Dan Roam schools me on creative process. His new book, BLAH BLAH BLAH, offers awesome tips on how to utilize visual and verbal concepts to refine ideas to their most pure state.

Dan Roam uses an animalistic metaphor to explain how your brain processes information, and reveals how to help facilitate communication between our verbal and visual minds. That and more in his new book, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Dan Roam used the rules of verbal grammar to build a Visual Grammar Graph that bridges the gap between verbal and visual concepts. Vivid Grammar is featured in his new book, BLAH BLAH BLAH.

Dan Roam explains why we talk too much, and how we can use our predilection for vision to become better problem solvers. “Vivid Thinking” is one of the many gems in his new book, BLAH BLAH BLAH. 

To honor one of one of the greatest communicators of all time, we’d like to re-post a popular blog from last year: The analysis of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech from the March on Washington.

MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not only literarily brilliant, its structure follows the presentation form perfectly, by traversing back and forth between what is and what could be, and ending by describing what the new bliss of equality looks like. In addition, MLK carefully chooses phrases and metaphors that resonate deeply with his audience.

If you’re struggling to create your next big presentation or even just crafting the message for your next staff meeting, take a few minutes to be inspired by the brilliance of one of America’s most beloved orators. Thank you, Dr. King, for standing up and speaking out to change the world.

Sounds crazy, but I met Victoria Labalme on Twitter and we’ve become lifelong friends. Her background in acting and improv gives her a special edge as an executive presentation coach. She coaches completely differently than anyone I’ve met. Most delivery coaches want to record you so you can “see” all the things you need to stop doing. Sometimes that negative chatter of “stop umming” and “use bigger gestures” disrupts us from being our true selves. She uses the metaphor of a Prism Effect. Victoria believes that if you bring your true self and true colors to your presentations, your message will come across more pure and clear, plus you’ll come alive!

I had the privilege of interviewing her at my office. Topics covered include remote presenting, her paradigm “The Prism Effect”, Velcro communication, Twitter-inspired friendships, and peach bellinis. (And at 6:44, there’s a little bonus where we delved a little deeper into Victoria’s personal life.) You can see why she’s my first choice to recommend to keynote in my stead.

We like photography. We also like fun, and Saturdays, and San Francisco, and sunshine. And we really like each other. Recently we went on a Photo Field Trip, and had the chance to enjoy all of these things, simultaneously. I know.

Our assignment: Take photos of contrast. Or take photos of whatever you want. Joe went rogue (typical) and took video. Then he compiled the footage with our photographs to make this. Hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed ourselves that day. Aaand pretty much all the time.

I *heart* Chris Brogan, so it was such a treat to do this new webinar format with him sponsored by KTC. Chris is SUCH a likeable guy. Here he is playing with his Batman doll (ahem, and yes, I’m wearing Yoda ears)

(Above: Photo courtesy of @Nov8r)

We taped an interview a few weeks ago and then he launched this video interview on his blog.

Then, he and I live tweeted answering questions. Some of my favorite tweets are here.

It was a very fun format. Listen to the end and there’s a valuable call to action where you get cool FREE goodies.

Enjoy!

Although primarily known as a dancer, Martha Graham was also a powerful communicator. She developed characteristics that anyone who aspires to become a great presenter must cultivate and nourish. She stood out by moving against the grain of society. She persevered in spite of seemingly overwhelming obstacles. She fought against and overcame her fears. She respected and connected deeply with her audience. And she never held back from communicating her deepest feelings.

Graham spent her life challenging what dance is and what a dancer can do. She looked upon dance as an exploration, a celebration of life, and a religious calling that required absolute devotion.

Graham became a dancer against the odds. When she finally began to study dance with the idea of making it her profession, she was considered too old, too short, too heavy and too homely to be taken seriously. “They thought I was good enough to be a teacher, but not a dancer,” she recalled. But she knew what she wanted to do, and pursued her goal with the intensity that marked her entire life. Dance was her reason for living. Willing to risk everything, driven by a burning passion, she dedicated herself absolutely to her art. “I did not choose to be a dancer,” she often said. “I was chosen.”

Graham was ready to discard traditional ballet. She invented a revolutionary new language of dance, an original way of moving with which she revealed the joys, passions, and sorrows common to human experience. In place of graceful soaring leaps through space, she introduced stark, angular movements, blunt gestures, and stern facial expressions as she sought to lay bare fundamental human moods and feelings. Her dances were meant to be challenging and disturbing.

This new kind of dance wasn’t to everyone’s liking, as it was neither beautiful nor romantic. Graham was often the object of ridicule and the butt of hostile jokes. Women in America had won the right to vote only a few years earlier, in 1920, and many people were still uncomfortable with the image of the “new woman” who sought a career and voted. It was all right to be a high-kicking, scantily clad chorus girl, but a woman who ran a dance company and created works that commented on war, poverty, and intolerance seemed unnatural and suspicious.

But Graham was resolute in her desire to communicate how she felt.

Graham believed that the secret emotional world made visible by a dancer’s movement could not always be expressed in words. She wanted her dances to be “felt” rather than “understood.” Graham drew inspiration from the ugly side of life and put it on display. Each of her dances had a special significance to her, because they expressed a fear she had conquered in her own life.

In 1930, Graham premiered a haunting solo dance of mourning called Lamentation. She sat on a low bench, wearing a tube-like shroud with only her face, hands and bare feet showing. In the dance, she began to rock with anguish from side to side, plunging her hands deep into the stretchy fabric, writhing and twisting as if trying to break out of her own skin. She was a figure of unbearable sorrow and grief. She did not dance about grief, but sought to be the very embodiment of grief.

Graham recalled “One of the first times I performed it was in Brooklyn. A lady came back to me afterwards and looked at me. She was very white faced and she’d obviously been crying. She said ‘you’ll never know what you have done for me tonight, thank you’ and left. I asked about her later and it seemed that she had seen her 9 year old son killed in front of her by a truck. She had made every effort to cry, but was unable to. But when she saw Lamentation she said she felt that grief was honorable and universal and that she should not be ashamed of crying for her son. I remember that story as a deep story in my life that made me realize that there is always one person to whom you speak in the audience. One.”

Graham moved in a way that gave anger and grief back to her audiences. She had a genius for connecting movement with emotion. She could make visible all those feelings that people have inside them but can’t put to words.

Mac Slocum interviews Nancy Duarte at Web 2.0

The kind folks at O’Reilly had me speak at Web 2.0 and then Mac Slocum asked some s-m-a-r-t questions at their booth.

Watch the video below to hear answers to these four questions:

1. Are presentations inherently broken? Are we going about it the wrong way?
2. If you ask most people if they like lectures they’ll say “No”, yet we default to that when it’s time to do a presentation, why do you think that is?
3. Do you feel that every great presentation has a meta component to it–a language that’s being spoken outside the visuals or what’s being said?
4. Do you think we’re getting better at business communication?

Enjoy!