Surprise gets attention, but its effects are fleeting. Is there something that can provoke an attention more enduring? There is. It’s what Samuel Johnson believed the “first passion and the [...]

Surprise is one of the presenter’s best friends. Why? Because it’s all about that most valuable commodity: audience attention. Professor Bryan Boyd suggests that our minds exist to do one thing: [...]

We misunderstand how people make decisions. That’s the message in Kotter and Cohen’s The Heart of Change. The standard view, they say, is that we analyse, then think, and then we change. They [...]

One thing that distinguishes great presenters is their choice of language. What do we need to know about language to help us do even better presentations? Imagine you were running a university [...]

Using a story is a good idea. We get to the problem early and understand it pretty clearly. It also gives you the potential to talk about other elements in your pitch (competition, business [...]

I often see pitches where the presenter uses a laser pointer. I’m not a big fan. First, it doesn’t highlight information as well as the speaker thinks. Often it just confuses the audience. [...]

If you have slides with multiple elements, I think you should build them up, piece by piece, from blank.  This gives you a number of benefits.  The first is control.  If there’s not much to look [...]

I recently touched upon the current debate in the UK which seeks to divide people into ‘strivers’ – often also known as ‘hard-working people (especially ‘families’ – British politicians love [...]

Just in! After more than twenty years watching thousands of presentations, here are the long-awaited conclusions. Below you will find a cutting-, nay, bleeding-edge toolbox of …er, tools to help [...]

“He encouraged us.” The epitaph that Tony Benn chose for himself. And, judging by the reaction to his recent death, that is exactly what Tony Benn did for so many people. He encouraged them to [...]

What passing bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by [...]

Any good presentation should take the audience on a journey: from point A – where they are when they walk into the room, to point B – where they know what the presenter wants, why they want [...]

The 50th anniversary of his death has put John F. Kennedy firmly back in the spotlight. And what strikes me about Kennedy is that he is Mr Contrast. Not just in the startling differences between [...]

When Paul Simon wrote of people talking without speaking people hearing without listening he probably did not have the modern business presentation in mind, but I think we’ve all been there, [...]

I’m obsessed with someone off the telly. For a middle-aged bloke, this might be embarrassing enough; the fact that the object of my obsession is another bloke around 20 years my senior takes it [...]

“No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.” So said Mark Twain, and he knew a fair bit about words. One of the easiest ways to improve your presentation is to take his advice and [...]

Delivery – according to Demosthenes, this is the key to good speaking. As anyone who has seen a bad actor mangle Shakespeare can attest, how the words are spoken plays a vital role. What then [...]

If there is a ‘secret’, it is this. All those speakers who impress us with their eloquence know it. Most of what makes a speech great is not in the telling; it’s in the preparation. Steve Jobs [...]

Question & Answer Contrast Lists of Three Repetition We use these techniques constantly, naturally, unconsciously in everyday conversation. When we step up to do a presentation something [...]

Curiosity, surprise and fear. We don’t pay attention to boring things. We pay attention to things that create an emotional response. This is because the brain releases the attention hormone [...]

Aristotle accepted that people are not wholly rational, that they are often driven by their emotions. Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia has managed to show just how strong these [...]

Hegel believed that simply stating an argument was enough to bring counter-arguments immediately to mind. If a presenter ignores these arguments, what do we do? Most likely we ask ourselves why. [...]

Because In a wonderfully elegant experiment involving queuing to use a photocopier, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer showed the persuasive power of giving reasons. Requests to push in and use [...]

The easiest, most powerful way to get the audience’s attention is to look at them. Eye contact is fundamental. Even very young babies are hard-wired to pay more attention to people looking [...]