What do you do when you are ready to give a presentation and there is an overwhelmingly intense news story that weighs heavily on the minds of your audience – like 9/11 or the Hudson Bay airplane rescue or the luger from Georgia who died in a practice run? What do you do? What do you say?
It’s best to acknowledge the news story in the opening of your presentation. Everyone is thinking about it, and when you talk about it, you can almost hear a sigh of relief come over the audience. You also are allowing them the opportunity to …

Remember the Olympics opening ceremonies in Beijing? ….. or Sydney….. do you? Or do you forget? Does your audience remember your opening from last week’s presentation? Was their attention 100% as you started speaking, or were they still fiddling with their laptops and cell phones? Here are three tips that will make your next opening one for the record books:
1. Surprise the Audience
Start with a great story or an interesting question or some statistics that will blow them out of the water. I can remember one presentation I made to a city council. Before it was my turn to talk, …

Are you getting excited? Giving a presentation often seems like an olympic event – the preparation, the nervousness, the adrenaline rush….
During the Olympics I will write a series of blog articles relating the sport of speaking to what’s happening in Vancouver. It promises to be fun, creative, and packed with great presentation tips. Don’t miss it.
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I stayed in a hotel for three nights over the weekend – I was competing in a dog agility competition. As I often do when I’m on the road, I try to guess what people do for a living, why they are staying in the hotel, and how they are connected to the people they are with. This turned out to be an extremely intense adventure.
Day 1: Riding down the elevator with my Sheltie and young Golden Retriever, I was trying my best to keep the white hair on the Sheltie and the muddy paws on the Retriever from annoying …

One of the best ways to add some muscle to your presentations is through telling great stories. One of my favorite stories is a true one about my muscle-building high school buddy, Mike Mentzer. I try to weave that story into almost every training session I can, because audiences just love it. What makes a great story? There are 5 main ingredients:
1. Tell it from your heart with passion
2. Create vivid details with picture words
3. Expand on those picture words through your gestures and expressions
4. Use voice inflection to create the tone
5. Craft a memorable message – an unforgettable message