SAFIRA 2.0

So, you’re telling me you have…

After the 2009 kickoff sessions, I got the feedback that I could give back to the SAFIRA community some of my clipart researching skills. That and maybe justa couple small, brief, if not too mind boggling ideas about presentations.

Ok, I’m up for it. Now it’s up to you. It’ll only work with an audience so… SIGN UP!
To sign up, just comment on this post something that roughly translates to “count me in”, and leave your REAL name, not some lame alias.

The schedule will be Thursdays, 1800h, recurring every 15 days, at the big meeting room of the Lisbon headquarters. Skype remote attendance is welcome! Every session will be recorded on video as it is a best practice in this kind of training. All documents and references will be in English. English will be spoken in case of foreign speaking attendants.

And now… the picth!

You know what you want to say! Or, at least, you feel like you do. But saying it in a way that really reaches out to your audience, and puts your ideas across to them, is a different matter. Innit?

Making yourself clear, and compelling, to an audience is a fundamental soft skill that you’ll cherish throughout your professional life. Once you’ve mastered it, you’ll be able to use this powerful tool for leading, for teambuilding, for motivating, for selling and for teaching, just to name a few. The self Xpress ^tm sessions is my contribution to everyone* at the SAFIRA community that wishes to empower himself in this field, and is willing to take this night train to self expression awesomeness. Wicked!

This is not about building a cute clipart library, selecting acceptable color schemes, or about creating neat PPT templates with well placed text and hightechish backgrounds that produce numb presentations, slide after slide. This is about making yourself clear and compelling. Better yet. It’s about making yourself compellingly clear! And, just maybe, eventually, it’ll include slideware.

* When I say everyone, I mean everyone. From technical to backoffice, from Operator and developer to Manager, from Lisbon to Warsaw.

The selfXpress sessions will not be a traditional sequential training program. Each session will be stateless (independent) to maximize reusage and minimize prerequisites. In fact, there will be no prerequisites to attend any session other than showing an interest in the subject. This means that if you miss an episode, you can still benefit from the following ones. The sequence of sessions will be repeated in a loop, while there’s a minimum audience attending. So, if you missed one session, you can always show up on one of the reruns.

I’ll also be cooking some selfXpress Jam just for you soon-to-be-speakers. There’s nothing like a true story, and I know that some of you have actual real presentations to do along the year. Some of you are doing them soon, like, this April. selfXpress jam is a session dedicated to help a colleague speaker improve his presentation, by providing him with guidance and feedback, but most importantly, providing him with a chance to rehearse before the real event, in front of a more encouraging audience. YOU!

The sessions are not a result of any pedagogic process, much less an elaborated one. This will be me trying to package some of my own experience on this matter, and experimenting with ways of passing it to you. What I’ll try to give you cannot be downloaded, otherwise I’d just post the URL here. Bare that in mind when attending. Oh, and I do plan to include reference materials… of the downloadable kind.

PREBAKED SESSIONS

Tools of the trade
Don’t look forward to lists of web resources. The tools of this trade are of a different nature. You can read about them all over the web and in several books. You can even see videos about them. But what you cannot do is try them. Until you’re faced with an audience, you’ll never know that your hands have a mind of their own, and will find their way in to a pocket in your pants no matter how much you try to keep them from doing so. Until this crucial moment, you cannot get a grip of the keep-ya-hands-out-of-ya-pockets tool, no matter how much you read about it. This and much more like… undressing your audience, facing them, keep that “eeeehhhhh” word from popping out every 10 secs, and learning how to breathe all over again. We’ll also fly by the whole stats playground about how people only retain some lousy % of what they read, and that hearing is this and that, and how seeing dominates 80% of your brain. This is your basic 101 session.

Accelerating to 1000 WPS (words per second)
Illustrating an idea or a concept takes more than knowing your clipart. It is about creating powerful associations of ideas, mostly metaphors, where a simpler visual idea induces the more complex one you’re presenting. When you accomplish this, they’ll have understood what you mean before you’ve said it. That’s how you do 1000 wps.

Meaning
This is probably the hardest bit. This is about the core of your presentation. This the reason you’re presenting in the first place. It is “the message” in elementary communication lingo. You have to make it matter to your audience to listen to you. It’s about relevance, and there’s no substitute for it. Sadly, there’s no formula either. But there are a few tips and general guidelines. Knowing and understanding your audience is paramount, and we’ll learn about that as well.

Storytelling
This is about getting some structure into it. We’ll look at several structure templates (it’s patterns for you techies), learn what best suits your case, and when to get out of that box.

Entertaining
Don’t just present. Put on a show! Make it appealing from every possible angle. You make the presentation, not the slides. You’re the star of the show. Get some passion in to it. And yes, this is trainable.

KISSing
One wise, pointy white haired guy kept saying that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler”. This is required not because your audience is stupid, but because they do not deserve do be distracted by irrelevant potpourri around your meaning. We’ll see how less is more, and how stripping an idea down to it’s bare essentials actually improves it.

The elevator pitch
You have 45 seconds to capture your listener’s attention, and get some extended play where he’s willing to really listen to you a bit longer. If you loose, he gets some more 14 minutes and 15 seconds of your white noise… during which you will bet ignored!

Beware of pacmans, snakes, match sticks, boxes and arrows
They never did much for me. But occasionally there is the need for a diagram or a chart. That’s why they’ve so cleverly built those features into the software. If only they could have done it properly. Oh, well…

Facts
They don’t create meaning, but they support it. Choose your sources carefully, or they’ll destroy the meaning along with your credibility. We’ll look at making a point by documenting ideas with facts, but always remembering what comes first.

Eye candy
Unleashing the creative designer in you. Or NOT. But if you can find yourself to choose two socks from the same pair, and match your shirt with your tie, then maybe there’s a small chance that with some basic examples and design tools you can get some 500% improvement on how your messages look on screen. If everything else fails, at least I’m confident I can show you how to imitate the good, and not the bad.

Detail
Because this is where the devil is, and where a good presentation feels like an instrument that’s out of tune. It’s those last 20% that take the 80% effort. Hopefully, and contrary to popular belief, I’ll manage to show that IT IS WORTH IT! Detail is EVERYTHING. I mean it.

Preparation
Now the sad news. I’m really sorry to tell you this but, there’s work involved. A LOT of it. These very sessions require preparation. This post is preparation.
Plus, you can be creative, but you don’t just get creative when you want. Still, there are deadlines to keep… and you’re a pro - the kinda pro that meets deadlines, not misses them due to “lack of inspiration”. There’s hard work going on in the backstage of every successful presentation, and we’ll walk through the nitty gritty of it all.

EOF.