Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
December 22nd, 2020A woman once told me about having attended her thesis supervisor’s presentation at an academic conference. It took him almost 20 minutes to read his research paper aloud. When he looked up at the end, she was the only one remaining. Everyone else had bailed from sheer boredom — and he hadn’t even noticed. (She […]
read more...How to reduce your dependency on speaking notesIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
December 2nd, 2020“I’m trying to sound smart.” These words broke my heart when I heard them from a workshop participant last week. The young woman who uttered them is so accomplished that she earned a coveted academic research grant usually awarded to PhD students even though she’d just completed a bachelor’s degree. She also speaks three languages. […]
read more...4 incentives to liberate you from reading your speaking notesIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
May 25th, 2018Why would 80 women who spend most of their working hours talking to people from the front of a room be nervous enough about their speaking ability to sign up for a presentation skills workshop? I asked myself this the first time the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) hired me to deliver such workshops. […]
read more...Women need to let go of perfectionism: it’s the enemy of good (and of engagement)Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
April 18th, 2018I’m speaking to a select group of rising star business women. In mid-sentence, I pause to pull off my suddenly too-warm jacket as I smile and murmur “hot flash”. At the end of my talk, the marketing VP of a major credit card company approaches. “You’re so authentic,” she exclaims. “That really works for your […]
read more...On Personal Branding, Being Authentic, and Avoiding IrrelevancyIncrease Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
May 15th, 2017I undermined the impact of my opening. I relied on my notes too much. I failed to advance my slides as intended. Those are just three of the critical observations I made after watching a video of myself delivering a conference keynote in Winnipeg. That’s the bad news. The good news is that 1. the […]
read more...Storytelling and the power of visual feedbackEffective Communication
February 21st, 2017Once upon a time it was possible to claim with confidence: Nobody likes a braggart. Now you have to qualify the statement: “unless he’s a billionaire, promising to turn the clock back to the 1950s, and Russian hackers are spreading fake news stories about his female opponent.” It was crushing for many women to be […]
read more...How to get others to recognize your brilliance – without braggingIncrease 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 introductionIncrease 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)?Increase Your Impact as a Speaker and Presenter
November 21st, 2012Even if you’re telling people 10 things they didn’t know about orgasms, or describing the experience of having a stroke from the inside out, it’s a lot harder to engage an online audience for your TED talk than it is to gather eyeballs for a celebrity meltdown or political sex scandal. (Partly because those options are among […]
read more...Five tips to developing a successful TED talk