Effective Presentation Tips

[Colleen O'Rourke]

There are times when detail is glorious, and there are times when you need to make the best pitch you can in as little time as possible. As a litigation attorney for sixteen years, I often had five to ten minutes before the judge to convey information from a warehouse of documents. As the director of public relations and marketing for 9 West Shoes, I often had five minutes to meet with the president of the company and give him a week of information. Here are a few tips to prepare for the most effective presentation and communication in the shortest amount of time possible:

- Write down your most important points on paper.
- Prioritize your points.
- Eliminate the points that won't drive it home with a major impact.
- When left with the few points that deliver major impact, start each one with an attention grabbing
statement.
- State the end result first, then explain briefly.
- Get through your list quickly and make eye contact and smile.
- They will ask further questions on what they want to know - Be Prepared to Answer.
- Tell them you're on it, and leave with a smile.
- Immediately work on the important issues brought up, and deliver a short and fast follow-up.

You're a star! Shine on!

[mary rose]

Colleen, Thanks for this solid information. One of the things i really like about Twitter is the 140 letter limit to getting one's message across. Really good practice for me since brevity is not my forte.

However, i see as if i were in a room full of TV sets with each one containing a portion of the whole big picture.

While i have not as yet had time to study this in depth -- from other related research it may be that whole brain thinkers --, that is those whose right and left brain hemispheres are entrained and connected with the heart brain see" holographically" which would be one's normal state of mind at birth., However, due mainly to both early parenting and our current educational system, which "teaches" to the left side of the brain, it is estimated that 75% of the population in the U.S. today is "left-brain" oriented, and thus able to grasp only a small portion of the whole big picture. One of the best ways to aid these people in healing is to place them in natural environments and let them self-organize their own hands-on- learning experience. Healing has much to do with "re-member-ing" those parts of our self we have lost contact with and reconnecting them in our mind field.

What is the experience of others as to how their "worldview" takes place? I don't have any statistics, but it appears that people who are involved in the arts are either holographically-oriented or are right-brain oriented as a majority. Any thoughts or comments? . . .

[Colleen O'Rourke]

Dear Mary Rose, thank you for your great reply! Yes, while I don't know the exact statistics, it sounds about right that 75% of the U.S. population today is left-brain oriented, and probably due to the present education system! And yes, I completely agree that healing has much to do with remembering those parts of ourselves that we have lost contact with. Also, I will say that I have always held those involved in the arts in extremely high esteem, always thinking that "they" were somehow so much more blessed than I was in my life...had so much more joy, beauty and freedom! I finally took control of my own life and began a deep spiritual journey to discover why I was so unhappy with my marriage and my career. (I was never blessed with children, although I always thought I would be a mother!) Although reading probably an average of two books a week on self-growth and self-discovery for some 25 years now, including everything from metaphysics, ancient history, theology, paranormal...from Edcar Cayce and Rudolph Steiner to Yogananda and Deepak Chopra to Louise Hay ...you get the picture...my life really changed when I divorced my ex-husband, an extreme left-brain attorney (and diagnosed with ADD and the compulsive disorder where you check your lock 20 times, etc.). After that, I began to take solo pilgrimages of self-discovery, including moving to the Rocky Mountains and hiking alot in the mountains there and also to Asheville, NC, and to Sedona, AZ, where I explored the deep canyon vortexes and also had a number of different experiences, such as "physic massage" and "aura-soma color therapy" and other innovative spa therapies. I also stayed at the Ayuvedic Institute in New Mexico for a week while Dr. Lad, the founder, was there from India, and underwent "Panchacharma" and listened to his lectures to his students every night. What an experience! He asked if he could examine me in front of his class, did my Vedic astrology chart (in which my rising sign is Libra, not Scorpio, which proved to be very important recently), and told them (and me) something really special. This all started in 2001. Life began to change in amazing ways for me. Things started happening as if by magic. Now, in the last two years, I really stepped it up, and left the traditional law firm practice. Now, in the last nine months, I have spent a great deal of time alone, working independently, working toward finding a way to make a living in the humanitarian arts...and spending time in nature and listening to beautiful music every day. Ahhhhh....poor at present, but richer and stronger in life and vitality than I have ever been. Feeling very blessed to be alive and healthy, be able to create, and be able to connect and share with beautiful, loving people! Also...feeling very much removed from my birth family, who are wonderful, but with whom the differences between us...now that I have finally begun living my life according to my heart and not some other's wishes...have become like the continental divide. Not in argument...just in separation (but never separated in my heart!)

The ones who taught me how to present my ideas in 5 minutes as outlined above were all very left-brained, including my father. No patience! Time is money, lol! However, if I had to present a book idea or a script while riding in an elevator with the president of a production company, by george, I could do it. So, it was a valuable skill learned, and I thought I would pass it on in case it could help anyone, with love.

You were so brief in your reply, but you hit the nail on the head. I'm actually 50/50 right/left brained, but was taught, from as far back as I can remember crying in my crib, to survive via left brain. I was conceived in the back of an old chevy by two teenagers, and accompanied them to the senior prom (in the womb still). My parents were married before I was born, and my father, a tough street fighting Irishman, and my mother, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, literally born as soon as the boat arrived in Ellis Island, were determined to build the American dream. The oldest of four children, a "B+" was not acceptable to my father. It was Catholic school, being whacked by a nun with a ruler when I stuttered once when reading in front of the class, being whacked by my father if I even looked at him the wrong way, and being pushed to achieve, achieve, achieve in the business area. I journaled my pain in private, and still have my diary from age 13.

I spent every hour of light outside as a child, leading the neighborhood children in summer-long games of building an early American pioneer settlement in the woods (complete with sewing the full wardrobes for my girl scout sewing badge), or holding play summer school, or running carnivals for Jerry Lewis's M.D. kids, or long solo sojurns with a backback into the woods, carrying hot dogs and building a fire to cook them, delighting to find a solid ice waterfall to slide down again and again, or revelling in the thick padded carpet of pine needles and complete shade of an enchanted forrest. I would hitchhike a long distance to go see my friends in high school before my father got home from work, only to have him come and find me and hit me in front of them. Why am I telling all of this? The point is, despite my big imagination as a child, despite my excelling at cooking, home decorating, child care, photography....all I have ever been pushed to do by my father and or is to achieve academically and to advance in my career. In law, I have helped many people who did not have a voice...but I never made any decent money and I feel I almost killed myself trying. So now, I am at peace and blissful. Still licensed in perfect standing...but never to follow that stressed-out, crazy life path again! Free at last to live life my way, and to help others know that so can they. I offer all of my heart towards this mission. Thank you for asking, Mary Rose. Many blessings and much love to you! I hope that your friend is doing better! I have someone very close to me who went through that experience. We are, after all of our suffering, so much more than we realize! We, human beings, are so incredible, and so resiliant...our potential is unlimited! I just want to help others discover this at a much younger age so they don't have to blaze the trail alone. Muuuaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!