If you get annoyed every time you hear the standard advice to "gesture naturally", keep reading. I mean, sure, gesture naturally! But what about when there is no gesture to accompany your words? There are plenty of brief moments during a speech or presentation when you have nothing to do with your hands. So what should be your "default" hand position? Many speakers … [Read more...]
What’s Your Humour Style?
What's your humour style? To find out, take this questionnaire. A friend of mine shared it with me and got me thinking about humour. Is there a way to codify what makes us laugh? According to Rod Martin et al. (2003), there are 4 humour styles: Affiliative Self-enhancing Aggressive Self-defeating Having completed the questionnaire, you should know which … [Read more...]
Finding Stories
A couple of years ago, I read a book by storytelling expert, Annette Simmons. To find good stories, she suggests looking in 4 "buckets": Times you've shined Times you've blown it Your mentors Books, movies, folk tales, news articles and other third-party sources You'll notice that the first three buckets draw on your own personal experience. While I believe we … [Read more...]
Crash Course: What Makes a Good Story
Granted, public speaking is a little different to novel writing and filmmaking. For a start, you typically have a lot less time to share your story! But you can still model it on the Hero's Journey to ensure that it has the key elements and a gripping narrative. The Hero's Journey is not the only story model you should ever use. But it's certainly a good one, … [Read more...]
Video Analysis: 4 things you can learn from this master of Q&A
Watch This Theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku is arguably one of the smoothest talkers in his field. Never lost for words and always charismatic, he seems to be one of the gifted few for whom public speaking is second nature... Or is he? Watch him taking questions and you'll see that he consistently does a handful of things to deliver eloquent and captivating … [Read more...]