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.


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 [...]

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How a shy country boy overcame his fear of public speaking

June 16, 2010
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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 [...]

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How to recover from a presentation disaster

June 8, 2010
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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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What to look for in a presentation skills trainer

May 14, 2010

When you’re choosing a presentation skills trainer there are a number of things to look for: their planning methodology, their views on PowerPoint, and how they’ll coach you on your delivery style. But despite all those variables there’s one critical distinction to look for. That’s the attitude of the trainer: are they rule-driven or [...]

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Anxiety and public speaking: What everyone ought to know

May 12, 2010
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I joined Toastmasters to learn how to overcome public speaking anxiety. I found a welcoming and supportive club and gradually got more comfortable about public speaking. I even found that anxiety and public speaking weren’t words that automatically went hand in hand. So I started to stretch myself. I entered the Toastmasters public speaking competition [...]

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How to simplify your presentation without dumbing it down

May 2, 2010

Making a presentation simple requires hard thinking. You might be concerned that in your quest to make your presentation simple, you’ll dumb it down. In this post I want to show you the difference between dumbing down and true simplicity – and how you can achieve true simplicity in your presentation.
What is simplicity
Here’s my favorite [...]

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Three traps when using images in your presentation

April 27, 2010

My post Presentation Images: Are you making these mistakes? sparked many wise comments. German presentation trainer, Anke Troeder wrote about combining words and images in your presentation, and I invited her to elaborate on that comment. Here’s the article she wrote:

We should give up the false belief that any image says more than a thousand [...]

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How to stop information overload in your presentation

April 19, 2010
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Do your presentations suffer from information overload?  One of my readers, Alec, wrote to me for help with this:
I know I should edit mercilessly, but the dilemma is that I’m often presenting fairly controversial points of view, or unorthodox (but proven) approaches, and so I know what all the objections or questions will be, and [...]

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