Friday, October 8, 2010

Boring to Bravo: a buffet of techniques for better presentations






















Two weeks ago I got a copy of Kristin Arnold’s recent book from my friendly local public library, and skimmed through it. This book is an excellent collection of techniques for taking your presentations up another level. It has a web site with free downloads of the introduction, table of contents, and the first chapter.


Kristin is currently president of the National Speakers Association, and has written three other books: Team Basics, Team Energizers, and Email Basics. She clearly has put a lot of thought into this book, including changing the title twice. The full, final title is:

BORING TO BRAVO: proven presentation techniques to engage, involve, and inspire your audience to action
Before that it was:
BORE NO MORE PRESENTATIONS : Proven Techniques to Engage & Involve Any Audience
It started out as:
PUNCH UP YOUR PRESENTATIONS: 101 Techniques to Engage and Inspire your Clients, Co-workers and Cohorts

Most sections are marked with a degree of risk from low (*) to high (*****).For example, Chapter 8 is titled Let Your Natural Humor Shine Through. It has the following section titles:

A word about finding your comfort zone *
Making humor work for you *
Finding the common ground ***
Keep your humor eyes open *
Other sources of humor ***
The pure humor of spontaneous interaction ****
What about jokes? *****

You can find other reviews by Ian Griffin and Andrew Dlugan.

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