Life After PowerPoint!

I recently spoke — with three other speech coaches — to the San Diego Professional Coaches Alliance about giving speeches as a way to build a coaching practice. (I’ve given a different form of the talk to consultants and to self-employed entrepreneurs).

Here’s my premise: As a consultant, coach, self-employed entrepreneur, or small-business owner, you are your business. To attract new clients you need to put yourself in front of prospects in a way that wins their attention, interest, and trust. One of the best and least inexpensive ways of doing so is by making presentations.

Someone videotaped my section of the presentation. (He used a hand-held camcorder so don’t expect professional production qualities. Half the time I’ve walked out of the frame.) In it I address two questions:

1. Who do you talk to? What is your audience? Where do you find them?
2. What do you talk about? What’s the content and the goal of your presentation?

Let me know what you think.

Nancy Duarte, author of Slide:ology, has published a new book that is well worth your consideration.

Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences (Wiley, 2010) is a visually-appealing, thought-provoking book, and richly satisfying book.

I haven’t read it from cover to cover. Its design has always prompted me to open it at random and read a couple of pages, reflect on what I’ve read, and dive in again at some other point. Each open-read-reflect experiment either confirmed my own experience (“that’s so true”) or gave me a new insight (“I hadn’t thought of it that way before”).

I’ve long believed that every speech — or at least any speech that hopes to change the way an audience thinks and feels and acts — tells a story. Resonate shows you what kind of story to tell and how to tell it. Nancy’s insights, gleaned from Joseph Campbell’s work on myths and from modern-day masters of screenwriting, is both insightful and practical. You would do well to buy the book for those insights alone. And then you’ll find so much more to savor. (Her analysis of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is a marvel; it gives a new way of appreciating a well-known masterpiece.)

Here’s just one example of what Duarte offers: “Create a moment where you dramatically drive the big idea home by intentionally placing Something They’ll Always Remember — a S.T.A.R. moment — in each presentation… The S.T.A.R. moment should be a significant, sincere, and enlightening moment during the presentation that helps magnify your big idea — not distract from it.”

She then lists, explains and gives examples of the five types of S.T.A.R. moments: 1) memorable dramatization, 2) repeatable sound bites, 3) evocative visuals, 4) emotive storytelling, and 5) shocking statistics.

I highly recommend Resonate. Let me know what you think of it.