Issue #125 January 9, 2007

PowerPoint Tip – How Attitude Affects Your Presentation

When you are presenting, certainly your message and key points are important. But perhaps as important is your attitude towards your audience and your material. Attitude is not something that most of us consciously consider on a daily basis – but perhaps we should. I am sure we have all seen presentations that suffered from a lack of interest in the topic by the presenter or contempt for the audience by the presenter. In either situation, the presenter may have tried to hide their true feelings, but the audience can pick it up in an instant. I have been thinking more about attitude since I have been reading Jeffrey Gitomer’s new book “Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude”. Jeffrey is someone I have admired for a number of years for his straightforward style and his approach to business. It doesn’t hurt that he started switching to visual slides for his presentations years ago, well before many others were thinking about it. This book is about how you can create a Yes! attitude in all aspects of your life. I highly recommend it and I am happy to be a part of the expert team he has involved in launching the book on Amazon today. Many of you know that I rarely recommend other resources because my quality standards are high. I can tell you that this easy to read little book certainly will have a place on my re-read shelf. And if you buy it on Amazon today the launch team has arranged for a whole host of bonuses for you – more on that later. Here are two ideas that I think presenters can immediately apply. On pages 28 & 29 he talks about how it is so important to phrase your ideas in terms of the other person, not in terms of yourself. This is critical when structuring your presentation. You must always analyze the audience first before you decide what you will say or else the presentation won’t be about what they need to hear. I have seen too many presentations where the attitude was clearly “Look how great I am” instead of “How can I be of service to help you”. The second idea is on pages 192 & 193, almost the end of the book. On these pages Jeffrey talks about how part of a Yes! attitude is quickly getting over the inevitable bad things that will happen in our lives. When you apply this to presentations, we must remember to get over the problems that will occur, such as equipment failure, poor room lighting, grumpy audience members and so many more. The quicker we get over these things, the quicker we get back to delivering the high quality information the audience came to hear. There are many more great ideas of course, but these are two that I think presenters can immediately apply. I think you should buy this book for your own library, but why buy it today on Amazon? As part of the launch, Jeffrey has put together a list of experts including Ty Boyd, Jack Canfield, Harvey Mackay and Victoria Labalme who are offering some downloadable bonuses if you buy the book today on Amazon and send your receipt to yes@gitomer.com. These bonuses include reports, book chapters and audio files that will help you in many areas of your life (see the full list at http://www.gitomer.com/yes). So, to get these bonuses, go to Amazon.com with this link http://snipurl.com/16mzr and buy the book. Then, e-mail your receipt to yes@gitomer.com and you will get a link to all the downloadable material.