Murphy's Law states: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." This is especially true and especially painful when there is an audience involved.

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This blog was active from April, 2008 to July 2012.
It is no longer being updated. It will continue to be maintained for reference purposes.

The Weekly Might Have Missed List (08/31/08)

Grammar Girl: Funny Homophones — “When you pick the wrong word, your readers laugh at your amusing sentence. It’s great to put them at ease with a joke or two, but if they’re smiling at what you wrote in all seriousness, that’s not good. Other readers don’t laugh; they cringe and wince, lament and vent. Some sticklers just stop reading.”

MostToast: Rehearse and Learn — “Make a commitment to practice and rehearsal with the equipment that you will use during your presentation: it will make your presenting life much easier.”

Speak Schmeak: Run out of time? Never again! — “A common presenter mistake is to run out of time. Even when you’ve practiced, you sometimes find yourself rushing the last five or ten minutes of your presentation, wondering where the time went. Well, here’s an easy solution.”

Execupundit.com: Crisis Management Students — “I’ve kept both responses in mind over the years whenever considering a potential crisis and have asked, ‘What if this is one of those occasions when those students are correct?'”

Make Your Point with Pow’R: Applying Project Management Principles to Presentations — “How do you keep track of everything? How do you remember to send your introduction a week before the presentation? Do you even know who to send it to? The easiest way to deliver powerful presentations every time, is by creating a simple project plan of the work to be done, and then working your plan. In this podcast, you can learn ‘How to use Project Management Principles to plan your next presentation’.”

Speak Fearlessly: The Path to Presentation Peace: Mindfulness and Stillness — “Another very handy place to use this technique is in the practice of presentations. It’s all very well to be prepared, but if something goes awry (a cell phone rings, the wrong slide pops up), it’s easy to panic. Anxiety, and stress = sweaty palms, physical tremors, accelerated heart rate and more. When this happens, we begin to focus on the feeling of anxiety and not what’s happened to interrupt the presentation.”

Fortify Your Oasis: Golden Oldies – Thoughts on Presenting — “This poor woman utterly lost her audience. Hers was the one subject of the day that any doctor should have been interested in, but they were now going to remember her presentation for all the wrong reasons.”

vctips: Join Twitter to follow these tips. Good things to keep in mind in order to avoid disaster when presenting to venture capitalists. A lot of these are useful for presenting to other audiences as well.

Control Booth: Storage of lav mics — Take care of your mics and they’ll take care of you (by not failing mid-presentation).

The Weekly Might Have Missed List (06/22/09)

Zallas Technologies: Managing Meeting Mayhem — “You start the meeting, only to be interrupted by two or three latecomers. As you glance around the room, people are busy sending text messages on their cell phones and whispering quietly to each other. What about the meeting? How do you even try to compete with all of these distractions, not to mention the rambling storyteller and the constant disagreement between the two at the end of the table?”

Speak Fearlessly: How to deal with the “Stump the Chump” dynamic in Public Speaking — ““Stump the Chump” refers to an audience member who may be disruptive or hostile; often expressed through repeated questioning meant to challenge a speaker’s authority and possibly steal the spotlight.”

Great Public Speaking: LapTop Volume — “Here’s a quick way to handle the volume when you do not have a sound person in the room.” and BACKWARDS — “The problem was, he started at the wrong end of the pole.”

SpeakerSue Says: The 2 Biggest Mistakes Presenters Can Make — “For example, you could: Faint, throw up, ramble, bore, forget, amble, become parched, blush, not know, say too much, say too little, humiliate yourself, not be funny, stutter, not shut up, patronize, condescend, shake, and in general make a mess of yourself. But wait, there’s more.”

Colorado Communication Coach: What I Learned from Scathing Criticism — “Then, on the backside, he or she typed out a numbered list of all the mistakes I made in my presentation…”

Gathering: don’t poison your attendees — “Seems like an obvious statement, but how often do we consider ALL of the ways we could be harming our guests?!”

Mother Tongue Annoyances: How to Attain Serenity Before Giving a Speech — “However, in my experience as a technical trainer, IT professional, and astute audience member I have seen not an insignificant number of public speakers blow otherwise fine presentations by needlessly psyching themselves out due to mishandled fear or over-jangling nerves.”

Overnight Sensation: Career Success: How a Crisis Can Become Your Opportunity for Greatness –Try to keep this in mind the next time the presentation is going to hell in a handbasket.

The Weekly Might Have Missed List (6/01/08)

Dr Simon Raybould anticipates that the architecture of the room he is presenting in might present some challenges — Tiers to tears.

speechmastery.com: Accurate Pronunciation How Do I Say…? A List of the Most Mispronounced Words.

iDoctor: Happy Birthday USB Flash Drive! — I guess sometimes good things can come from bad presentations.

Speak Schmeak: A great idea for getting the laptop show ready.

Seth Godin: Sorry to talk so long… — You don’t need to say you’re sorry.

Speak Fearlessly: Stage Fright.

Speak Schmeak: Lost your place?

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Gathering: honey, i’m [sending a bunch of stuff] home! — “Here are some quick and easy things you can do to ensure your return shipment doesn’t cause you headaches!”

Connexion! Communication Central: Power Failure – How Not to Use Your Body….

Corporate Presenter: Presenting Under Pressure — “These American presenters really know how to lose it!”

Corpreform: Laser pointer too complicated for partner at Skadden.