I’m a pitch coach for people who are trying to win big, multi-million-dollar deals and I also help CEOs and their executive teams present at the highest levels and to the biggest audiences. It may surprise you that even CEOs report that they fear public
Do you remember the song from the Wizard of OZ? ‘We’re off to see the WizardThe wonderful Wizard of OzWe hear he is a whiz of a wizIf ever a wiz there wasIf ever, oh ever a wiz there wasThe Wizard of Oz is one
We’ve all been the subject of a pushy salesperson. Someone who seemingly forced us to buy something that we didn’t want or need, and then we regretted it the minute they were gone. At the time you probably felt strong buyer’s remorse and wished you
Australian research lead by Professor John Sweller at the University of NSW has uncovered a theory known as the “cognitive load theory”. It suggests that the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either verbal or written formats, not both
Often when it comes to a winning promotion, or special approval to work on a high-stakes project or extra duties at our existing place of work we assume that the person or committee deciding who will take on the work knows everything about us and
Lots of people create their slides directly from the information in the original report. In other words, they do the work, create a report about that matter, and then transfer the information (the rationale, all the bullet points, the graphs and charts and justification with
The average slide has 50 words on it. We know from the science of NLP that the conscious mind can only remember seven, plus or minus two. That’s between 5 and 9 things. So, at best your text-heavy slides are confusing, at worst they are
Don’t expect your ‘canned’ presentation to work the same way with all audiences every time! It’s important that you don’t assume that your standard keynote/presentation is going to work for everyone, even if you’ve been saying or doing the same thing for years. We are all
If anything goes wrong with your slides or the equipment, don’t panic, keep cool. It happens to everyone at one time or another. The problem can probably very easily be fixed, and there will be several people ready to offer assistance. Best of all, the
As humans, we can’t help judging someone immediately within the first few seconds of meeting them. Researcher Nalini Ambady calls this quick first impression, “thin-slicing.” Remember that people’s first impression of you happens the moment someone sees you. It’s based on the way you talk,