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.


How to Master the Inner Game of Presenting

September 7, 2010

The way that you think and feel about presenting – “the inner game” – has a profound effect on your success as a presenter and speaker. The term “inner game” was coined by Timothy Gallwey in his classic book “The Inner Game of Tennis”:
“There is always an inner game being played in your mind no [...]

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Hear live from 8 presentation experts without leaving your home

September 3, 2010

Ellen Finkelstein has organized a series of webinar presentations with a great line up of presenters. And not only will you not have any travel and accommodation costs, the webinars themselves are free!
To sign up for the webinars go to this webpage: Outstanding Presentations Workshop.
Each webinar will be at 1:00pm PT, 2:00pm MT, 3:00pm CT, [...]

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9 reasons you should put words on your slides

August 24, 2010

I hate bullet-filled PowerPoint slides, but neither do I advocate having no words on a slide. That’s just going to another extreme. Images and words combined are the most effective PowerPoint slide design for most technical and business presentations. Here are eleven reasons why:
1. A picture may be worth a thousand words – but it [...]

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Six Secrets from a Professional Speaker on Audience Participation

August 18, 2010

Last week I wrote about the challenge of the third era of presenting: the era of the audience.
Kristin Arnold has written a provocative and intensely practical book Boring to Bravo on how to meet that challenge by encouraging audience participation . The philosophy of the book is summed up by this quote from Amanda [...]

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Are you ready for the third era in presenting?

August 12, 2010

There have been three distinct eras of public speaking and presenting. They are all still present today, but at different levels of maturity. The third era – the era of the audience – is going to be challenging for most presenters and public speakers. It requires a new attitude. But first let’s review the first [...]

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Learning Styles: What every presenter ought to know

August 3, 2010

Before Copernicus we believed that the the earth was the center of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth. That’s what it looked like and it made sense. But science showed us that it’s not the case.
Today, many people believe in learning styles theory. At face value it makes sense and it’s [...]

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Three good reasons to distribute your handout after the presentation

July 27, 2010

In my last post on presentation handouts I suggested that it’s best to distribute your handout before your presentation. The comments to that post identified three situations when it makes sense to distribute your handout after the presentation. As not everyone wades through comments I’ve decided to highlight them in this post:
1. Surprise
Mike Slater
Personally I [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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