just Have To Know How To Get There…

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

It’s All About Your Goals

If you’ve ever read a book or attended a workshop on motivational techniques, then you already know about the power of goals. If for some reason you haven’t, then you’re going to learn now.

In a nutshell, if you want to accomplish something, like writing a great speech, then you need to first start by creating a goal and, this is the important part, writing it down! Yes, I know that it seems too easy, but trust me – this really works.

Setting Goals Is How You Start To Be Successful

Sure we throw the word “goal” around a lot, but do any of us really know what it means? It can mean many different things, but for our purposes here lets assume that when we talk about goals, we’re talking about something that you want to achieve.

You would think that when it comes to the goal of writing a great speech, all you have to do is to think to yourself “I’m going to write a great speech” and that would be that. Right? Well, actually there is a lot more to it than just that.

The experts say that thinking about the goal is really just the first step. The next (and some argue the most important) step is to write it down. For some reason this has the effect of making the goal seem to be more “real” to us. Finally, the last step in the process is actually taking action to make the goal a reality. There may be many steps that you need to take, but taking the first one is what will get you on your way…

Visualization: Can You See What I Can See?

If you were a professional sports figure, then in the past few years you would have found yourself getting caught up in the “visualization” craze that swept through the sports world awhile back. Simply put, this is where you take the time to imagine yourself being successful before it comes time for you to perform. Since the mind can’t tell the different between real and imagined actions, it thinks that you’ve done this before and you’ve just improved your odds of completing your goal.

When it comes to writing a great speech, visualization can be a big help. Speech writing can take quite some time and so having taken the time to visualize yourself successfully creating a great speech helps you to stay focused and on track while writing.

What sport figures go through is called process visualization. What you’ll go through when you are writing a speech is called outcome visualization. You can “see” what you want to produce and that will help you to get there.

Becoming A Speaker Of Action

In the end, all of the goals and visualization in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t get up out of your chair and take some action. It’s this final step of the goals process that separates the people who plan great things from those who achieve great things.

What All Of This Means For You

You can write a great speech. The key to doing this is to make sure that you have clear goals for what you want to achieve.

Knowing your goals is only the first part of a process. Next you need to take the time to visualize yourself creating that great speech and then, most importantly, you need to start to take the steps that will be necessary to get you to where you want to be.

There is no secret to writing a great speech. You have the ability to do it right now. Go set some goals and you’ll be half way to creating that great speech…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What kind of goals do you think would help you to create a great speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Can we all be honest here? PowerPoint is a part of everyone’s life no matter how you feel about it. We all seem to fall into one of three camps: we fear it, we love it too much, or we just don’t really know what to do with it. With a little help, I think that I can help you out here…

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Posted in speech writing | 5 Comments »

Big Game Hunting: How Public Speakers Capture An Audience’s Attention

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010
Image Credit
You Can't Go Hunting If You Don't Know What You Are Looking For

You Can't Go Hunting If You Don't Know What You Are Looking For

In the world of big game hunting, the goal always seems to be to try to hunt something bigger and more deadly than you did last time. The world of public speaking isn’t all that much different except that we go looking for the biggest game of all: an audience’s attention.

Do The Unexpected

Face it, we’re all jaded. We live in a world where we expect to be updated instantly via iPhone or Blackberry, we get text messages whenever something important happens, and we can get virtually any type of food within about a mile of where we currently are. What the heck do you have to offer us as a speaker that is going to cause us to pay any attention to you?

David Green is a speechwriter who has to deal with this wandering attention thing as a part of his job every day. He’s got some suggestions on just exactly what you need to do as a public speaker in order to keep that audience of yours hanging on your every word.

First off, David suggests that you pay attention to what your audience is expecting you to say. Do they know who you are? Have they heard you speak before? Are you just like a bunch of other speakers? If any of these are true, then it’s time to shake things up just a bit.

David suggests that you do the exact opposite of what your audience is expecting you to do. If they are expecting you to deliver a speech standing behind a podium, then get out in front of everyone. If they are expecting you to use 100′s of slides, then don’t use any at all. These types of dramatic departures from the ordinary will catch your audience by surprise (in a good way) and they’ll be forced to pay attention to you because they’ll want to know what’s going to happen next.

Accent, Accent, Accent

Nope, we’re not talking about having you sound like Crocodile Dundee or like you are from the U.S. deep South, instead we’re talking about what else is going on on stage while you are speaking. Like PowerPoint.

How much time do you typically spend on the PowerPoint presentation that you are going to use with a speech? As much or more time than you spend on the speech itself? Forget all that fancy stuff, the real star of any speech is you. Make sure that if you decide to use slides that they accent (softly) what you are saying and don’t steal the show from you.

It’s Play Time!

So just what is a speech? If you’re not careful, it’s 20-30 minutes of pure boredom for your audience. If you don’t want to inflict this kind of pain on your audience, then you’ve got to entertain them. I’m not saying that you’ve got to make them laugh (although that might be a good idea), instead I’m trying to let you know that you’ve got to give your speech in a way that will hold their attention.

There are lots of ways to do this. Telling great stories is one way to do it. Slowly unveiling a discovery that you’ve made is another. How you do it isn’t as important as just making sure that you do it.

What All Of This Means For You

Just like a big game hunter, when you are giving a speech you are stalking prey. Your elusive quarry does not have four feet, but rather is sitting in a chair with four legs.

Your goal is to capture and hold your audience’s attention for your entire speech. In order to do this you’re going to have to get creative. Doing the unexpected is one way to keep them guessing – and paying attention to you. Make sure that your PowerPoint doesn’t overpower what you are saying and make sure that you tell a story or two or three.

In the end, you’ll know if you’ve done a good job because the audience won’t want your speech to have ended – they were having a great time listening to you. You’ll know that you’ve had a successful hunt if you get asked to come back and present again!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What should you do if you sense that you are starting to lose an audience’s attention while you are giving a speech?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So there you are: you’ve agreed to give a speech and now your mind has gone completely blank when you’ve tried to start to figure out what you’ll say. Where did your energy go? Perhaps more importantly, how are you going to get it back and create a great speech?

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Posted in attention | 1 Comment »