Comedian Bob Monkhouse used to say presentation skills were all about your ABC and XYZ:

• Always Be Confident
• eXamine Your Zipper

Great advice!

Another example: my wife Emma read lots of baby books when Maia was born. But, when she had Tom nearly four years later, she didn’t re-read one of them – Secrets of the Baby Whisperer – because she remembered it’s advice about making things EASY:

• Eat – when the baby wakes up, give her food.
• Activity – after the food, encourage her to do something.
• Sleep – after the activity, put her to sleep.
• You – when she’s asleep, do something you want to do.

And one more example: when people ask me for an easy way to prepare communication, I tell them to RAMP it up:

• Results – what you want the recipient to do afterwards (your Call To Action at the end).
• AFTERs – why they will be better off AFTER doing it (your engagement piece at the start).
• Mechanism – how you’re going to deliver the communication (email, meeting, presentation).
• Preparation – once you’ve done RAM, only then can you begin to prepare.

Initial letters help people remember lists, especially when the word is short, and relates to your message (like, this is an EASY way to look after your baby).

There are only four steps to creating these lists:

To show what I mean by the last point, here’s how I got to RAMP. I started off with:

• Do – what you want people to do afterwards.
• Benefit – why they’ll benefit from doing it.
• Channel – which communication channel you’ll use.
• Preparation.

Now, no anagram generator is going to do much with the initials DBCP, so I thought of other words I could use instead:

• Do, objective, aim, result
• Benefit, AFTER, aid, help
• Channel, mechanism, process
• Preparation, create, write, narrative

And, from the various combinations of initials, I ended up with RAMP (it was either that or DAMN!)