Best Public Speaking Articles: Weekly Review [2008-06-28]

Every Saturday, we survey the best public speaking articles from throughout the public speaking blogosphere. Topics featured this week include:

• helping your audience remember your key message;
• speaking you need to do before your presentation;
• reducing nervousness;
• arranging a room for a better training environment;
• lessons learned from a story file
• and many more.

Week in Review: Public Speaking Blogosphere

Speechwriting Advice

• Olivia Mitchell provides six simple techniques for improving the odds that your audience will remember your key message.

Focus your presentation around one key message.

Make that key message simple and concrete.

Flag your key message.

Match your key message to a memorable image.

Display your key message on a slide and leave it up for a while.

Repeat your key message.

Speaker Habits

• Wayne Botha shares four types of speaking you should be doing before your presentation.

Just reaching out to other speakers before the event puts you in a class of your own. The atmosphere between speakers who have spoken ahead of time is one of camaraderie instead of professional courtesy on the platform and the audience benefits from all the speakers involved.

• Gavin Meikle reveals how belly breathing can combat your nervousness.

Belly breating is a slow deep breathing techhnique where, when you breath in, your belly expands rather than your chest. Correspondingly, when you breath out, your belly contracts.

PowerPoint and Slide Design

• Laura Bergells declares that we are entering a new era: Post-template PowerPoint Design.

With so many options available for great images, you don’t need to rely on a PowerPoint template anymore. […] Back in the early 1990’s, very few people had easy access to compelling digital photography to insert in their PowerPoint presentations.

• Dave Paradi outlines four steps for helping your sales team deliver better corporate presentations every time.

Create a library of standard slides.

Train the sales staff on how to use the slide library.

Educate the sales staff on how to create visual slides.

Evaluate and update the library every four months.

Delivery Techniques

• John Windsor points out that ending with an “Any Questions?” slide may not be the best way to close your presentation.

It’s far more powerful to leave the previous slide up — the one with the killer recap of their message — and then just say, “Let’s open this up now for further discussion.”

• Rhett Laubach provides techniques (accompanied by sketches) for positioning yourself and your audience to maximize the effectiveness of training.

Concentrating the Room is about controlling the learning environment to produce the greatest chance for success and it is so simple to do. Just follow the techniques below. Does it take more time? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

Toastmasters Articles

• Chris Elliott ponders “what type of Toastmasters member are you?“

When I attend Toastmasters meetings and conventions, I am always surprised by the many different types of people that have found Toastmasters. As someone that is working on their public speaking career, I sometimes get so focused on becoming a speaker that I often fail to notice the many other ways that Toastmasters can help people around the world.

• Craig Strachan reflects on lessons learned from building a story file and working through the Humorously Speaking advanced manual.

Almost every time, I got a better response from using my own stories, than I found by using a joke that I found, or from somebody else’s stories…

• John Spaith has a suggestion for scheduling software that may be of interest to all those incoming VPs of Education.