by Allan Kaufman

Many people make their living giving technical presentations. Unfortunately, presentations on technical subjects often are boring. To make your technical presentations and workshops interesting, consider spicing them up by doing the following:

• Grab your audience right away — Go to http://nosweatspeaking.com/articles/grab_audience_article.html and read our article entitled, “How to Grab Your Audience by Their Corpuscles and Wake Them Up!” This will get you started.

• Use humor throughout your presentation — Read our humor tips in all our Ezine issues. To view back issues go to http://nosweatspeaking.com/ezine/back_issues-2002.html.

• Keep your audience continually involved — Increase audience participation as your presentation or workshop time increases. The days of audiences sitting by passively as speakers lecture to them are gone. In programs of 45 minutes or more, consider using individual exercises and group exercises to help get your points across. You could have every 3 to 5 people form a team. Give out a team exercise and then have each team appoint a spokesperson to report its findings to the rest of the audience.

• Use the experiences and successes of some in your audience to illustrate your points — Your audience will related to “their” successes and you’ll develop powerful rapport, get more “buy-in” to your ideas, and strengthen old relationships and develop new ones.

I once coached someone who gave boring week long technical workshops. He feared for his job after he got very poor evaluations from the participants. After a coaching session, he added humor and workshop exercises, asked more questions, and lectured less. He got the best evaluations ever and saved his job. Do the same and you may even get a raise!

For coaching in this area, go to http://nosweatspeaking.com/coaching.html. Sometimes it takes only a small amount of refining your technique or style to make boring technical presentations come alive.

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We wish everyone a happy holiday season and a happy and healthy New Year. As our holiday gift to you, we are extending a 30% discount on all our learning tools  (does not apply to our strategic partners learning tools) at http://www.nosweatspeaking.com/tools.html. Just enter the coupon code “30off” (without the quotation marks) in the shopping cart upon checkout and you will save 30% on your total order. Our gift is good until January 3, 2010.