How Effectively Do You Plan?

How effectively do you plan for your presentation, whether its before a large or small audience?

According to Arch Lustberg, in his book  Winning When It Really Counts,  speakers and presenters often fail miserably at this He says, "It's a pity that we rarely do the right things to get ready to give a presentation to an audience. We worry a lot. We make a lot of false starts. We go through a lot of self doubt and agony."

I know what he means but there are things you can do to eliminate all or much of this, such as using one of those portable flip charts stands -- loaded with a lot of blank sheets.

By setting one of these up in your home office you can easily plan, organize and continually update your presentation by creating your presentation or speech outline on it.  You'll find it much easier to edit and revise your material as well as add new thoughts by having your outlined quickly accessible in this way.

You can use any type of outline you find works best for you, either the traditional   with its linear layout complete with  the hierarchy of numbers and letters and indentations for major and supporting points -- the type probably still used in many schools today --    or one of the newer techniques such as clustering and Mind Mapping.

 If you have not used this outlining technique before Mind Mapping is the method that using a central main point written on a large sheet of paper with supporting material outlined on branches set off around this

I find the Mind Mapping better  because its easier to see relationships between all your different ideas as well to make quick changes or additions to the outline. And it is also possible to keep an electronic version on your computer if you find it awkward to use the "ancient" flip chart method.

Using either method will help you to eliminate much of that pre-presentation agony  Lustberg was was talking about not only because Mind Mapping makes it easy to continually refine and update your material but also because Mind Mapping, because of its graphic format, helps you to remember what you want to say

For more information on Mind Mapping click on: www.thinkbuzan.com or www.thorsons.com/buzan  and  you'll come up with a wealth of ideas that can help you get started on this.