​PowerSpeaking Blog: Tips and strategies for crafting presentations!

According to the National Science Foundation, women currently hold only 13% of engineering jobs and 25% of computer, math, and science jobs in the U.S. In a 2016 study sponsored by Women in Technology International (WITI), only 30% of women surveyed said they knew a woman (other than their mother) working in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) while they were growing up. And even though most of the WITI survey respondents were seasoned professionals, only 13% held C-level or executive jobs.

Have you ever noticed that the most a businessman will bring to the meeting is generally a phone and a pad of paper (or maybe a laptop)? By contrast, it’s not unusual to see a businesswoman haul in a shoulder bag, a briefcase, an armful of files, a purse and a phone. No biggie? Actually, biggie. That’s just one of the many insights incorporated into our Confident Speaking for Women course that offers wisdom from over a dozen interviews with highly successful women. Here’s another gem. Listen to Cindy Solomon talk about being comfortable owning our successes:

In our last blog ("Seven-Minute Abs") we gave you a heads up about an upcoming digital offering, Powerspeaking’s Plus-Microlearning Videos. Now, we’re excited to announce they’re here! Offered exclusively to past and current participants in our PowerSpeaking® or HighTechSpeaking® workshops (and others soon), Plus-Microlearning is a library of short-subject, online videos that serve as refreshers to help you retain what you learned in the live PowerSpeaking class. Averaging five minutes each, the videos cover topics pulled directly from the two programs, like “Audience Analysis,” “Openings,” “Gestures,” “Questions,” “Discussion Management” and much more (please feel free to contact us for a complete list of topics). The Plus-Microlearning Videos, as well as digital workbooks for each class, are now available to you 24 x 7 via any device (laptop, desktop, smart phone).

In the hilarious comedy There’s Something About Mary, Ben Stiller picks up a deranged hitchhiker who tells him about a brilliant idea he has for a product:

                  “You heard of this thing, the Eight-Minute Abs?”
                  “Yeah sure, Eight-Minute Abs, the exercise video.”
                  “Well this is going to blow that out of the water. Listen to this: Seven. Minute. Abs.”
                  “Great…Unless, of course, someone comes up with Six-Minute Abs, in which case you’re in
                   trouble, huh?”

“At the beginning of my career when someone would ask me a question, I thought my job was to relay the vast amount of information I had on that subject, so I would tend to give a bunch of useless information. Over a period of time, I realized that it was the synthesis of that information that was so much more important. People were looking to me as an executive or a leader to just give the kernels of information that were important, not the laundry list of everything that happened.   And I think that we tend to do the latter—a lot.” — Nina Richardson, Board Director, Zayo, Silicon Labs, CallidusCloud. Women who are powerful communicators make the best leaders (and vice versa).

The young manager who stands at the head of the room starts to speak: “I was thinking that maybe I would give you some of the numbers and updates for the XYZ project? Unless, of course, I should sort of start at the very beginning, with, you know, the history of the project, before I get to our proposal?” How would you describe the speaker in one word? Unclear? Hesitant? Timid?

Dealing with major change in the workplace is very much like peeling the proverbial onion. Just when you’ve managed to turn back one layer, another one presents itself. That was the case recently, as we introduced a new, online platform for delivering training. We anticipated some of the impacts of change on our customers but ran into a few unknowns inside the organization, where the change started.