Olivia Mitchell

Presentation tips


Welcome, I’m Olivia Mitchell and this website is full of presentation tips to help you in your next presentation.

Start by downloading my free guide "How to make an effective PowerPoint Presentation". The Guide will take you through my streamlined process for creating an effective presentation. It's full of presentation tips to help you structure your talk and create PowerPoint slides.

You'll also receive my free email course giving you new presentation tips every week.

Then explore the many articles. I've divided the articles into five main categories:

How to make an effective presentation

The content of your presentation, what you say, is the most important. Start planning by crafting a key message, then choose a structure and use stories, examples and statistics to back-up what you're saying. Finally work out the presentation introduction.

How to create powerpoint slides

Powerpoint slides have the ability to enhance or sabotage your content. Unfortunately, the way most people use PowerPoint they sabotage themselves. Find out why bullet-points don't work and how you can do a make-over of a bullet-point slide.

How to give an effective presentation

You're probably quite good at having a one-on-one conversation with somebody. But somehow those skills desert you when you get up to speak in front of a group. I'll show you how to use those conversational skills to connect with your audience - I call it conversational presenting. Find out about body language, projecting your voice and using eye contact.

How to overcome the fear of public speaking

It's normal to be nervous and having some nervousness is useful. But you're probably thinking it would be good to have some way of reducing your anxiety about public speaking. I'll explain how you can use proven psychological techniques to reduce your fear of public speaking.

How to manage the audience

Being able to interact with the audience and handle tricky audience situations can make your speech much more effective. You can find out about how to keep audience attention, encourage questions from the audience and how to handle a heckler.

I do hope you enjoy my site and find useful presentation tips. To find out how I got over my fear of public speaking and became a presentation trainer, click here Olivia Mitchell. You can contact me by clicking here.


Three good reasons to distribute your handout after the presentation

July 27, 2010

Welcome to this website – my aim is to make a difference to the success of your presentations. If this is your first visit start by downloading my free guide “How to make an effective PowerPoint presentation”. Thanks for visiting! OliviaIn my last post on presentation handouts I suggested that it’s best to distribute your [...]

Read the full article →

13 Best Practice Tips for Effective Presentation Handouts

July 22, 2010

Your presentation handout is the lasting concrete manifestation of your presentation. It’s an important part of the total experience for the audience:

But most of us focus on preparing what happens during the presentation, not what happens afterwards. Here are the benefits of having handouts:
Benefits for the presenter

They allow you to cut down on the amount [...]

Read the full article →

5 tips for overcoming stage fright

July 15, 2010

And as the curtain rose on the first night, I had a flash of intense vertigo, like I was going to pass out and couldn’t find my center. It sent me into a cold-sweat panic.
This is a quote from Jason Alexander, most well-known for his role as George Costanza in Seinfeld, from a book [...]

Read the full article →

How to stop worrying about forgetting what you want to say

July 7, 2010

Do you have a fear of missing out something critical from your presentation? This concern can sabotage your presentation in three ways:

To alleviate your concern you put everything you want to say on your slides
You write a script and read from it.
You spend the whole presentation worrying instead of connecting with your audience.

There’s a simple [...]

Read the full article →

How to stop waffling once and for all

June 28, 2010

Waffling happens when your brain stops working but your mouth keeps going.
The solution to waffling is simple: When you have nothing ready to say, stop, look at your notes, work out what you to say, look up again and start talking.
Easy to say. Difficult to do. That’s because when you start waffling, rather than [...]

Read the full article →

Presentation structure: Why it’s smarter to put your conclusion in your opening

June 21, 2010

A long time ago I attended a presentation on ostrich farming. It was pleasantly interesting because I love animals but I didn’t really get the point – after all I wasn’t planning on being an ostrich farmer. At the end of the presentation the presenter said “And that’s why you should invest in ostrich [...]

Read the full article →

How a shy country boy overcame his fear of public speaking

June 16, 2010
Thumbnail image for How a shy country boy overcame his fear of public speaking

Last week I received a moving and inspiring email from a reader about how he overcame his fear of public speaking. Dave has given me permission to share his story and I hope you find it inspiring too. It reinforces the point that you can learn to be a confident public speaker – you don’t [...]

Read the full article →

How to recover from a presentation disaster

June 8, 2010
Thumbnail image for How to recover from a presentation disaster

Getting no feedback from your audience is hard. That’s what happened to a reader, Emma, this week:
I did a 20-minute presentation during a lunch yesterday and I’m feeling pretty terrible about it.  I would love to tell you all of the details about what I felt went wrong but I am sure that would turn [...]

Read the full article →

How to keep to time during your presentation

June 2, 2010

Do you regularly go over time when you’re delivering a presentation? If a time limit has been set for your presentation, then it’s your responsibility to finish it within that time. Consider it as part of the contract between you and your audience.
Here are some tips to help you keep to time:
1. Decide on your [...]

Read the full article →

How to write a presentation title that gets people flocking to your session

May 25, 2010

You might not give much thought to your presentation title for a conference presentation. The conference organizers will have asked you to provide a title and an abstract for the conference programme and you manage to slap something together just before the deadline.
But your presentation title can determine whether you have a smattering of people [...]

Related Posts with Thumbnails
Read the full article →