The Premier Blog For Quickly Improving Your Public Speaking, Presentation & Communication Skills
If you are under 18 (or if you were at one time), please cover your ears as you read this posting. Let’s talk about naughty words. What words do I mean you say? I’m talking about all of the common ones like $^#!, *&@^, &%$#, and of course &#&@. Just for good measure we should … Read more
When you speak to an audience, how long do you talk for: 60 minutes, 30 minutes, 10 minutes? Any of these are normal answers. What would you do if you only had two minutes to get your point across? In my neck of the woods, a developer wants to build a gas station at the … Read more
Last week I had the opportunity to give the perfect speech. Now, you might be offended by this statement and are probably wondering just how I could become so full of myself, so perhaps I should explain myself. I had spoken in this venue four times before, I had been invited to speak again because … Read more
Sometimes when we are called on to give a presentation, we sit down to create the presentation only to find that our creative juices have somehow run dry. Oh, oh – this can be a big challenge. What always just seemed to “be there” can go missing just when we really need to draw upon … Read more
As a communicator, you’ve got a lot to say. Getting up in front of an audience is one way to get your message across, but it’s not the only way. We’ve talked a lot about slides, handouts, and summary sheets, but there is one even more powerful tool that you have at your disposal – … Read more
We spend a lot of time talking about how to deliver your message verbally to your audience. However, there’s a lot more to communications than just the spoken word. For your typical do-it-once-and-it’s-over internal business presentation, the actual delivery is enough – do it well and then move on. But what about those presentations that … Read more
So just about everyone out there knows who Jack Welch is – he was the CEO and Chairman of GE who lead them from a market valuation of $14B when he took over to a valuation of over $410B when he stepped aside. What many people may not know is that Jack is a great … Read more
Today’s audiences are a jaded bunch. In fact, a Gallup Poll shows that just 16% of us have a favorable opinion of business executives. With all of the Wall Street failures and auto maker bailouts that are currently going on, this number will probably keep going down. What’s a presenter to do in order to … Read more
Tis the season for college graduations and I was recently asked to deliver a keynote speech as part of an engineering graduation ceremony. The interesting thing about this speaking opportunity was that I was basically starting from ground zero – I didn’t have an engineering keynote speech in my bag of tricks. This meant that … Read more
Oh, this one’s an easy question to answer: your story. I don’t care if you are giving a speech about the company’s 3rd Quarter profits, or telling an audience about the best way to water-proof a roof, if you work a personal story into your speech it will instantly become a memorable speech. Now with … Read more