Martin Barnes

Great points Peter - reading the situation and adapting accordingly A course is a curriculum - set ahead of time A coach sees and responds in the moment

In every airport around the world there is always someone trying to force their suitcase closed They won’t admit that they have too much stuff This is the same for the majority of presentations It’s all essential It’s all important Is it? It might be factually correct But is it important for the people swapping their non-refundable attention for your presentation? Think from their perspective What will they remember? What can they use that will solve their problem? This is what you need to share in your presentation GPTs can summarize & inform Humans can inspire When we inspire less is more Cut it out Save it for another talk Most presentations need an overnight bag not a suitcase

I look at cave paintings from 100’s of 1000’s of years ago and I see presentation slides Pigment on cave walls Pixels on plasma screens Same goal Very different tool But this tells me we are visual communicators We instinctively read images fast The simpler the better If you are communicating some expert topics they will get complex To make it enjoyable for your audience to take your ideas & do something with them sketch them We ❤️ sketches becuase they are hand drawn They have a degree of vulnerability because of how we make them They exist in the realm of direct communication We see a sketch & we seek its meaning We don’t rate it on skill or ability We rate it on if we understand If it’s getting complex - sketch

It was like he flipped a switch He stopped being a nervous speaker & started to speak with more authority Was he ready to pitch on a TEDx stage or to investors? Not yet But he made a significant leap forward What happened? After a run through of his pitch I said “Leaders go at their own speed. You are speaking fast. At the moment you are presenting like an intern*. Not the CEO of a successful EdTech company” *no offense to interns, but the comparisons was useful for him as it helped him see where he had got to “Try adding a pause. Leaders pause to give their ideas space” I said “Speaking fast does not sound confident” I paused He thought about it He smiled He ran through his pitch again, this time he paused with intent

“Ok let’s get started the tech is not working” I was in the UK 1/2 the audience was in the room in India The other 1/2 was joining remote My slides weren’t displaying properly One of my mantras is: The audience are the most important people during a presentation No one wants to swap their time & attention to watch me try to fix a tech issue So I ditched the slides & started to present And the cherry on the cake of tech errors …? I couldn’t see anyone in the room at the event or joining remotely I was talking to myself - I knew the room was getting my feed But I got nothing The takeaway? My connection with people is the presentation Slides are not the presentation And Hybrid is not going away Embrace every opportunity

Paul Arden said "if you get stuck draw with a different pen" What I take from this is that the tool is important It has to be quality But what is as important is the mindset you bring to the creative process To me sketching is not drawing To me, the success of a sketch is measured by how fast it communicates A drawing is measured on "how good it is" With this mindset shift people who think they can't draw can sketch When you sketch your ideas grow & your design improves Knowing the design tools is increasingly less important This morning I rendered images in AI in seconds that would have taken years of know-how + hours of doing To boost your creativity spend time sketching to discover the why - and change tools frequently