Dahle Communication

Why I wear an eye patch!

I wear an Eyepatch because of the presentations that I have seen have caused me to stab myself in the eye so I didn't have to see half of the presentation.

What caused this to happen: three things really:

1) People who put their entire speech on their slides then read it word for word

2) So many bullet points that I can only imagine that their enter button must automatically get hit every four words

and 

3) People who talk like they clearly don't care about the speech....so why are you even talking.

That's why I wear an eyepatch, and that's why I'm hooked. Are you?

Ignite SD Talk

It's been a while since I gave this presentation at IgniteSD, but I wanted to share it with you all.

In this Ignite speech, I decided to not talk about communication, powerpoint or delivery. Instead, I wanted to talk about my other passion - Music! It's a bit quirky, but I hope you like it.

 

 

Travis Dahle at Ignite SD #3 from Ignite SD on Vimeo.

Slide Handouts - a quick guide

I have always felt that slide presentation handouts were a bad idea. Your intentions might be good, but as the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." The idea is a good one: you want your audience to follow along. You want to make sure that they take down some notes because your information is THAT important.

However, disaster soon ensues because here is what usually happens: you hand out your presentation, and I read through it in about 2 minutes while you are still on your first slide. I then become bored with your presentation because I have already read through it. Am I a bad person for doing this? Probably, but it is what 95% of your audience is doing.

So, what to do? You want to give a presentation people will pay attention to, but you also want to give them something that will make sense when they are going through it on their own. You need to do two things:

1) Create a presentation, that as David S. Rose in Presentation Zen Design states is "completely incapable of standing by themselves." When you keep this in mind, you will hopefully avoid putting too much text and graphs in your presentation and give a presentation that people will listen to.

2) Prepare a 2nd presentation that you can leave behind AFTER you give your presentation. This 'deck' that you leave behind can include all of the important information that you covered in your speech, but you didn't have written down. It should be similar in style and structure as your delivered presentation, but with more information on it that they can look at.

The important part is that people listen to your speech - which they won't if you put everything into your presentation. It doesn't take much extra work, but it will lead to much bigger results.

The following images is an example. A client of mine wanted to explain what Querencia was. He originally had it written out word for word what he was going to say on his slide (which had a bad background color on it as well). We changed his presentation on this slide to have an image that supports what he was going to say and then created a deck that he would then handout that had the information on it. This way people would stay focused on him instead of reading the text on the screen - yet they would be able to take the deck home with them and still understand what was said.

 

 

Educators need some new branding

I'm in a bit of a dilemma. I love teaching and coaching speech and debate. While I am only a half-time teacher (working on Dahle Communication Group the other half) I do really enjoy my time at school working with those kids.

Here is the dilemma: my daughter says she wants to be a teacher. I say dilemma because I am not sure that I even want her to be a teacher. I know she would be an amazing elementary teacher (which is what I think she wants to do). She has a huge heart, is very caring, helps other students now while in school and is nothing short of brilliant. I know she's only ten and will might change her mind, but she's been saying she wants to be a teacher for about 3 years now (I wanted to be a fireman when I was 7, but that's because we got to go to the fire-station in second grade).

Now why don't I want her to be a teacher? I know it sounds terrible, but I think she is too smart and too talented to be a teacher - and that is the problem! As a society we have a belief that if you are a talented smart person, you should do something besides teaching. While I don't claim to be a brilliant person, I've had several people ask me why I'm not in politics or a lawyer or something else. It is a stigma that I have heard several times: 'If you can't do, teach.' That is the problem.

Educators and education as a whole needs some new branding. We need to change the mindset of people that if you are the most talented and smartest kid in class, that you absolutely should go into teaching! Teach for America has started to do this to some degree of success. They focus on getting graduates from schools like Duke or Harvard and get graduates who usually would never think about going into education and sending them to impoverished schools or reservations and working with kids who are not exposed to highly intelligent successful kids to try and inspire them.

Mostly though, as educators, we need to show that education is so important that it should be pursued by the best and brightest. It is an issue that I am struggling with. We all want our kids to do better than we did, and I'm not sure if education is going to provide that for my daughter - especially if she teaches in South Dakota (we are 51st in the nation in teacher-pay).

How do we do this? Do educators need to have a more rigid educational background? Do we just need to start talking about it? I obviously have a clouded perspective being in education so I am curious as to your thoughts: what do you think?

What Can Dilbert Teach Us About Communication?

Lot's of things - specifically that:

1) Most people will freak out if they have to give a presentation

 

 

 

 

2) Others will get sick (not this bad I hope)

 

 

 

 

3) Businesses are not quite sure what a Public Speaking Class can do for them

 

 

 

 

and

4) Most people don't think too highly of how their bosses communicate