06.06.08

Want to Conquer the Fear of Public Speaking?

Posted in General at 11:00 am by Paul Ambrose

The widely held notion about overcoming the fear of public speaking is to imagine that your audience is sitting in their underwear. However, Toni Bowers of TechRepublic offers the following suggestions to overcome your fear:

  • Leave nothing to chance. Lay out your strategies, have your material ready, line up a contingency plan (in case something goes wrong), and practice what you’re going to say often and out loud.
  • Take a deep breath before the presentation. It is biologically effective at lowering your heart rate, and subsequently, your nervousness.
  • Keep it slow and steady. Pause when you need to take a breath; you’ll think better.
  • Tell stories. Stories will get your idea across much better than charts and graphs and numbers. They also have the added benefit of helping to engage your audience.
  • Prepare for more than time will allow. Time flies when you’re up there, and you may speak quickly out of nervousness.
  • Understand that your audience is on your side. They want to hear what you have to say and to see you do well.

Here the link to Toni Bowers article on TechRepublic

02.12.07

Hello!

Posted in General at 11:12 pm by Paul Ambrose

Welcome to my blogsite!

Blogs are great content management systems (CMS) and can very easily be customized to look like a regular website. I do not have direct access to the CSS files for this blog, so I’ve not done much to change the look and feel of this site, so it still has a ‘bloggy’ look. It is a pain to override CSS locally. And to contact someone to effect CSS changes doesn’t make a lot of sense. I could have changed some files that are available to me from the Admin panel, but there’s no motivation to do so without full access to the site.

This blog is powered by Movable Type. I personally prefer Wordpress, but MT is the official blogware that is available here at UWW. Wordpress has better control over the creation of static pages, and in the current version of Wordpress you can designate any static page as your home page from the Admin panel, without writing any code. Also, the Wordpress community is huge, and there’s plenty of plugins and themes available for free. Best of all, Wordpress is free licensed under GPL, while Movable Type is a commerical product. I use Wordpress both as blogs, and as CMS for websites.