To be successful, arguments shouldn’t be combative, but they must be convincing.
Here are five tips to constructing and communicating a convincing argument.
While brushing off your power suits and shoes, you also need to brush off your in-person presentation skills. This means no more presenting through a camera with our notes pasted on the wall and dogs barking in the background.
Here are three important best practices to remember as you prepare to return to in-person presentations:
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If each PowerPoint was an inch, there would be enough PowerPoints to extend to the moon and back...over 10 times!
That’s a lot of slides.
Despite the considerable volume of generated slide decks, the old adage “practice makes perfect” hasn’t borne out. We all regularly encounter slide decks that merely repeat spoken content—often as a string of bullet points. Like this:
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When the time comes to present, you get up and start your presentation. But once you start, you can’t stop...not even to breathe. You’re off to the races. You easily finish in the time allotted, and when you ask for questions, there are none.
Was it good? Probably not.
I recently watched a speaker who used 11 ‘umms’ and ‘ahhs’ in the first 26 seconds of their presentation. That’s nearly a filler word every 2 seconds! I became fixated on them. I started counting.
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Like learning to play guitar, golf, or knit, improving your presentation skills takes practice.
We get asked all the time, how much should I practice? Good question.
In order to become a more effective communicator, we recommend the following:
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Ultimately, if your audience doesn’t remember what you said, it’s the same as if they never attended your presentation in the first place.
Given the fragility of human memory, you need to design your presentations to pass the “Water Cooler Test.”
Our attention span is less than a goldfish (8 seconds, by the way)…
With our ability to pay attention going in the wrong direction, you must partition your content into bite-sized portions if you want people to retain the information you’re presenting.
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