Everyone knows that productive brainstorming sessions are imperative to creating stellar presentations. Everyone also knows that the practice of brainstorming has become a little weary. Our brains are over-stimulated and tired. Even after cups and cups of coffee, sometimes we just can’t WAKE UP! Jumping into a brainstorming session these days seems a lot like jumping into an ice cold swimming pool in early Spring. With that in mind, below are five warm-up exercises that will help ease your team into the brainstorming pool.

Opposite Day
To help jump-start your team’s brains, try an exercise in words. Choose five random words and ask your team to come up with their opposites. Bright; Dark. Once they have completed that task, ask them to go one step further and come up with three more words that could be considered opposites of the originals. Bright: Night, Dull, Lackluster. Hopefully, your team will come up with less lackluster words. Regardless, you’ll have them thinking about something other than the memos they need to get out by 5:00.

Improvisational Tools
Set up a brief improv performance to encourage your team to put their tin foil thinking caps on. Bring a bunch of ordinary objects to the office and ask people to demonstrate alternative uses for them. You could find out that a grocery bag could double as a papoose or that your sunglasses are really some super x-ray vision goggles meant for use on Neptune. Once your team starts thinking about how to present their ideas, they’ll already be thinking in an inventive way.

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After you sweat every detail of every slide, once you’ve double-checked to make sure you have those extra batteries, as soon as you are certain that your projector and your presentation are going to get along just fine, you’re ready to give your knockout presentation, right?

Not quite.

You may not be a marathon runner, a power lifter or a kick boxing champion, but warming up can be just as important for a presenter as it is for a champion athlete. Although stretching – or even mild calisthenics – can be a good idea before taking the stage, another kind of warming-up is vital.

You need to give your throat a work out!

Just like an opera singer about to solo at The Met, you need to prepare your voice before your big moment. It may seem like a bit of a stretch to compare your presentation to singing La Boheme, but there are a lot of similarities. Just like an Italian diva, you are about to project you voice, in a dynamic manner, for an extended period of time, in an effort to move your audience in a persuasive manner. See! You have a lot in common. It’s actually OK to feel like a rock star when you deliver a great presentation. You sort of are one.

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Anyone interested in taking their presenting skills to the next level could do worse than emulating the style of Steve Jobs. Not only has this guy built an empire and turned the whole country on to the importance of cool design, he’s a knockout speaker in front of his standing-room-only crowds.

Some guys have it all.

If you’ve never had the chance to see the master in action, you might be pleased to know that Jobs isn’t really doing anything special. But he is doing everything that makes a presentation work. And he’s doing it very, very well.

Create Immediate Rapport
Jobs routinely makes his entrance unannounced, with no music or fanfare. He also holds off on the presentation and the visuals in order to address the audience directly. He’s humble, he’s welcoming, and he puts the emphasis on the people in the seats, reassuring them that they are the reason he is excited about all the new developments he’s about to show them.

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As we all know, one of the biggest, most influential segments of our population is made up of the Baby Boomers: the kids that were born in the late 40’s and early 50’s just after the end of World War II.

These are the folks that brought you rock ‘n roll, The ’60’s, Women’s Liberation, Sesame Street, JFK, Nixon, the Vietnam War, and any number of other cultural touchstones that changed our culture – and our country – drastically and forever.

Despite their radical beginnings, many of the Boomers eventually transformed from Hippies to Yuppies, ushering in an age of unfettered capitalism and glamorized money-culture in the 1980’s. This means that some of those Boomers are probably still the big-fish movers and shakers in your industry, and knowing how to speak their language may make all the difference when it comes to your next PowerPoint presentation.

Know Your Knowledge
The Boomers grew up watching the 6 o’clock news in an era when reporters were actual journalists – not just models with teleprompters. Boomers like to sit down on Sunday nights and watch 60 Minutes – for an entire hour! The Boomers were the last generation in America that boasted a high number of book readers. These folks want to know things and they want to know them deeply and fully. Unlike Generations X, they didn’t grow up on a steady diet of manic, MTV-style, jump-cut edits. They have long attention spans – if you can keep ‘em interested.

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