Presentation Delivery: TJ Top Video Tutorials To Boost Your Public Presentation Skills
Preparing a public PowerPoint presentation can be sometimes one of the most challenging activities. The fear and feeling of not being quite up to snuff grows thicker as presentation day gets closer and as your PowerPoint deck grows bigger.
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Unfortunately there is often an inversely proportional relationship between the number of slides you put in your show and the quality and effectiveness of your presentation. As you add more stuff, you lose perspective on what it takes to be effective communicators, and you unconsciously transform your performance in a long, endless summarization of your own points and ideas.
What you forget is that those fancy, illustrated bulleted notes are just for you. By reading them to your audience and expanding each bullet into a live explanation of your ideas, it is positively not the best way to communicate an idea effectively to an audience.
But this is a hard notion to spread around: most business, academic and even social presenters keep all of their focus on themselves and what they need to say, forgetting altogether that what they need to prepare is a full communication show for their future audience.
And so... anxiety, stress, memory loss, embarrassment, pain... these are the physiological responses that your bodyt sends out once it realizes how self-centric., uncommunicative and ugly your presentation really is.
TJ Walker, a professional public speaking expert has been joining our crew at MasterViews for a few months now, providing mini-video tutorials that explain in simple ways how to make your public presentation and speeches more effective.
You can indeed keep yourself abreast on preparing and delivering effective presentations by following the work published on MasterViews, one of Robin Good's Media Network sites devoted entirely to information design and presentation skills.
From MasterViews, here is my personal selection of TJ Walker top video tutorials. In it you wil find the best tips and advice on how to seriously reform from the bottom up your obsolete and ill-born presentation delivery skills.
Creating A Presentation: The Easy Way, The Hard Way
Did you know there exist two diametrically opposed approaches to putting together a presentation? In this video TJ Walker illustrates the difference between the so called "hard way" and "easy way", unveiling some great tips on how to prepare your presentation quickly and effectively.
Presentation Planning: Desired Outcome Is Everything
Your presentation isn't as good as the amount of hours you spent creating it. So how can you save yourself a whole lot of time, and still end up with killer content? The secret is to make sure that above all else you begin with a clear desired outcome. What exactly do you want to achieve by making your speech? Here is the answer of TJ Walker:
How To Succeed In Your Video Podcast
In today's world, making a presentation goes beyond the classic idea of projecting some PowerPoint slides in a room. Video pocasting is the ultimate presentation technique: it is based on the use of different technologies and requires a new set of skills that not everybody is capable to master. TJ Walker shows you how to create a successful video podcast without making it a hassle.
Insecure Speakers Dump Facts By The Dozen
The first sign of an insecure speaker is one who eschews examples and anecdotes in favor of thousands of bullet points and piles of mind-numbing data. If you fail to make your presentation memorable for your audience, all of your endless screens of stats will have been forgotten before you shut your computer down. In this video, TJ Walker shows you how to avoid this negative approach:
Are Your Speaking Too Fast?
The world seems to have become a faster place, and the speed with which we can access information from numerous sources around the globe has never had a precedent. Does that mean that as a speaker you need to learn to speak as fast as possible, to skip to the main points and cut through the noise? Here's what TJ Walker thinks:
Presentation Delivery: Cue Cards Can Make All The Difference
When you're standing up in front of a crowd, making a recorded speech or broadcasting live there is always that chance that you are going to forget your lines and find yourself floundering before your audience. Cue cards might just save your life, and here's why - according to TJ Walker:
Timed Presentations: How To Stay Within Your Time Limit
Sooner or later you are going to be given a very tight schedule for your public speaking - a ten minute slot, a twenty minute speech - whatever the time limit, it can be a real challenge to get it just right. To avoid classic mistakes, check out TJ Walker's ten step video tutorial to acing your next timed presentation.
Blasting Your Nervousness Away
Getting nervous before a presentation is totally natural, and many of us fear that our nerves might ruin an otherwise good speech. It isn't your nerves ruining your presentation, but rather your presentation ruining your nerves. So what's the best thing to do? Here is what TJ Walker suggests you to do:
Dealing With Someone Else's Terrible Slides
Sometimes you have no choice. For all of your impeccable taste and flair in the world of visual communication, you find yourself landed with someone else's terrible slides. And then you look at the slides, and they are filled with hundreds of bullet points, details and everything that makes for a boring, uninspiring presentation. How to deal with this? TJ Walker gives you some useful tips:
Keep Your Examples Sharp And To The Point
There's nothing worse than listening to a confused speaker who sums up loads of information and data that do nothing else but panic the listener. While giving a presentation it is important to use clear, exact examples and keep things sharp. In this video tutorial TJ Walker explains you how to make sure your words are always focused on the real subject matter:
How To Silence Those Ums and Errs
It's easy to punctuate your speech with 'ums' and 'errs', and can feel like one of the hardest things in the world to avoid. But there are ways around it and in the following video tutorial TJ Walker talks you through the tecniques you can use to shut down - or at least minimize - this inconvenient:
Presentation Delivery: Getting An Outsider Perspective
When you've put a lot of time into preparing your speech or presentation, it can be all to easy to miss some of the issues that make it less than dynamite. In the following video tutorial from speaking expert TJ Walker, the need for running your presentation by someone that isn't already familiar with it becomes evident:
The Perfect Speech Is A Myth
There are no perfect speakers and no perfect speeches, and the sooner you acknowledge that and cut yourself some slack, the sooner you can set about improving your presentation skills. Perfection just wasn't meant to be, but the best way of getting somewhere close to it is to take a balanced view of your presentation delivery, and let the good points balance out the bad. Here's the opinion of TJ Walker:
Becoming An Expert Through Public Speaking
At some point, if you want to be considered and expert in your field, you are going to have to do some public speaking. In this video tutorial speaking expert TJ Walker talks you through what it really takes to become a top-tier expert in your field, providing details of how speaking in public will not only strengthen your profile, but also add depth and focus to your expertise:
Conclusions
Presenting effectively and public speaking are true arts and, being such, they can be refined and mastered.
The above set of video tutorials from public speaking expert TJ Walker, gives you many hints and practical tips on how you can inject some new life into your presentation preparation and delivery habits.
Today's world is mostly based on images and visual inputs and what you look like, your gestures, the confidence you have while speaking and presenting your ideas play the most important role in helping your messages and ideas arrive where they need to.
I wholeheartedly recommend you to find some time to watch, understand and test some of the great suggestions that TJ Walker has put together.
And if you want to get further advice, learn the tools and methods that can make your presentations memorable make sure you pay a visit to MasterViews, Robin Good's Media Network destination devoted entirely to presentation delivery and information design.
Originally written by Livia Iacolare for Master New Media and originally published as: "Presentation Delivery: TJ Top Video Tutorials To Boost Your Public Presentation Skills"
Reference: MasterViews
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