Upgrading presentation skills, check!

Back on Friday, I stopped by school’s library and found these two books: Talk Like TED: The 9 Public Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds and Life is a Series of Presentations: 8 Ways to Punch Up Your People Skills At Work, At Home, Anytime, Anywhere. It was quite interesting, per se. Let me explain. Oh yeah, all the information I absorbed from these books may serve as my first steps on finessing my presentation skills!

The first book I read pretty much an observation about how some of the greatest TED Talk speakers transmit their intended messages to the audience. What I learned is that some of them actually have tricks up their sleeves. Here are three of my favorite: One, a surprising statistics about certain topic can bring massive “wow” moment for the audience. Sir Ken Robinson’s “Why Schools Kill Creativity” brought couple of sobering statistics on how schools ‘uniformized’ children’s way of thinking. Two, Bill Gates, who brought the awareness about climate change, simplified that topic in particular to a series of awe-strucking PowerPoint slides and three, body gestures that can convince the audience and making it more persuasive. These all tricks are simple yet enables them to attract audience, making it successful on delivering their messages.

The second one is, so to say, a little bit advanced for me. It’s well-written but it jumps right into people that already has those presentation skills and want to further sharpening it. Nevertheless, still a good read. It mainly talks about how building network between audience and speaker through means of persuasion. Sounds complex, but in essence, it’s just a general topic on how to be more vocal on what you’re saying while paying attention to who is your audience.

From these two books, I really want to giving it a try on those three tricks from TED Talk speakers in addition to paying attention of my intended audience. I haven’t have the chance to talk in public, however I’d definitely take a shot on it. I’m pretty sure it will work most of the time.