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Kaizen: relentless improvement

When I think of becoming a better presenter, I think of four key areas:

• Content: the raw material
• Organization: how you put it together to make sense
• Presentation: the visual, auditory, and kinesthetic aspects
• Delivery and interaction: the performance

All four areas can be separately and deliberately practised to help you build your skill.

CONTENT: Writing journal entries, blog posts, and articles is an excellent way to deliberately practice building content. Here are some ideas for finding content worth sharing:

• Think about what you’ve learned that other people need to know.
• Read lots of books on a topic. Summarize them and add your own insights.
• List the top challenges someone might face in a particular area (ex: facilitating meetings) and how to deal with them. Illustrate this with stories.
• List five to ten unexpected tips on a topic and illustrate them with stories.
• Come up with a creative metaphor combining two or three very different things. Illustrate.
• Collect interesting statistics, stories, pictures, and videos.
• Learn something new. Share it.
• Take a cliche and change it. Illustrate.
• Pick a famous person with interesting quotes. Apply to a different field.
• Blog. Review your archive to find things that people find useful. Revise or summarize in a presentation or blog post.
• Pick an action you want people to take. Assemble stories and tips to help them change.

ORGANIZATION: A good talk hangs together well. It’s of one piece. It flows. It’s memorable.

• Read books. Watch other presentations, TV commercials, etc. Look for the framework and sequencing of ideas.
• Take an existing talk (even by someone else). Restructure it. Find the key message. Cut out all the things that don’t support the key message.
• Take your raw material. Pick out key elements.
• Play with finding acronyms and mnemonics.
• Play with structure: location, alphabet, time, category, hierarchy.

PRESENTATION: There are so many ways to express ideas.

• Watch other presentations for inspiration. Slideshare and TED have many great examples. Take notes on what you like and don’t like.
• Develop a visual vocabulary by looking at ads, photography, videos, and so on.
• Keep an ear open for vivid language and imaginative metaphors.
• Experiment with different ways to look at an idea. The Back of the Napkin has a great framework (SQVID).
• Turn blog posts and book reviews into presentations and share them on sites like Slideshare.
• Listen to and tell stories.
• Read design books.
• Look for great data visualizations and ways to make statistics come alive.

DELIVERY AND INTERACTION:

• Watch other presenters. Take notes on what you like and don’t like. Every presentation (even a boring one) is a learning opportunity.
• Listen to speeches, radio programs, and other examples.
• Attend webinars to see how they handle the backchannel.
• Read speaking books.
• Stop thinking of people as audience. Think of them as participants who can teach you a lot. Experiment with ways to involve them and learn from them.
• Practise and reflect.
• Record yourself and review it. Build on your strengths.

See also: <a href=”http://sachachua.com/wp/2009/04/seven-tips-for-making-better-presentations/”>Another seven tips for making better presentations</a>

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