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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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PowerPoint and Presenting Notes
PowerPoint and Presenting Glossary
Once you have added gradient fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2010 you may want to make some changes to the gradient fill. You have already seen how you can use the More Gradients option to add different types of gradients as fills to the shapes. In this tutorial, I’ll step into a little more detail and show you how gradient stops work. When you are done with this tutorial, you can create your own gradients, or edit existing ones.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
Bess Gallanis is the founder of Speaking with Power and Persuasion, an executive communications consulting firm based in Chicago. She is a communication coach, speaker, journalist, a student of yoga and insight meditation and the author of Yoga Chick (Warner Books, 2006). For more than 25 years, public and private company CEOs, senior executives, portfolio managers, and financial advisors have sought out Bess to help them develop their leadership voice and to make an impact through skillful communications. She prepares clients for high stakes presentations, media interviews, and sensitive conversations. Bess draws from the universal wisdom of yoga and insight meditation as a model for Presentation Yoga, which emphasizes leadership from within, personal authenticity, and storytelling.
In this conversation, Bess discusses the concepts of Presentation Yoga.
Geetesh: What is Presentation Yoga and how can it help everyday presenters be better-equipped delivering presentations?
Bess: Effective presentations are the product of a combination of skills. Presentation Yoga is a set of exercises to help presenters stay centered under pressure, manage their physical energy, and project their authentic, best selves.
These also are the skills of great storytellers. The minute you open your mouth to speak, the audience is thinking: “So what? Who cares? What’s in it for me?” Effective presenters get ahead of these questions by telling stories. Stories can touch people in their hearts, stir their emotions, stimulate them to question their beliefs and motivate change.
Presentation Yoga begins with exercises in mindfulness, which is the practice of being focused on and present in your experience. Effective speakers use this skill to relive the experience of the story they are telling. As a result, they project a genuine and powerful emotional energy that resonates with their audience at a physical level. This is authenticity. We can use a dictionary to define authenticity, but most people trust that they know it when they feel it.
Meditation, breathing and stretching exercises help reduce stress and manage energy. The breathing exercises also help to develop breath control and vocal vitality. Vocal energy takes your audience from passive listeners to actively experiencing your message.
As a reflective practice, yoga cultivates listening to – and challenging — your inner voice. Every presenter at some time or another has heard that voice, the one that screams about performance anxiety and fear of failure. Challenging your insecurities and trusting your gut instincts are powerful tools to use in scripting a new mental talk track. Presentation Yoga includes confidence-boosting visualization and mantra exercises.
Geetesh: How and when did you discover and practice the relations between how yoga principles can benefit presenters – tell us more.
Bess: After a few years of serious study, yoga, and meditation practice with master teachers like Deepak Chopra and Thich Nhat Hahn, I began to connect the dots between my personal and professional worlds. Yoga and insight meditation are a set of practices that emphasize mindfulness and self-inquiry as the primary tools of self-mastery. If you are not the leader of your inner world, you won’t be much of a leader in the external world.
Like the strands of a braid, leadership and communication skills are integrally linked. As leadership guru Warren Bennis says, “Leaders are driven to express themselves.”
If you study powerful presenters and watch how they connect with their audience – whether it’s around a conference room table or from a stage — you can see that they are communicating from all three levels of consciousness: body, mind, and spirit. This is where yoga provides a model for presentation performance. I don’t mean ‘acting’ performance, but rather the impact a great presenter makes on the audience.
It did not take long before I began to develop business tools based on yoga to help my clients expand their presentation skills to meet the leadership demands they faced.
My challenge was to develop tools that were accessible, particularly to people who were not familiar with Eastern wisdom technologies. Though the tools are different, the concept of self-management and authenticity translates across cultures. My clients have been very receptive to the centering, meditation, breathing and visualization techniques in Presentation Yoga. One of my clients, a middle-aged, public company CEO, practiced yoga to prepare for a challenging presentation to investors.
Storytelling is the most difficult skill for business people to get comfortable with. We’re conditioned to trust data as infallible and to mistrust our own judgment. Presentation Yoga helps the most hardened data cruncher bridge the divide from communicating to connecting.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Bess Gallanis, Delivery, Interviews, PowerPoint, Presentation Skills
It may happen that you add a picture fill to your shape, and may opt to link the picture rather than contain it within the presentation. You may thereafter forget about this altogether and delete the linked picture file or even rename it. Or you may move the presentation itself to another computer — and since the linked picture file does not exist on that other computer, PowerPoint may get some hiccups!
Filed Under:
PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
This page is a continuation of the tutorial where I showed you how you could add picture fills to shapes in PowerPoint 2010. In this we’ll just cover more advanced options for picture fills in PowerPoint 2010. Before you start, I am assuming you already have a shape filled with a picture. Then right-click the shape, and choose the Format Picture option. This opens the Format Picture dialog box.
Learn how to use advanced picture fill options in PowerPoint 2010 for Windows.
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PowerPoint 2010
Tagged as: Fills, PowerPoint 2010, Shapes, Tutorials
Sandra Schrift is the president/owner of CoachSchrift and Associates, a San Diego based consulting, training and coaching firm. Since 1996, Sandra has been coaching speakers who want to become highly paid professional speakers as well as executives and business professionals who want to develop persuasive presentations. She is connected to her international clientele by telephone and email. She also works in-house with organizations on their communication and presentation skills. Sandra started the first national, professional speakers’ bureau in San Diego in 1982 and brokered over 1500 professional speakers to the meetings industry nationally and internationally. Her clients included a variety of corporations, associations and medium and large size companies. Her speaker clients included well known celebrities, sports coaches, media personalities and other people who speak on a wide range of business and personal topics.
In this conversation, Sandra talks about her experiences in being a presentation coach.
Geetesh: Can you tell us more about your role as a presentation coach, and how it helps wannabe presenters, or even anyone who wants to become better at what they do.
Sandra: I typically work with three types of clients. Since I formerly owned a national Speakers Bureau and brokered professional speakers to groups that had meetings all over the U.S. and somewhat internationally, I know what a speaker needs to know and do to launch a career as a well paid professional speaker. I also work with the experienced professional speaker who needs more help with selling themselves and marketing their services to meeting planners, associations and corporations. Another client is the business professional/CEO type who realize that public speaking is the #1 way to advance their career. Many come to me to learn how to be more motivational and persuasive in their presentations. If they integrate between the calls, what we discuss on the calls, they will get the results they want and deserve in a short time. More recently, I also have been working with teenagers and young adults who want to improve their communication and presentation skills. I am familiar with this age group as I was a high school teacher and enjoy working with young people.
From time to time, I work in-house with a group within an organization on their communication and presentation skills. To see the types of people who have been my clients and the results we achieved, please view our testimonials.
Geetesh: What are the challenges that presenters face while speaking in front of an audience, syncing with their slides, or practicing – and how does your involvement help them.
Sandra: There are mixed reviews on giving a PowerPoint presentation. PowerPoint is a passive form of communication and cannot help you establish rapport with your audience. Some presenters cling to their slides and others use the slides in an interesting, informative and entertaining way to enhance their presentation. The second is more popular with audiences. I tell my clients not to use PowerPoint slides as a substitute teleprompter. In other words, do not read aloud what is on your screen to the audience. Attendees will cringe! Augment and discuss, rather than mimic what’s on your screen.
Here are a few suggestions:
Let me help you craft and deliver a great speech that is supported by your PowerPoint, when appropriate.
Geetesh: How do you do coaching – you once did tell me that all coaching is not always in person, and you use technologies like Skype successfully. And how does one get in touch with you?
Sandra: I coach my one to one clients by phone and in person. Skype allows me to work with many global clients, as long as they speak English. It is helpful and fun to use video with Skype – I get to see my global clients as well as hear them give their presentations. Sometimes clients mail me a DVD or send me a link to one of their presentations. We also use email as needed – no extra charge for this service. After you visit my website to learn more about what I can offer you, then contact me to set up a complimentary coaching call to see if we have a fit. My contact information also includes my phone number. My office is in San Diego, California (Pacific time zone).
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Delivery, Interviews, Personalities
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