Resources to Professional Tools to Sharpen Your Skills
Persuasive Presentation Skills | Personal Branding VOD | Personal Financial Planning VOD
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SkillUp: Executive Presence
Developing a positive professional presence is essential for fostering relationship-building that could lead to opportunities, collaboration, and advancement.
Executive presence is the demonstration of respect, confidence, integrity, and empathy in accordance with professional standards, guidelines, and ethical codes.
You can cultivate executive presence by skill-building in 4 main areas:
1. Gravitas
- Show grace under fire: The ability to handle adversity, navigate crises smoothly and rebound quickly after admitting mistakes.
- Be decisive: Know and communicate what you want without being authoritarian or aggressive; enhance negotiation skills.
- Speak your truth: Be aware of your views and values and communicate them in your work and to others; give honest and constructive feedback.
- Be authentic: Your personal brand should align with your personality and values.
2. Emotional Intelligence
- Build your EQ: Emotional intelligence is understanding and managing your emotions and recognizing the emotions of others.
- Increase self-awareness: Understand your strengths, weaknesses, and emotions and how you react in stressful situations. Shift from being reactive to responsive (take time to prepare for an intentional response).
- Be socially aware: Read the room and recognize the dynamics and emotions present. Strive to understand your colleagues’ feelings and practice empathy. This builds the foundation for good communication skills.
- Manage relationships: Notice how you influence, coach, and mentor others as well as your conflict resolution skills.
3. Communication
- Speak with conviction: We’re drawn to great orators. Speak clearly with passion and ease. How we speak is often seen as more persuasive than what we’re actually saying.
- Command the room: Practice great storytelling with anecdotes, small talk, and humor.
4. Appearance
- Body language: Make direct eye contact, face your audience, keep your body positioning open and relaxed. Being comfortable in your own skin will translate into your non-verbal cues.
Articles & Sources
How to Develop and Master Executive Presence
Have you ever wondered why one person with the same skills and qualifications gets promoted over another? Leadership presence isn’t an innate quality that you either have or not. Instead, it is a skill—a set of learned behaviors that enable you to command attention.
10 Tips for Building a Stronger Executive Presence
Nowadays, we prefer our leaders to be calm, confident, and steady. We still want them to be authoritative, but we also need them to be approachable, smooth and inspiring.
What Defines Good Professional Presence?
No matter what industry you’re in, good professional presence can open the door to new opportunities and pave the way for raises and promotions.
Why Emotional Intelligence is Important in Leadership
If you aspire to be in a leadership role, there’s an emotional element you need to consider. It’s what helps you successfully coach teams, manage stress, deliver feedback, and collaborate with others.
SkillUp: Persuasive Presentation Skills
Effective presentation skills help you connect, communicate, engage and persuade others. They give you a significant advantage when presenting your thoughts and ideas to colleagues and clients. We’ve compiled content with actionable steps for creating and presenting innovative and engaging presentations to help you captivate your audience.
Videos
The Secret Structure of Great Talks | 17 min run time
From the “I have a dream” speech to Steve Jobs’ iPhone launch, many great talks have a common structure that helps their message resonate with listeners. In this talk, presentation expert Nancy Duarte shares practical lessons on how to make a powerful call-to-action.
How to Give a Great Presentation: 7 Skills and Tips to Leave an Impression | 7 min run time
Dana Blouin is an entrepreneur currently living in Bangkok, Thailand where he is the co-founder and CEO of Mango Labs, a tech startup that is building a new quantified-self platform. Over the past two years, Dana has given hundreds of presentations and talks all over the world. These are the top 7 tips he has put together based on his experiences.
10 Presentation Ideas That Will Radically Improve Your Presentation Skills | 9 min runtime
Did you know that 83% of human learning is done visually? The more you can visually stimulate your audience, the better! A good presentation needs to be engaging, memorable, and impactful. Vanessa Van Edwards, founder of Science of People, has given hundreds of presentations; here are 10 presentation tips to make your meeting, keynote, workshop, or demonstration *spark*.
Articles & Sources
How to Give a Good Presentation: 8 tips
Public speaking and presenting isn’t everyone’s forte, but it’s a valuable skill, regardless of your job. If you want your voice to be heard, you’ll need to master communicating your thoughts and opinions simply and politely.
Best Practices For Virtual Presentations: 15 Expert Tips That Work For Everyone
With in-person presentations, you more or less have a captive audience. But with virtual presentations, your audience has a greater opportunity to stray. You now have to compete for their eyes, ears, hearts, and minds against diminished attention spans, increased home and work life distractions, and conflicting priorities.
15 Actionable Storytelling Tips for PowerPoint Presentations
Great storytellers do two things very well. First (obviously), they tell stories. Second, through their stories, they get people to act. You might be thinking, “That’s great if you’re Steve Jobs and introducing the iPhone, but what do I do with all my everyday content? Here are 15 insanely actionable storytelling tips and tricks for all types of content.
19 Quotes That Will Inspire You To Create An Amazing Presentation
Stuck in PowerPoint purgatory? Start with this great advice.
8 Reasons Why You Should Learn Presentation Skills
Clear presentation is vital if you are in an interview for a new job, but it is an equally big deal if you aim for a new position at your current workplace. Wherever you go, whatever you do, you should always find new ways to improve your presentation skills.
