Negotiation Tip For Women – Does Your Voice Turn ‘Em on Or Off?

Your voice is a powerful tool when you negotiate. How you use it influences the outcome of your negotiation. Here are some tips on how to use your voice to be a more effective negotiator.

Listen to the tone and pitch. Is your voice soft, sweet or high-pitched? Do you have an accent?

Non-native English speakers have a tendency to speak fast when conversing in English. Slow down. Even some native English speakers need to heed this tip, especially if you have a regional accent. This will also help with the next point.

Speak in a lower tone, especially in a negotiation, for added credibility. Research verifies that men prefer to hear a low, slow-paced female voice with some vocal variation. Also, some men have difficulty understanding people with accents. That’s where the slower speed comes in.

Your ethnicity plays a large role in how you speak, and this carries over into negotiations. For instance, in Japan men find women with a soft, high-pitched voice appealing.

Consider finding a voice or presentation coach to help you. Record your voice in various settings (including telephone voice and meeting voice) and replay as a learning tool. Take note when your voice raises, goes lower, speeds up or slows down. If your voice is running on autopilot, the message you want to give may not be the one the other person hears.

How do you find a presentation or voice coach?

Google is one way. Another is to locate a local chapter of the National Speakers Association. There may be a member in the chapter who specializes in presentation and voice development.

Learn to use your voice effectively. It is one of your most powerful negotiation tools.

Expand your negotiation skills from a seasoned negotiator. Learn more about negotiation training at http://www.LeaseSpeak.com/workshop-keynotes-lease-negotiating.

The Lazy Speaker’s Way of Spicing Up Your Presentation

The average attention span of a literate adult is 20 minutes.

Good, you think to yourself. 20 minutes is plenty of time.

But how many speeches have you sat through where you fell asleep within the first two minutes?

And how afraid are you that people are going to do the same for yours?

It seems terribly obvious: unless you’re interesting, no one is going to pay attention. When you watch an episode of the O.C. or Gray’s Anatomy, you’re there to be entertained. You watch because the plot twists and the developing relationships on-screen are interesting. Not interesting? You switch the channel.

People may not have the luxury of turning off a speaker. But they can certainly turn off their own brains, and if you’re not careful, you’ll find most people snoozing in their chairs.

Find out your audience’s expectations, and do your best to break them. Does your audience expect you to be very formal? Take off your jacket and walk out from behind your podium. Does your audience expect you to be very serious? Be irreverent. Be self-deprecating.

One simple way to do this is to ask unexpected questions. It makes people think and also keeps them awake because it’s embarrassing to be singled out for sleeping.

5) Laugh! Never underestimate the power of humour. It’s been said to the death, but somehow people still don’t seem to get it. And they end up with dead audiences.

And I don’t mean just a humorous beginning or ending. Make sure you keep it up! It’s a pity if your audience doesn’t pay attention to the body of your speech.

6) Be visual. Okay, the above blog post advises that you ‘show a (half) naked woman’. But take that with a pinch of salt. It might not be appropriate, and you never know when you might have a dedicated, stone-throwing feminist in your audience.

Instead, you can be visual. It’s pretty much an undisputed fact that we remember images better than words. If you have a powerpoint presentation, make it visually striking. At the most basic level, it’s as simple as bolding words to make them stand out. At higher levels, you can add images or even videos.

7) If you’re stuck with words only, then use what fiction writers and poets have been using throughout the ages: metaphor, simile, and analogy. All these techniques are meant to call up images in the mind of the reader – or in your case, the listener – and help them retain your message better.

8) Tell stories [http://blog.ericfeng.com/getting-your-audience-engaged-excited-at-the-edge-of-their-seats-at-all-times]. It may sound difficult but it’s not, because we do it all the time.

When you tell your friends about the time you were stuck in a traffic jam or about dealing with your horrible boss or about the time you tried so hard to get tickets to a concert, you’re essentially portraying the essence of life: conflict.

Tell your audience about a particular conflict you resolved. It endears you to them and also helps them empathize with you. Besides that, stories are simply far more memorable and interesting than a series of unconnected facts.

9) Start writing your speech early. A lot of people wait till the very last minute to start working on their presentation, which results in them being unconfident and boring. If you don’t craft your jokes and stories carefully first, you’ll end up telling them badly or not telling them at all.

10) Keep your role as a public speaker in mind, all the time. You can start keeping a folder of notes or materials to use in any speech.

If something interesting happens to you, write it down. If a friend tells you a good joke or if you happen to read a nice anecdote from a book or the Internet, write it down. You never know when it’ll come in handy.

How to Make Presentations Without PowerPoint

In these days, most of the presentations are made by a powerful tool called PowerPoint. In addition, there are lecturers and teachers who use this tool to make the learning process and teaching more interesting. However, there are some people making their presentations without using such tool.

Without PowerPoint, presentations can be quite boring. The reason is that they will be monotonous without any visual aid and music background. Presentations with PowerPoint usually provide the audience with a change in the presentation, and additionally provide the crowd with some explanations visually to the points being told. So without PowerPoint, the presentation requires the presenter to use his or her creativity. The reason is that the creativity is the only technique to keep the audience motivated and interested in the presentation!

The most important thing to be kept in mind to make a successful presentation without the help of PowerPoint is to know exactly what to talk about. If you are the matter of the issues intended to present, you will present it very well without PowerPoint. However, you should ensure making your presentation after you have learned about the nature and temperament of your audience.

At the beginning of your presentation, you need to present it and keep the end of your presentation in mind at the same time. You should know what your presentation talks about, because you may lose the audience’s interest without PowerPoint! Whatever you say, you should ensure seeing, hearing and feeling exactly what you want them to respond to. Make a strong beginning to the presentation. It is essential that your appearance and first words should be interesting enough to keep your audience glued to you listing. One of the most effective techniques to make a connection with your audience is to tell them a story or a universal appeal anecdote.

It is necessary to use props in a presentation without PowerPoint. The reason is that props are basically worth more than a thousand words. With such props, the audience tends to anchor their thoughts to these props. It makes no difference if the prop is serious or funny, small or large as long as it really relates to what you are trying to talk about and the audience can see it! Another technique to ensure that your audience loves you and your presentation although you do not use PowerPoint is to bring answers to the questions they have. As regards the audience, you can have a general idea of what their questions are; it is all dependent on you as it comes to bringing new ideas to your audience to try.

Keep in mind that because you do not use PowerPoint, you are just the visual aid and sound effect of your own presentation. People will get more interest in whatever you say, instead of overheads, visuals or fancy slides. So essentially, it is important for you as a speaker to be more well-versed and self-confident in your speech without PowerPoint.