Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
September 29th, 2016Power pointers everywhere, can we talk? The time has long passed for you to be creating slides featuring 79 word-paragraphs. It’s not a good idea to share detailed graphs with data that’s indecipherable from even the first row. And no one wants to see your meticulously footnoted sources during a stand-up presentation. That’s what handouts are for […]
read more...How to Avoid Power Point CrimesIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
September 14th, 2016Three times in recent weeks, women I know and respect have declared, in conversation or in print, “I’m really good at what I do.” In all cases, I knew them to be stating the truth. And because a part of what Informed Opinions does is remind women of the importance of owning their expertise, I […]
read more...How to rescue yourself from a poor introductionEffective Communication, Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter and Master Media Engagement
August 18th, 2016As professional communicators who advise others on how to improve their ability to connect with audiences, colleague Sarah Neville and I have watched the astonishing ascension of political neophyte and insult-machine Donald Trump with dropped jaws. Here’s our conversation about the lessons to be learned from his fearless communication style, originally published on Huffington Post. SARAH: […]
read more...Trump’s Terrifying Communication EffectivenessIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
June 11th, 2016It’s a challenge that has defeated many experts with decades of professional experience. But in Calgary recently, at Congress 2016, 21 grad students from universities across the country managed to describe complex scientific research in engaging and accessible ways, and to do so in under three minutes each. Lots of speakers – academics included […]
read more...Storytellers demonstrate the engagement power of passionIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
April 19th, 2016For five long minutes, the graphic recorder’s raised right hand was stalled over the paper in front of her, a stunning demonstration of the speaker’s failure to deliver useful content. Although knowledgeable and articulate, the woman at the microphone had already used up half of her allotted time – and she had said absolutely nothing […]
read more...Avoid graphic humiliation: deliver value from your presentation’s first sentenceIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
March 20th, 2016I confess, I didn’t want to do it. International Women’s Day 2016 had already delivered an abundance of workshop and speaking opportunities to me this year (eight in the space of 10 days, three of them out of town), and I didn’t need the added stress of trying to adapt my 20- or 30-minute presentation into […]
read more...How to prepare and deliver a five-minute IGNITE speechOur Advocacy Work
September 2nd, 2015“Thank God the world is not populated by people like me.” That was my overwhelming thought last week while participating in a symposium of women engineers. Unlike most of the rest of the attendees at the first ever Women of Impact in the Canadian Materials, Metallurgy and Mining Fields event, I dropped physics and […]
read more...Awe-struck by engineersIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
February 15th, 2015How often are you rendered comatose by a presenter at the front of the room who commits one or more of these completely avoidable offences: 1. Failing to have curated content that would fit into the time allotted? 2. Failing to have considered the interests of the audience in selecting material to present? 3. Failing to […]
read more...Do you Engage Audiences (or Render Them Comatose)?Our Advocacy Work
June 6th, 2014It’s often seen as a dirty word, and I usually avoid using it. So when Lisa Kimmel, the general manager of Edelman PR agency recently invited me to debate the merits of imposing a gender “quota” on journalists as a means of increasing the number of women quoted in the news, I balked. Even though […]
read more...Why Journalists Should Be Forced to Quote More WomenOur Advocacy Work
April 20th, 2013… that’s the title of the talk I delivered three times this past week — and I didn’t even need to explain the context for the title to get a laugh. A wide variety of women working in high tech (Girl Geek Dinners Ottawa), education (symposium hosted by the Canadian Teachers Federation), and the non-profit […]
read more...Overcoming Anonymous: In Search of More Fully Clothed Female Role Models