Few people like giving presentations and even fewer enjoy listening to them. Conversations, on the other hand, work. So why are presentations – essentially conversations with props – not more engaging? This course will help you to understand the basic truths of how conversations work, and use these ideas to structure presentations that are: personal, insightful, emotional, visual, physical, live, interactive and memorable.

You will learn how to:

· Understand the two types of nerves: the helpful ones on the day and the damaging hidden ones that affect you during preparation.

· Learn where a presentation sits on the ‘communication chain’.

· Learn how eye contact drives your delivery.

· Avoid ‘Death by PowerPoint’ by creating visual aids that are actually visual.

· Learn how to use stories and why presenters tend not to use them.

· Learn how to use examples, analogies and demonstrations to explain your ideas to a non-expert audience.

· Learn ten interaction techniques to engage your audience.

Content and Overview

This course contains 8 lectures and over 85 minutes of content. It is for anyone who has to give a presentation as part of their job, which is nearly everyone in the modern workplace.

The course shows how in conversations people use stories, examples, analogies, demonstrations, interaction, as well as their voice, eyes, hands, body and emotions to communicate with punch and precision. In presentations, however, people tend to speak in the abstract, fill slides full of text, go way over time, and speak without emotion or tone. The course explains why presenters do this and how to put it right, so you can present as naturally as if you were chatting with a friend.

One of the core insights is that nerves aren’t the core issue. In fact, nerves on the day are beneficial as they give you energy and make you alert. However there is a second type of fear – which I refer to as ‘caution’ – which strikes unnoticed in the preparation phase. This ‘caution’ leads presenters to omit valuable content such as: stories, simple examples, videos, demonstrations, interaction and humour. You need to understand this fear and overcome it.

The course will help you to speak in the concrete, not in the abstract, which will help you to explain your ideas to a non-expert audience, using tools like: examples, analogies, props, pictures, videos, graphs and stories. It illustrates the points with many videos of both conversations and presentations, as well as sample slides and content from real presentations.