You know the symptoms; you are sitting in a slightly darkened room and the speaker drones on in a montone whilst showing you slide after slide, dot point after dot point, spreadsheets you can’t read and before you know it your eyelids feel heavy and your consciousness floats away.

Power Point is a powerful tool that is often misused and yet with a little preparation can bring your presentation to life and free you to inform and inspire your audience.

I trust you enjoyed the short YouTube video above. For more information about presentation skill training and coaching, visit www.selfleadership.com.sg

There are four presentation styles that every speaker should and can easily master. Watch the video and read the descriptions below.

Director Style

This is the presentation body language that commands attention while maintaining dignity and rapport. It offers no immediate opportunity for resistance.You will use it to give clear mobilizing directions.

Instructions: Stand straight, square the shoulders, and maintain eye contact. During instruction, stay as still as possible. After the instruction, freeze for a couple of breaths while slowly scanning room. Use a strong voice. Use visual words and physiology.

Discovery Style

This is the presentation body language used when ‘on stage’ or teaching.You can use it to elicit curiosity, wonder, excitement and discovery. To explore what is possible to know or learn; to build closeness and partnership with the audience.

Intsructions: Stand light on feet, move laterally across stage, Use lots of gestures congruent with content, voices and expressions, and maintain an air of playfulness. Use “Let’s”, “Us”, “We” and phrases such as “Here’s an idea. What do you think or feel about it?” “This is true for me, how about for you?” Move in and out of the audience.

Leadership Style

This is the presentation body language style that inspires and calls people to action. You can use it to unify a group, and get them to move toward commitment and action.

Instructions: Stand straight, breathe fully, and maintain eye contact. Keep one foot in front of the other; slightly turn body to one side of the audience at a time. If in center of audience, slowly rotate and speak to different sections.

Authenticity

This is the presentation body language used for establishing openness and authenticity. You can use it to own up to a mistake or deliver bad news.

Instructions: Use a calm voice. Sit down, open your palms upwards be emotionally vulnerable.

Practice these styles in front of a mirror and incorporate them in your next presentation or contact us for presentation skills coaching

As with all things, Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

In this YouTube video I share a few tips on remembering a speech.

Feel free to share your tips by adding a comment.

In this short video I suggest that what to do with your hands is to make meaningful gestures.

This short video will certainly help.

During the 2-days training, using video feedback, the participants were transformed from nervous to confident and from unstructured to persuasive presenters.

Personal Brand

A key message that I shared was that each of us have a personal brand and that our ability to communicate and present effectively is essential to the building of that brand.

A couple of truths that I have observed in my work with multi-national organisations are:

1. It is not the most competent individual that gets promoted but the individual with competence and visibility.
2. The more senior we get, the less we are paid for what we do and more for what we influence others to do.

Feel free to watch the video of my introduction on presentation skills to these young professionals.

As I was conducting a leadership retreat last week, one of the participants complained of “meeting madness” and requested that the team adopt a code of conduct for meetings. I think this is a great idea and so I have jotted down some principles that you might adopt for your team or company.

1. Define the ‘type’ of meeting – is it to brainstorm ideas, evaluate options, make a decision or plan execution?
2. Specify a start and end time – meetings do not have to go for an hour, you can start a trend by having 15,20 or 30 minute meetings.
3. Invite only the people who need to be there – nothing is more of a time waster than sitting in a meeting that doesn’t concern you.
4. Send pre-reading by email – make sure people come prepared and on time and that way meetings are more efficient.
5. Start all meeting on time - if you wait, you send the message that it’s not important to be on time.
6. No using phones or laptops – the exception is the laptop for a presentation which should be limited to 10 slides max.
7. Identify a Chairperson – if the team doesn’t play nice or keep to time it is important that one person has the authority to call the meeting to order.
8. Send action points by e-mail after the meeting – to make sure what is agreed to gets done.
9. Avoid Friday – consider making Friday a no meeting day and see if people have time to finish off the weeks work and get some work-life balance.

Do you have any more to add?

The thought provoking title “You can’t teach leadership at a seminar” highlights the need for a strategic approach to leadership development. Andrew is guaranteed to give a highly engaging, interactive an memorable presentation – so don’t miss it.

Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.

Or as the bard,  William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”.

Fear takes many forms and can vary in intensity from a mild discomfort to a paralysing phobia. You may be surprised to realise that most people have some type of fear that is preventing them reaching their full potential in life or business.

Fear of… flying, public speaking, meeting people, commitment, success, failure, cold calling, criticism, ill health, death, closed places, confrontation, snakes, spiders…etc. etc.

Fear can a survival mechanism with the purpose of prevent us from engaging in dangerous activities, but overdone it can be extremely limiting.

With the Self Leadership we can ‘step back’ from our fears and question whether our fears are real and valid or blown up out of proportion; and if our fears fall in the latter category – to overcome them.

It is worth considering that FEAR is an acronym for…
False Evidence Appearing Real.

NLP and Neuro Semantics teach us that we react not to reality itself but to our mental representation of reality. Our fear is a reaction to the movies we play in our mind about past and future events.

I was once  giving a training on presentation skills when one, otherwise successful bank vice president told me she had cold sweats for three days before each presentation. I asked her what mental movies she created when she thought about a training – “Well first I see all the people staring at me without blinking and I see their faces getting bigger and closer to me and I hear a voice inside my head saying – you are going to freeze, you are going to stuff up”. That certainly sounded like a horror movie to me, no wonder she is afraid to present.

In this case the fear was out of proportion to the risk. Presentations aren’t life threatening. They can be career threatening if you don’t prepare and speak with confidence and in this case our bank VP was robbing herself of confidence.

If you change your mental movies you change your reactions. To do this you need to be able to step back from the movie and realise it isn’t real.

There is a Moorish proverb that says, “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him.”

Have you ever hired a video or DVD and then realised that it was a really bad film? Would you hire it and play it again? Of course not! Why is it then that when we have a bad experience we play that mental movie over and over and over again?

With this current financial crisis are you playing horror movies of how bad things are? Or are you playing mental movies of how to best position yourself and your company for future success?

To de-power an unresourceful mental movie you need to step back from it and create distance so that you realise it’s only a movie. In addition if you change you movie to black and white you will find it has less power over you. You did know that you could change the quality of your internal movies – didn’t you? Editing our internal movies gives us power over our states of mind (self leadership).

If you would like to erase a movie that has been playing over and over, follow these steps.

1. Start with a black and white, still frame that just precedes the start of your ‘fear’ movie.

2. With the movie in black and white and you distanced from it (as if you are in the projection booth), run the movie to the end, and keep on running it until you reach a pleasant scene (this might be quite some time after the original movie).

3. Step into the pleaseant scene, fully experience it.

4. Now run the movie backwards to the first still frame. It helps if you can make the whirring sound of a video recorder being fast rewound.

5. Step back into the pleasant scene and rewind the movie 5 or 6 more times.

This process has the effect of scrambling your neural association to this movie and frees you to make new meanings in your mind for what is empowering for you.

This is an abbreviated description of the fast phobia cure that is taught in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic (NS) practitioner trainings. If you know a coach who is trained in NLP or NeuroSemantics you can also ask them to run this pattern with you.

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

Realising that there is a way to release you fears, large or small, is now the time to let them go?

’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They said, ’’We are afraid.’’
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They came. He pushed them… and they flew.

- Guillaume Apollinaire