Welcome to the guest blog.
As part of the expansion to help more people tap into their unique talents to communicate, connect and come alive, I've decided to include other voices on the website. I hope the ideas here will help you in your business and in your life. Enjoy!
All my best,
Victoria
Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Victorialabalme.com
I think the most persistent problem I see in presentations—from the boardroom to the convention center to my local chamber of commerce—is words. It’s not that presenters are choosing the wrong words. Often they are eloquent and organized, clever and interesting. Rather, they simply have too many of them. They talk and talk, fill their slides with text, and give the audience handouts full of more words. It’s as if they think, the more flotsam they can stuff into our heads, the more likely we are to retain something. Of course, that’s not how it works. People learn best when they are given a simple message, repeated frequently.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Siprep.org
It doesn’t matter who you are or what line of work you’re in, to succeed you must develop a track record of success. But this track record doesn’t necessarily match up one-to-one with every piece of work you’ve ever done. Instead it’s a carefully curated collection of your accomplishments—the best of what you have to offer. Here are some tips for building your most powerful and persuasive resume.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Flickr.com
Every good presenter knows the presentation doesn’t stop when the lights come up. The question and answer period at the end of a presentation can be even more challenging than the presentation itself. You don’t know what the audience is going to ask and unpredictability is frightening when you’re on stage in front of a bunch of people. Worse, if you have an audience member who strongly disagrees with your thesis, you may find yourself backpedaling and stammering to defend yourself—never a good position to be in, especially after you’ve worked so hard to get your point across. But you can protect yourself from most major Q & A pitfalls by setting the stage beforehand. Remember: you’re the master of ceremonies! You don’t have to give floor time to hecklers if you don’t want to. But you have to be bold, confident, and in control if you hope to steer the crowd towards your agenda and away from a heckler’s bag of tricks.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Brandengineers.com
I think a man with such an illustrious business and speaking career deserves more than a single post. In truth, we can learn thousands of lessons from Steve Jobs—lessons about hard work, perseverance, cleverness, negotiation, and persistence. Apple faced many challenges over Jobs’ tenure. IBM was hot on their tail in the early years, poised to usurp Apple’s main demographic. But Jobs was up to the challenge. In one of the most famous Commercials ever made (directed by Ridley Scott) Jobs likened an IBM monopoly to the totalitarian government in George Orwell’s 1984, and to great effect. Apple emerged as the underdog (despite its position as a billion-dollar company) and gained a multitude of fans that have followed the company doggedly through think and thin. I believe this is due, in no small part, to the charisma and visionary talent of its founder and C.E.O., Mr. Steve Jobs. Jobs created a cult of personality and he did it through great products coupled with great style and likeability. He was accessible to his customers—the presenter who just seemed like one of the guys. In fact, he worked very hard to cultivate that personality.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Obamapacman.com
Steve Jobs was so many things: a visionary, a leader, an entrepreneur, a scholar, and an incredible public speaker. He was a diamond in the rough—a one-in-a-million thinker and doer. Jobs offered us a model of what a businessman (and a business) should aspire to be: innovative, ahead of its time, bold, risky, exciting, and for the people. Mac products hit that perfect balance between form and function—the balance artists and manufacturers are always striving to achieve. And Jobs was a genius at selling his products. His keynote speeches were always vibrant, compelling, exciting, and new. His style was comfortable and confident but he never talked down to his audience. Every word mattered and yet, it felt as though so much of what he said was off the cuff and spontaneous. Here are some important lessons I learned from Steve Jobs’ keynotes over the years.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Commissionbased.wordpress.com
Yesterday I wrote about the challenges of sharing a cubicle with a stranger. Indeed, co-workers occupy a strange and ill-defined space in our lives. We see them every single day and yet, they’re not really social peers. We don’t necessarily even like them very much. When we do like them, we are faced with a very difficult question: do we treat co-workers as friends and disclose our personal information or do we maintain a professional veneer despite our genuine feelings of friendship? Building barriers can feel wrong—cold, calculating, and manipulative—but without them we risk disclosing too much. Your professional persona probably isn’t in a 1:1 relationship with who you are. You put on professional airs of all sorts. When you talk with clients you filter your thoughts to project complete professionalism, politeness, and appropriateness. You don’t tell your boss about your weekend benders. You control your emotions in the office, even if you’ve had a really bad day. So, it should follow that you maintain a certain professionalism with your co-workers as well.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Wusq.com
I remember elementary school math class really well because it was the only class in which the teacher encouraged group collaboration. We’d arrive in the morning to find the desks arranged in groups of four. Somehow we all knew how important it was to choose the right foursome. If you sat with your friends you were guaranteed an entertaining math period. If one of those friends happened to be a wiz at math, all the better. It was a mad dash—an elbow flinging, foot stomping, book-bag-swinging melee as we all raced to grab our desks and our friends before someone else got them first. This scenario has played out many times in my life—in high school soccer practice, college chemistry lab, even in the hallowed halls of the corporate organization. Finding just the right combination of personalities for a work project always seems like a critically important challenge. But what happens when your careful plans hit cold water? What if the teacher assigns seats, for example?
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Smh.com.au
These days PowerPoint is as ubiquitous as email or shoelaces. It’s in every classroom, every boardroom, and every presentation hall from New York to Massachusetts, assuming you go the long way (i.e. all the way around the world). PowerPoint has created a monster: a workforce that believes every message can be reduced to bullet points and clip art. Aside from the obvious aesthetic concerns, PowerPoint forces users to distill nuance and complexity into easily digestible slides. Sure, sometimes this can be good. It helps organize ideas and guide an audience, but what about the bad side? Can PowerPoint drain a presentation of its style, pluck, charm, and complexity? Can it trigger the dreaded glazed-eye space cadet-itis that seems to spread like a zombie plague through the rows of plush corporate chairs as soon as the lights come down and the PowerPoint goes up?
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Alive.com
After last week’s article about being yourself at work, I continued to do some in depth research on the subject and uncovered what I find to be a disturbing consensus. While what I wrote is true—being true to yourself is an important part of finding satisfaction in your job—actually being yourself at work may not be the best bet after all. A CNN Money article on the subject explored the strange paradox of personal investment. According to them, when a worker is truly invested in his work—he is fulfilled, he cares, he is deeply motivated to succeed, he is dedicated to the product or service he provides—he may not, in fact, be the best employee. Apparently, employers don’t always love the 100% dedicated worker.
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Posted by
Anni M.
Image source: Businessweek.com
As children, we’re told to be ourselves. Don’t worry about what other people think. Don’t try to put yourself in a category. Just be who you are. If people don’t like it, they’re not worth your time. If only the adult world were that easy. As you get older, “being yourself” becomes less about listening to your inner self, that voice that tells you what you truly are, and more about listening to everything else. Our culture imposes certain expectations on our behavior, our dress, and our way of life. Our jobs impose rules on how we interact, present ourselves, and produce. In many cases, we don’t really choose what we want to do. We find ourselves doing something because we’re good at it, it was easy, or it was the first thing we thought of.
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