Create Genuine Enthusiam for Your Topic

Enthusiasm for your topic is one of the keys that will enable you to convince and motivate your audience to follow your suggestions but it cannot be faked. As one pundit said: "You must be a product of your product or service." And that that goes for your advice as well.

You must be a living example , in other words, of the benefits of using that product or service or following a particular philosophy or belief.

To put in another way you must have and show complete belief in whatever it is that you're talking about.. It cannot be faked. Your audience detect that almost immediately.

Overcome Stage Fright with Practice and Visualization

Are you terrified at the thought of giving a presentation before a live audience? If so you are far from alone as even professionals with many presentations under their belt and veteran actors and acresses. The difference is that know how to overcome this.

Properly controlled such nervousness caused by an extra dump of adrenalin into your system can even stimulate you to give an extraordinarly moving and persuasive presentation. Some speakers control this nervousness through a little, usually unoticeable, ritual of wrist and ankle shaking to keep their bodies loose and flexible. Others go for a walk outside or around the building to keep their body relaxed. Nearly all practice deep breathing prior to the start of their presentation to flood their brain with oxygen so they can think more clearly. You can do all of these things too.

But the most important keys of all are to know the key points of your presentation so well you can deliver it with few or no notes at all and then visualizing yourself standing before an audience and delivering that presentation, bringing out those key points arguments, illustrations, and examples as well as responding to any questions from the audience. Picture yourself interacting with different persons in your audience.

Athletes use such visualization as they practice jumps, hurdles, and other movements before the day of the competition. And the most successful are often those who make extensive use of this technique.

You can use it too before your presentation. Then any paralizing fear of speaking in front of an audience will fade away.

Discover Your Audience and Objective With Clustering and Mind Mapping

As they say before you begin any writing or communcations project you should first know your audience and what you want to accomplish before you put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. And that is true. You have to know both if you want to succeed.

And the best way to accomplish both is make use of Clustering and Mind Mapping -- as illustrated by both Gabriele Rico, Ph.D. in her books such as Writing the Natural Way and Web site www.gabriele rico.com and Tony Buzan the creator of Mind Mapping in his many books on the sucject and his Web site www.buzanworld.com

Both Clustering and Mind Mapping(r) are excelent ways to explore both your intended audience and what you want to say. or write.

With clustering you write your central topic in the centre of of a piece of paper ( the bigger the better) and letter ideas radiate out from it in balloons connected by spokes or arms in free association style.

Mind Mapping is similar but instead of the balloons you create main ideas on branch-like arms radiatin out from a central image like the branches on a tree. You try to create the main and supporting ideas as vividly as possible through the use of images to create or illustsrate the main and supporting ideas.

Both of these techniques or invaluable invisible collaborators during all stages of your idea generation, researching, writing, editing and presentation journey. Make good use of them