I Can See You Naked

This book is just great! Full of fun, advices, hints. Practical in every step (although sometimes you need to read between the lines). So far the best book about presentations I read!

...books in the "training" industry. I use these practices in all my training sessions and presentations.

This book was one of my sources for my masters thesis: "A Systematic Approach to Making Presentations in a Corporate and Sales Environment." You can probably find some useful information in all of these books, but this one was the least effective for me.

The author suggests that one way to overcome nervousness is to imagine that your audience is naked. Hence, the provocative title. For the nervous presenter, it would be completely distracting to imagine your audience in the nude.

I eagerly turned to the part about "presence" or "charisma," not having been able to find an empirical definition for one. To my disappointment, the author gave an example of what it wasn't. Any definition he wrote, wasn't memorable.

So, here are my three suggestions for presenters and trainers:

* Never show up twenty minutes late to teach Time Management. No matter what you say, your credibility is shot to hell.

* Never pop in the video or DVD and turn the lights out, especially after lunch. (You'll never get them back.)

* ENSURE that you turn off the battery pack to your lapel microphone before using the restroom. (The speakers are still in the room.)

Recommendation for the book? It can't hurt, but read some of the more glowing reviews before you decide.

I am terrified of giving presentations. Even when I get together with people I have known for years, I become afraid if I have to stand up in front of them all and discuss a topic. All those eyeballs staring at me - I just know I will say something stupid, or they will lose interest in my discussion. I begin to shake and forget what I am going to say.

With "I Can See You Naked", Ron Hoff tries to ease the fear of public speaking - a fear that studies say is the most common fear in the US. It's more common than the fear of death, or heights! We all worry about what others think. While death might be far off, if you're standing in front of a group, their disapproval is right there, staring you in the face. With the average attention span being 10 seconds or less, if you're not actively engaging your group, you can lose them quickly.

While this book seems aimed at people giving a sales speech to businesspeople, there are certainly enough tips in here to help out casual speakers, trainers, and other people who have to speak in front of groups. There are hints on a warm-up routine. Advice about what to do the night before. Information about catching your audience's attention and keeping it. Warning signs in body language to watch out for. How to deal with bad situations, from faulty equipment to cranky audience members.

Sure, some of this advice is common sense - but other of it is quite helpful. Just having a list of options to try can be extremely helpful. There are suggestions about what to do with your hands, what to wear, how to say things.

One book will never solve all of a public speaker's fears. Only time and practice will do that. However, it really did help to read the book, and to get some concrete ideas of things to try to make things easier.

Well recommended.

I have no doubt that Hoff makes wonderful presentations, but he's written the book as though he's making a presentation. The techniques of effective writing are very different from those of effective speaking. Hoff takes pages and pages to make even the simplest point, something that could have been communicated in three sentences perfectly well. He can't simply just come out and state a something and be content with the fact that he's just shared something extremely useful. He comes off as trying to entertain more than inform. If you're making a presentation to high school students, maybe that's a good idea. But after 50 pages in a book, it starts to feel incredibly condescending. If you want a book that assumes you're reasonably intelligent, don't buy this one.