Tag Archives: presentations

A simple body-language “swing thought”

You’ve probably heard that body language is important when communicating. 

How important?  UCLA Professor Emeritus of Psychology Albert Mehrabian believes that non-verbal communication accounts for more than 50% of the success of getting your message across.  (To be exact, Mehrabian believes that words account for 7%, tone of voice 38%, and body language accounts for 55% of a listener’s ability to warm up to you or your message.)

There are nearly twenty non-verbal cues that make the difference between bad and great body language for communicators.  However, when I conduct communications training/coaching sessions, I typically don’t share that list at the beginning of a session.

Why?  I’m a golfer. 

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“Ask the Communications Coach” Vol 1., No. 1: Simplifying complex information; experts as presenters

B. Turner sent me a basket of questions to consider for this first “Ask the Communications Coach” post: 

B. Turner:   We both mentioned Pecha Kucha on the HBR blog today, one of my questions is (besides 20×20) what are other tools and methods for communicating complex ideas in limited time?  What tools or tricks do you employ?  A rhetorical question I have is why do we ask people who cannot present — whether they be engineers or human resources — to make presentations?  Does the owner of the content have to be the presenter?

Nice series of questions here, B. Turner.  Allow me to respond in two parts:

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20×20 = A Winning Architecture for Presentations

Q:  What can communicators learn from architects? 

A:  PechaKucha 20×20.

Huh?

According to the movement’s Web site, PechaKucha 20×20 was born to limit architects’ long-winded presentations.  In February 2003, the first PechaKucha (pronounced pe-chak-cha) night was held at a gallery in Tokyo.  It established two rules for speaking architects.  1) Presenters were limited to twenty slides; 2) each slide must have auto-advanced every 20 seconds. 

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