It’s not just business owners that love us…
How awesome is it that international speakers and business experts offer to speak at our events!
These are some of the best speakers globally for business and personal and professional development. We recently had a call from Colin McLean a specialist in presentation skills. He won’t tell us which TV celebs he’s worked with!
Colin has hosted the business masterclass at a BWN event 5 times over the last 11 years! AND is coming back to the Insiders this October to deliver something very exclusive! You can’t get this unless you pay to work with Colin!
All of our webinars for the Insiders are accessible forever to our mastermind group so grab a coffee because there is some awesome ideas in there for you to grow your business, increase sales and profit, communicate powerfully even how to deliver a winning 60 seconds.
Here Colin has kindly delivered a copy of his new article on
After you get up in the morning, how long is it before you look at a screen?
There’s no right or wrong answer but the question serves to emphasise that, like it or not, our lives are dominated by screen time of one sort or another. Our phone, our tablet, our TV, our laptop or monitor; in our car, in city centres, at the surgery, the bus stop .. the list is endless.
Nothing new there, you say. Well, no. Except for so much of our time we have been the active ones, our screens have, by and large, been passive. We have absorbed information, entertainment, instruction, messages from our screens. That, of course, continues.
What has changed is that now our screens are active participants too. Forced into the world of Online Comms – whether that be on Zoom, BlueJeans, Skype or a dozen other similar platforms – we are needing to acknowledge different rules.
Ok, it’s the camera that’s active, I accept, but on many devices the camera is as good as unseen.
Even perched atop your monitor it’s all but invisible.
So here’s my point: these days you’re not just ‘watching TV’ you are on it. You are, thanks to so much ‘zooming’, a large part of everyone else’s screen-time. You’re on show and so is everything about your home or office set up.
We need to think about our screens as no longer opaque; the screen lets us look out, but crucially others look in.
In this changed world we need to rethink our role. And I believe we need to set ourselves a few standards and stick to them.
For a start, let’s ensure that what others see is, as far as any of it is in our control, what we’d like them to see. At least let it complement us and our message, not(unintentionally) sabotage it. There’s often a lot we can do to improve things,visually for starters, that are painlessly simple.
Other crucial matters – audio for example – might require more thought.
Let us review our individual set up to make it easy and welcoming on the incoming eye. But let us go further. Let us resolve to be sensitive during our online meetings, to remember the power of focus, of eye contact and of smiles and nods. Non-verbal communication hasn’t gone away; in many ways it’s all we’ve got, particularly as attendees.
Let us resolve, too, to leave checking our emails, or the dozen other diversions that crave our attention. Our focus, for the duration, must be on each other, and nowhere else.
Ask any speaker (from the world BC*) and they will confirm that the principal gain, and the rocket fuel that keeps them going, is the energy shared and returned by their audience. That ‘virtuous circle’ of shared energy can be a real high. Replicating that online is unquestionably harder, but there are ways and there still can be rich rewards.
But let us start by turning up to our own TV show with some pride and purpose.
*Before Covid”
Thanks for sharing Colin. You can catch Colin’s new webinar on the Insiders this October. To join us click here.
More event details here
The Screen Bites back – Life in the Zoom era
Colin McLean of Presentation Works
(www.presw.com)
