Presenting and Facilitating

I spent the past couple of days in Melbourne with several other Readify guys doing a course about "presenting and facilitating".

There were some great moments and also some real highlights.  It was fascinating to learn some of the little tip-n-tricks that you can use when you are speaking/facilitating that can help to get your message across and also to make your talks more participatory.

Some of my most important learning's were:

• Eye contact.  It's important to make eye contact with the people that you are talking to and to maintain eye contact for about the length of a thought.
• Structure.  On the first day I had a presentation which was a sea of data& by day 2 this was packaged nicely into a structure that made it much easier to present and also, for the audience, much easier to digest.
• Interventions.  We discussed interventions - which are small break-up activities designed to get people up on their feet.  These are used to get things going and to stimulate everyone.
• The humble 'B' key.  When you are doing PowerPoint presentations, you can press the 'B' key to make the screen go black and again to bring back your presentation to the screen.  Use this when you want to talk and not compete with your slide.

Overall it was an awesome experience which taught me a lot.  It was also great to catch up with the other Readify guys.  For those of you who know any of the guys you can imagine how vibrant, collaborative and enthusiastic the sessions were :-)