http://presentationspeaker.com Become A Great Speaker with Powerful Presentation Wed, 11 Mar 2009 17:26:58 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Sometimes meetings can be just like a big vacuum cleaner: they suck you right in with no time to prepare. Once again, we can usually thank those who cannot budget time for the opportunity to participate without preparing. Under this topic in Part II, I suggested that we simply blame ... http://presentationspeaker.com/zero-preparation-techniques.html Anything that has a start naturally will have a finish, but some meetings seem to once again have a kind of inertia and lack the ability to conclude. If the chairperson has an agenda, obviously the conclusion of the last event on the agenda should end the meeting, right? I ... http://presentationspeaker.com/finishing-the-meeting.html Once the meeting starts, we get a chance to discover the dynamics of the meeting. It's always good not to be the first person to speak, because the dynamics need to be analyzed for us to be effective for the duration. In the course of the first couple of discussions, ... http://presentationspeaker.com/interacting-in-the-meeting.html It would seem that starting the meeting should occur automatically, but the truth of the matter is that some meetings have a kind of negative inertia to them. We have this mass of people milling around a room—some seated, some standing, some walking around—and the whole thing acts just like ... http://presentationspeaker.com/starting-the-meeting.html In participating in the meeting, we rely even more heavily on the characteristics we use in the formal presentation: poise, confidence, and dignity. We don't get excited or engage in shouting matches, and since we have this marvelously indifferent attitude, we approach all issues coolly and objectively. We can be ... http://presentationspeaker.com/participating-in-the-meeting.html In a zero-planning state, we are confronted with entering a meeting with the proper attitude or, as is the case with presentations or documents, altering the attitudes of the other participants or the chairperson. The fact that some sage lacked the foresight to allow us to plan or prepare does ... http://presentationspeaker.com/zero-planning-attitude-adjustments.html We have talked about the unexpected in the context of meetings throughout this part of our little book, and we know that the meeting is to the unexpected as a Petri dish is to bacteria—a fertile breeding ground. Even the phrase anticipating the unexpected seems contradictory. How do we anticipate ... http://presentationspeaker.com/anticipating-the-unexpected.html Our attitude for a meeting is quite similar to that for the formal presentation. We need that attitude of healthy indifference we talked about in Part II. We can't control all the participants, so we had better not care very much about their responses. We follow the steps of preparing, ... http://presentationspeaker.com/acquiring-a-meeting-attitude-preparing.html What happens when we are snatched into a meeting without the time to plan properly? We make plans to find a better hiding place and not be quite so visible in the future! Having thus comforted ourselves, we can do a few things to make our participation in the meeting ... http://presentationspeaker.com/zero-time-planning-3.html In planning the meeting, we use our three fundamental principles of communication: making the connection, establishing the flow, and providing the reinforcement. We make sure we understand our specific role in the meeting, and prepare any handouts, documents, or presentation material, using these three principles. Even if we are only ... http://presentationspeaker.com/planning-the-meeting.html