Identifying your strengths
What are the talents, skills, and abilities that got you promoted to or hired for this position? Do you excel at analyzing data and forecasting trends? Are you relational, intuitive, and good at encouraging people? Are you practical and able to break a problem down into easily manageable pieces? What do you do better than your co-workers or peers?
Jot down three key strengths on the Presentation Planning Worksheet. Building a presentation around these strengths will allow you to feel comfortable, reinforce your unique contributions to the organization, and connect with your new team.
Assessing your personal brand
One of the key elements of an effective presentation is authenticity. Being real, being you.
Unfortunately, a lot of presentation "tips" and "rules" prevent people from being themselves. That's why so many presentations are bland, boring, and torturous. Everyone is copying and mimicking the same tired routine. Most presentations waste precious time by including unnecessary information and too many slides with uninspired images and far too much text. Typical presentations lose sight of the fact that every slide and every piece of data should be aimed at engaging the audience.
Newsflash! You aren't any other presenter. You have your own leadership style, management personality, and approach to team dynamics. Embracing what is unique about you is what will help you stand out from the crowd. More importantly, your presentation won't be credible if your presentation persona is vastly different from the way you communicate every day.
So, who are you? Let's do a quick personal branding exercise:
Who do you think you are? Write down five to eight adjectives that describe who you are all the time—with your best friend, your boss, or a person you just can't stand.
How do others see you? Ask your friends or family members to list adjectives describing you. Look over work reviews to see which adjectives frequently occur. Ask your boss and your team. Write down the five to eight words most commonly used by others to describe you.
How do you want to be seen? Write down five to eight adjectives that describe the way you want others to perceive you.
Look across all three columns on the Personal Branding Chart and work through the following steps until you've identified five distinct words that describe you.
Circle words that appear in every column. Write them in the Personal Brand Attributes box. If you've identified five distinct words, you can skip the rest of the steps.
Circle words that appear in the last two columns. Write them in the Personal Brand Attributes box. If you've now identified five distinct words, you can skip the next step.
Circle words that appear in the first and last columns. Write them in the Personal Brand Attributes box. If you haven't identified five distinct words by this point, fill the remaining spots with words from the last column that best describe how you'd like to be seen.
When you've identified five distinct words, you've identified your personal brand attributes.
Identifying these attributes helps you create a presentation style that is authentically you. A funny, smart, artistic, ambitious, and brave person presents differently from someone who is serious, thoughtful, empowering, resourceful, and innovative.
Write your five personal brand attributes on the Presentation Planning Worksheet. They'll be useful in Chapter 2, Developing Your Presentation.
