{"id":3950,"date":"2016-10-28T10:51:29","date_gmt":"2016-10-28T09:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=3950"},"modified":"2016-10-28T11:42:32","modified_gmt":"2016-10-28T10:42:32","slug":"colon-structure-for-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/colon-structure-for-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"Colon structure for presentations!"},"content":{"rendered":"<div align=\"center\" style=\"display:block;clear:both;margin:0;padding:0;\">\r\n   <table style=\"margin:0;table-layout:fixed;\" width=\"100%\" border=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\">\r\n     <tr valign=\"top\">\r\n       \r\n       <td width=\"50%\" align=\"left\" valign=\"top\" style=\"\"><div align=\"left\"  style=\"margin:0;padding:0;;\"><h1>Back on the wagon! \u00a0Missed us?<\/h1>\n<p>We&#8217;ve been away for a whole month? \u00a0Why? \u00a0Because over on the <a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\">Presentation Genius<\/a> site we&#8217;ve been running <strong>Confidence Month<\/strong>. \u00a0It&#8217;s been all over twitter and youtube,\u00a0too&#8230; but onward to new content here!<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_3960\" style=\"width: 210px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-3960\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-3960\" src=\"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/man_pain_colon_stomach-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"No, not this kind of colon! Presenting with pain at your doc!\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-3960\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">No, not this kind of colon!<\/p><\/div>\n<p>It&#8217;s called the <strong>Colon Technique<\/strong>, and although I&#8217;ve described it here in terms of the (painful-but-traditional) 60 seconds networking introduction the principle applies to bigger presentations too. \u00a0All you have to do is scale it up and translate it a bit&#8230;<\/div><\/td><td width=\"6\" style=\"margin:0;padding:0;\"><\/td><td width=\"6\" style=\"margin:0;padding:0;\"><\/td><td width=\"50%\" align=\"left\" valign=\"top\" style=\"\"><div align=\"left\"  style=\"margin:0;padding:0;;\"><div class=\"jbox red\" >  <div  class=\"jbox-title red\">Update box<\/div><div  class=\"jbox-content\">&#8230; here are the main blog posts of the Confidence Month<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Confidence is how you feel &#8211; assertive is how you act. Unpacked <a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-month-confidence-vs-assertiveness\/\">here<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Should you\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-month-inner-and-outer-games\/\">seek confidence<\/a> from inside or\u00a0outside?<\/li>\n<li>Getting <a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/getting-confidence-by-getting-more-worked-up\/\">worked up to get more confident<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Confident in the &#8216;heat of the moment&#8217; is <a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-in-the-heat-of-the-moment\/\">here<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Confidence\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-without-calm\/\">without the calm<\/a><\/li>\n<li>You&#8217;ve done your\u00a0best and you&#8217;ll be\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/Another of the Confidence Month blogs - this time about being confident by learning from your mistakes :) http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-and-rp\/\">even better next time<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Being <a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-when-youre-down-and-almost-out\/\">confident when you&#8217;re losing<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Confidence in the tech&#8230; or about it&#8230; or&#8230; \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/presentationgenius.info\/confidence-trust-the-tech\/\">something<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/td>\r\n       \r\n     <\/tr>\r\n   <\/table>\r\n<\/div>\n<h2 class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>The Colon Technique <\/b><\/span><\/h2>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Figuring out what to say in your 60 seconds of fame can be tricky &#8211; sometimes almost impossible. Fortunately there\u2019s a simple technique that makes it (a lot!) easier.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">All you have to do is ask yourself a series of questions and wrap your 60 seconds around the answers.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3 class=\"p4\"><span class=\"s1\"><b>What does your audience want to know?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The biggest wrong way is to tell people what you do. Sorry, but no one cares.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">They don\u2019t care that you\u2019re an accountant; they don\u2019t care that you\u2019re an NLP Master Practitioner; and they don\u2019t care that you\u2019re a fitness instructor. Unless they\u2019re married to you, you\u2019re not important to them. Like it or not, admit it or not, people are sitting there thinking that.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Okay, I\u2019m overstating the case for the sake of getting you interested, but you get the idea.<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">What they actually care about is not that you\u2019re an accountant: they care you can take away the pain of having to do their accounts and &#8211; hopefully &#8211; of paying so much tax.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p6\"><span class=\"s1\">They don\u2019t care about your NLP certificate: they care that you might be able to help them feel more confident.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"p6\"><span class=\"s1\">They don\u2019t care that you\u2019re a fitness instructor: but they might be interested in the fact that you can help them shed the pounds.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Look closely at the way I\u2019ve set up those last three points. Half way through each sentence is a colon (:). A colon is used to separate two ideas that are so closely related a full stop is too powerful a piece of punctuation. That brings us to a tried and trusted technique for providing a structure for your presentation &#8211; the <strong>Colon Method<\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The beauty of this method is that it can be used for single sentences all the way up to full minutes and it looks like this:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The pain is, of course, the thing that your (potential) clients don\u2019t want to do, don\u2019t like doing or are just plain rubbish at. After the colon comes the solution to that pain, which just happens to be you. What an amazing coincidence (ahem!).<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Try it out in a number of different ways. How about this approach for an accountant (sorry if you\u2019re an accountant, I\u2019m not having a go at you!)?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p7\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><b>Pain<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p8\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\">\u201cI know a lot of people hate filling in their tax returns. They fight with them for hours and hours, time when they could be out earning more money, but HMRC estimate that despite this, about 35% of them are wrong! That\u2019s more time, and more effort and more hassle spent sorting it out. The opportunity cost of that sort of thing runs to thousands of pounds a year &#8211; and so might the real, cash costs!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p10\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Colon<\/b><\/span> <span class=\"s1\">\u2013 take a breath; have a pause; make \u2018em wait&#8230; and then give the\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p7\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><b>Solution<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p11\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\">\u201cFortunately, I can do all of that for you. You get the benefit of not losing sleep and &#8211; what\u2019s more &#8211; I\u2019m so confident that if I can\u2019t save you more than my fee in terms of tax saved, I\u2019ll not charge the difference!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">How does that feel?\u00a0 Obviously, you shouldn\u2019t take it too literally! I\u2019ve used my own turn of phrase and I\u2019ve made up the 35% figure, but hopefully it gives you a starting point to develop your own ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Of course the five-second version is even more pithy:<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p7\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><b>Pain<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p8\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\">\u201cHow many of you like doing your taxes? Yeah, I thought not!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p10\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><span class=\"s3\"><b>Colon<\/b><\/span><span class=\"s1\"> &#8211; take a breath; have a pause; make \u2018em wait&#8230; and then give the&#8230;.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p7\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><b>Solution<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p11\"><span class=\"s1\" style=\"color: #0000ff;\">\u201cFortunately, I can do it for you so that you don\u2019t have to &#8211; and save you money in the process.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Don\u2019t get me wrong &#8211; I\u2019m not pretending that this is the <b>only<\/b> technique out there. It\u2019s perfectly possible to do a great 30-second pitch using any number of tools &#8211; but hopefully this one will be helpful if you\u2019re struggling to get yours to work.<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"jbox red\" >  <div  class=\"jbox-title red\">So what would my own colon technique pitch be for this post?<\/div><div  class=\"jbox-content\">How about this:\u00a0Presentation when you&#8217;re networking are often a PITA and rubbish: this techniques helps with both of those things.<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Colon Technique Figuring out what to say in your 60 seconds of fame can be tricky &#8211; sometimes almost impossible. Fortunately there\u2019s a simple technique that makes it (a lot!) easier. All you have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3960,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3950"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3964,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3950\/revisions\/3964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}