In this post by Seth Godin, he list 45 ways that you can take charge of whatever professional situation you may be in and make a change. I like #16 — "Learn to be a killer presenter." Everyone can get better and it can indeed make a big difference in your career. You can learn a lot on your own, but workshops are still relevant and important learning environments for adult learners. Seminars and workshops are great, but given the current economic situation, it's difficult for many people to attend full-day workshops, especially when participation involves transportation and hotel costs, etc. Duarte Design, which has run many successful workshops at their head office in Silicon Valley since last year, has an answer for the recession blues: The Webinar. Last week Paula Tesch announced that Duarte will be offering a series of six webinars beginning on May 27 and continuing once a week until July 1. You can sign up for a single webinar or just a few, or sign up for all six and get a good discount. Even if you can't catch the webinar live you can watch it anytime after the event if you registered.

Each Slide:ology Webinar is 45 minutes in length and starts at 10:00am on the West Coast of the United States. Sign up here for the webinars on Duarte's website.

Slide:ology Webinars
May 27    Introduction to the Principles of Slide:ology
June 3     Connecting with Your Audience
June 10   Story and Structure
June 17   Design Thinking
June 24   Visual Storytelling and Design Part I
July 1      Visual Storytelling and Design Part II

Live in-person workshops
Duarte just finished up some full-day workshops. Their next workshops held in their offices in Silicon Valley will be from September. Go here to check out the details of their workshops. I do not usually do many public workshops — though I'll be in Wellington, NZ in July for some public seminars — so Duarte's workshops and webinars are something I am pointing everyone I know to checkout. I think the webinar is a pretty good deal. Also, if you know anyone who could benefit from reading Presentation Zen but they are too busy to go through the book, point them to this 50-min online video of the Presentation Zen Approach available on the PeachPit website. It will be available as a DVD in June as well. It's about 20-26 bucks — that's not cheap, but it's cheaper than bringing me from Japan to your living room (though I'd come for free if there were chocolate chip cookies involved).

Related
• Also checkout Decker Communications for great live training. Wonderful people!
• The slide:ology book on Amazon.