Effective Presentations
At Virtuas today, we had a workshop from Joel Hochberger of Effective Presentations. This was a very valuable training course that I learned a lot from. We started out by doing short presentations that were videotaped and criticized by other folks in the class. It was interesting to see myself speaking on video because I did a lot of "umms" and "ya knows" that weren't noticed by me or the audience.
After learning to pause more, quit shifting and have better eye contact - we moved on to learning how to better organize our presentations. Joel gave us some great tips that I should be able to really benefit from. The main gist was that you can easily create better presentations by simply thinking from the listeners perspective. What is the main benefit the listener derives from your idea?
The other two things that really stuck with me were: 1) ask for action from your listener (what they must do to achieve the benefits of your idea) and 2) summarize your presentation following audience questions. If you get a chance to attend one of Joel's workshops, I'd definitely recommend it.