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Creative Ways Coaches Use Haiku Deck Presentations

While conference rooms, classrooms, and auditoriums might have been the original setting for slide decks, those are in no way the limits of their utility. Coaches especially have found a myriad of ways to use slide decks — from “About Me” pages, to instruction manuals, to blog title graphics. These uses of slide decks save time, provide personal connection with potential clients, and create consistent branding. Let’s take a look at some of the creative uses coaches have found for Haiku Deck!

About Me Pages

Cena Block has a very personal connection to her coaching niche. After becoming a mom, she realized how hard it was to run a business within a family-centered life. Furthermore, she discovered other moms struggling with similar issues. She switched to coaching, sharing what she wishes she had known when she was starting her business. Through her coaching practice, she helps moms learn how to balance a startup and a family without burning out on either.

To introduce people to her practice, Cena has an amazing slide deck that runs through her full story from a steady, career-focused life, through becoming a mom, starting her own business, and eventually becoming a coach. Her deck beautifully combines personal imagery with a narrative structure that gives her audience something to deeply relate to. She finishes off the deck with a small promotion of her practice, after highlighting how her experience and the lessons she learned could help her audience.

Coaching Program For Mompreneurs – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Intro to a Concept

Cassandra O’Neill has written multiple books on the idea of Collective Leadership. This entails going above and beyond teamwork and learning to work as a system. By shifting leadership from something you do for people to something you do with people, collective leadership allows everyone to contribute to their fullest ability.

Cassandra has an incredible deck to explain the idea of Collective Leadership that she points to from multiple pages of her website. Similar to the “About Me” deck, this deck introduces an idea and finishes off with contact info and links to follow for more information. It smoothly introduces the core principles of Collective Leadership and gives the audience a clear idea of what they could learn from Cassandra.

Collective Leadership Slides Leadership Alchemy – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

How-to Guides

Elise Enriquez has an exemplary deck for how-tos. Her presentation, “Ideas Into Action” leads its audience through the days just after a large conference, teaching them how to synthesize the wealth of information learned from attending. The deck itself has a great balance of information and visuals, but the key piece of this deck are her slide notes. Each slide is accompanied by 100-150 words of notes that guide the reader through the step outlined on the slide.

By using a slide deck format, Elise gets the best of both worlds; it is detailed enough to provide all of the information you need in the notes, but simple enough on the slides to make it very easy to review. The slides are concise, the slide notes are detailed, and overall, it gives the reader a choice between a quick overview with just the slides, or an in-depth read through the notes.

Turn your ideas into ACTION – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;
Slide notes aren’t displayed on embedded decks. To read all the slide notes for the example deck above, click here.

Blog Post Title Graphics

One of the most interesting uses for Haiku Deck comes from Coach Cheryl Leitschuh, who uses Haiku Deck as a blog graphics generator. Cheryl has taken advantage of the easy to read, at-a-glance design of Haiku Deck to create powerful title graphics for blogs and newsletters. Many people (including myself) have struggled with blogging tools trying to create nice visuals. Cheryl can do the entire visual creation side with Haiku Deck and just pass those on to her blogging software.

Blog Posts – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Background Information

Cena Block is back again with another innovative use of slide decks. If you have taken a personality test (or BuzzFeed-style quiz) online, you’ll know that at the end,you get an indigestible wall of text detailing your personalized results. Cena realized that this format, while personalized, didn’t feel very personal. For her TSSI (Time and Space Style Inventory) Personality Style Assessment, she used a Haiku Deck complete with imagery that clearly illustrates the insights and strategies for managing your space and time.

In addition to feeling more personal, the Haiku Deck with slide notes adds the in-depth/quick-overview option just like Elise’s “Ideas Into Action” deck above. To read all the slide notes for the example deck below, click here.

Nothing Out Organizing Personality Style – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Webinars

A webinar is a great tool for coaches looking to expand their practice. Webinars let you reach more people, faster, and build relationships with each of them just as you would in a workshop or conference. We have a lot more info about webinars in these posts.

Jared Ganem’s powerful webinar “Double Your Bookings” makes use of recorded audio over his slides to give him an even more personal connection to his audience. In addition, his beautiful imagery and professional formatting lend him an immediate air of authority, pulling his audience even closer.

Double Your Bookings V1 – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

Audio doesn’t play on embedded decks. To hear all the audio for the example deck above, click here.

Slide decks can be for much more than just presentations. Thanks for checking out these decks! If you use Haiku Deck in a creative way for your coaching business, will you tell us your story? Drop us an email at team@haikudeck.com. For more information about coaching and Haiku Deck, check out haikudeck.com/coaches.

Why webinars are the key to growing your coaching practice online

June 13, 2018 / Emmett McCann / 1 Comment

Forbes names technology and the rise of remote coaching as the #1 trend in coaching over the next 15 years. Recorded webinars and podcasts are just two technologies that expand your reach past your local community.

Skype and phone-coaching give coaches easy access to a larger client base and more location freedom. But those are just the online equivalent of one-on-one conversations. What if the large speaking engagements that many coaches perform on a regular basis were online too? Webinars let you reach more people, faster, and build relationships with each of them just as you would in a workshop or conference.

Why webinars work for coaches

Webinars are made for presentations and seminar-like work. You might have a fairly standard presentation that you offer on a regular basis that you would like to offer to more people. Or have an idea for a great workshop but don’t have a solid, large client to host it with. Webinars are a great place to utilize these ideas and materials. Their visual components help to build trust, keep your audience focused and interested, and help you create a closer emotional connection with your clients. A webinar is a great tool for coaches looking to expand their practice. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of a webinar and how to maximize trust, focus, interest, and emotional connection.

Instill Trust

According to the International Coaching Federation, the main obstacle in coaching as identified by coaches is the influx of untrained individuals who call themselves coaches. As such, a client’s trust in a coach is key to the coaches success. A professional slide deck can validate your process and ideas in a way that the disembodied voice of a podcast can’t, immediately building your client’s confidence in your program. While podcasts and email lists may reach more people, only about 2.5% of the audience will end up being a client. In contrast, a well planned webinar can yield significantly higher conversion rates. One example is Jenna Soard of YouCanBrand.com whose first ever webinar boasted a 16% conversion rate.

Jared Ganem has a powerful introduction to his webinar “Double your bookings” that makes use of beautiful images paired with professional layouts and design. Right off the bat, this deck helps to show potential clients that Jared has the skills and expertise to coach them.

Tip: Try balancing a consistent look to your slides with varied formatting — easy to do with Haiku Deck Themes.

Maintain Focus

Especially in corporate settings, building client buy-in is an essential of coaching. Without the supervision of an in-person seminar, webinars and podcasts must find ways to catch and hold the attention of the audience. Forgo the dense PowerPoints of corporations for a streamlined, one-idea-per-slide approach that focuses listeners on the most important points. Research shows that in doing this, your audience will stay engaged longer and retain the information better.

Jane Hewitt has a captivating deck on changing your mindset that includes interesting but not overly complicated visuals. Balancing simplicity and intrigue, her images give the audience something to explore with their eyes and connect with her talking points.

Tip: Use images that relate to the the underlying points and abstract ideas of your slide to drive your audience to make those connections.

Stimulate Interest

Interesting and engaging visuals take centerstage in webinars, drawing in your audience and directing them through your ideas. In addition to improving retention, interesting visuals make your webinar fun and helps you to move up past that 15% average conversion rate!

Cassandra O’Neill does a great job of this in her Collective Leadership deck, tying together symbolic language with visuals such as a slide about your “flourishing future” that is backed by a picture of a flower blooming in the spring.

If you can find images that also connect to your wording, audiences will enjoy the clever connections.

Build an Emotional Connection

The internet is often seen as a very impersonal place and webinars/podcasts can feel the same way. However, with captivating images, you can build an emotional bond with your audience. A wisely chosen picture can drive home the emotional importance of your talking points. This improves retention but also develops the connection you have with your clients.

Cena Block’s story on how she got into the coaching business is simple, but emotional, and she pairs it well with imagery (both from online and from her own pictures) that evokes the “I’ve been there, I get that” feeling in her audience.

Tip: Since in a webinar, you aren’t there to make the physical connection with your audience, use images of people (and sometimes your own pictures) to help them connect more to your topics.

Putting it All Together

The visual aspect of webinars helps to build trust, keep your audience focused and interested, and help you create a closer emotional connection with your clients. A webinar is a great tool for coaches looking to expand their practice. To stay notified as we go into more detail about making awesome webinars with Haiku Deck, drop us a message at team@haikudeck.com or visit our coaching page at haikudeck.com/coaches.

Presentation Writers Block? Get Unstuck with Upside Down Thinking

November 14, 2017 / Adam Tratt / 0 Comments

Great presentations, often start with great ideas, but what do you do when the new ideas aren’t flowing? How do you overcome presentation writers block?

We recently met Haiku Deck Pro subscriber, Forbes contributor, and business transformation consultant Patricia Cotton, who has devoted her career to helping individuals and organizations unlock their creativity using a unique method she calls, Upside Down Thinking. Using this method and presentations created with Haiku Deck, she facilitates Upside Down Thinking business retreats and workshops, keynote speeches and creative consulting. We asked Cotton about her method and advice she gives to leaders on change management, presentations, communication, and more.

What is Upside Down Thinking?

Upside Down Thinking is a mindset that helps individuals and organizations to transform new ideas and intuitive knowledge in reality, by fostering new ways to manage change & creativity. Although turning one’s thinking upside down is rather an unnatural and even painful process, it may unleash innovation, leading to unexplored, creative and also more authentic solutions.

It sounds like a big part of change management has to do with the way leaders communicate change to their organization. What are the most common mistakes you see leaders make when they communicate with their teams and what should others do to avoid the most common pitfalls?

It’s very common to see leaders assuming that new ideas will be embraced organically by their teams simply because they make logical sense for the business. However, one should not disregard the crucial power of human emotions, including the voices of fear, cynicism and judgment which tend to appear in change moments. Since telling is not selling, one should communicate any new strategy followed by an emotional link and reward, dealing with doubts, engaging with resistance and managing emotions. In a nutshell, leaders should move from the head to the heart when communicating with their teams.

How can Haiku Deck users apply upside down thinking to improve their presentations?

First of all, I would recommend inverting the natural flow of your presentations by focusing more on fostering emotional connection rather than sharing hard data. After establishing a certain level of trust, I’d suggest playing with the “sacred cows” of the industry, company and/or field of to which the audience belongs, questioning their crystallized (and probably limiting) beliefs, and reframing them in the opposite way. This can be a fun and unexpected way to unleash innovative thinking, reaching deeper levels of reflection and engagement. In order to support this process, it is worth checking out the open source tool Reframe.

What steps do you take to prepare for success in giving talks and running workshops?

Well, first of all, I do certain things in order to create time and space for preparation, such as getting rid of urgent and mundane tasks, meditating and being on my own at home. After creating the conditions to have a certain level of peace of mind, I start immersing into the workshop/talk topic, looking back on what I already built on it, as well as doing some new research and seeking for inspiration in random and non obvious sources.

Last but not least, I use Haiku Deck to inspire and organize my thinking. Haiku Deck is a support for all of my business presentations such as workshops, corporate talks, consulting reports and institutional presentations.It has always made a big difference to boost the quality of my presentations as well as the quality of my thinking, since it provokes me to nail the essence of things so that I can better communicate it.

What advice can you offer to Haiku Deck’s community as they think about their talk or workshop?

Being simple = being effective.

In Forbes you describe how optimism, risk-taking and self-confidence are extremely beneficial as change drivers. What advice do you give to leaders who are trying to show these traits when effecting change in their organization?

Be aware that these qualities can be highly contagious if shared and practiced with consistency over time. Also, bear in mind that is possible to spread and sustain these traits by building a courageous culture that is less risk-averse and more open to innovation. All this combined will probably foster the necessary organizational resilience to support you and your business in change moments.
Upside Down Thinking – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;
Patricia Cotton is a Corporate Marketing & Business Transformation Consultant with fifteen years of experience in Strategic Marketing, Corporate Branding and Change Management, working across Real Estate, Cosmetics and TV. Patricia holds an MBA in Creative Leadership from the Berlin School and Marketing from ESPM, Rio de Janeiro. She also holds a B.A in Communications from PUC-Rio, Brazil, and University of Leeds, England. Visit her web site to learn more about Upside Down Thinking.

Career and Leadership Coaching Presentations: Q&A with Polly Chandler

November 2, 2017 / Adam Tratt / 0 Comments

Polly Chandler is a Tiburon California-based coach and facilitator that specializes in leadership development and career transitions. Before starting Chandler Coaching, she coached and taught students and faculty at Antioch University New England, where she served as Program Director for the MBA in Sustainability and Chair of the Department of Management for 10 years. An early Haiku Deck Pro subscriber and advocate, Polly recently shared her thoughts on coaching presentations, storytelling, and how effective presentations make a difference for her practice and her clients.

What makes your approach to leadership and career coaching unique?

My approach is strengths focused, I support people in understanding their strengths so they can build from where their talents, values, interests, and even passions intersect. I work with people to see that most of their challenges come from misapplication of their strengths, 70% of weaknesses are just an over or underuse of a top strength. This is a powerful construct for people to use. I focus on high energy and high performance. I also do team trainings and integrate experiential learning and outdoors as much as possible

How do you use Haiku Deck in your practice?

I use Haiku Deck to illustrate key concepts in a strengths based approach. I have a series of decks that I develop based on a client’s goals. For example, when I was working with First Five, I selected photos to tell the story of strengths through images about children. When I work with healthcare, I select photos to tell their story. Haiku Deck allows me to design customized decks that unfold as stories.

(Here’s an example of a Haiku Deck Polly used to help a group start thinking about how we would be working together)

Imagine it’s January 2017 – Created with Haiku Deck, presentation software that inspires;

How has Haiku Deck made a difference for you and/or your clients?

It’s easy to keep my role as a facilitator, not a lecturer. I use the slides to open dialogue and conversation. I believe that best learning happens with content and discussion, not just content. I design decks so people learn to think about presentations as a story and conversation, not just a list of facts.

Before becoming a full-time coach, you were Chair of the Department of Management at Antioch University. How has your role as a teacher and department leader impacted your approach to coaching?

One of the reasons I left Academia, was because I found my greatest energy and performance came when I was coaching students and faculty. I had talents and strengths in this role and I loved it. I decided to spend more of my time doing what I loved most. This is a great story to share with clients as I encourage them to leverage their strengths to do more of what they love. My goal was to have more “best days at work”. I also was determined to find a way to work outdoors as much as possible. I do most of my coaching outdoors. I do not have an office. I prefer to meet clients in person outdoors. If it is phone call coaching, I work from outdoors in a park or other beautiful setting. Today, I sat on a bench overlooking San Francisco Bay. If there are children playing, birds chirping, or other outdoor sounds, I just explain that I work where it gives me energy. I try to encourage others to do the same.

When you coach leaders, what advice do you give to help them craft and deliver more effective storytelling to their teams, partners, and clients?

Be a guide and storyteller. People get overwhelmed by facts. Design and deliver slides that weave together a story of facts, impressions, learnings, and insights. Be a guide on the side. Form a relationship with the audience through images that speak a common language. Build a connection with the audience by building on shared knowledge. Be a slide guide and customize all your presentations to meet the needs of your audience. Never give the same talk twice. Don’t give canned talks. They sound tired. Come up with new ways of delivering every presentation to meet the needs, strengths and passions of your audience.

You mentioned that you’ve been an advocate for Haiku Deck. How do you describe Haiku Deck to others?

I ask people to tell me…What was your favorite children’s book? (Or if they are a parent, what is your favorite book to read to your child). I then ask, why was it your favorite book. Nine times out of ten the response is, the illustrations were so wonderful and there just was not a lot of need for words. To me, that is Haiku Deck. Finding excellent images to tell the story with as few words as possible. I find I love building the decks now that I am out of the PowerPoint platform. PowerPoint did not have the same creative potential for me, unless I decided to spend a lot of time learning. Haiku Deck was easy, fast and I have had great success with audiences.

To learn more about Polly and her coaching practice, visit www.pollychandlercoaching.com.

Are you a coach using Haiku Deck to deliver impact with your clients? We’d love to hear from you! Drop us a line at team@haikudeck.com.

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