The Premier Blog For Quickly Improving Your Public Speaking, Presentation & Communication Skills
Love ’em or hate ’em, politicians are by and large fantastic communicators. If you take a look at their technique they may be lacking; however, they sure seem to be very good at getting their point across and wining audiences over. Wouldn’t it be great if we could figure out how they do that? There … Read more
Ok, so it’s time to talk about an ugly little secret that nobody who does presentations really like to talk about. What’s the secret? Most of the time what we tell our audience goes in one ear and out the other. It just doesn’t stick. In fact, if you are presenting training or a new … Read more
So why should anyone take the time to attend your presentation? Unless you are Paris Hilton (hi Paris!) or former President Clinton, you probably don’t have enough star power alone to pull people to your presentation. So what’s a presenter to do? These days with everyone being overworked and so stressed for time, the one … Read more
Some presentations are designed to simply motivate your audience. Some are designed to educate them. It’s this second batch that is tricky to do. It’s probably not that your presentations are lacking in educational material, but rather it’s the way that you are delivering it that really matters. You need to find a way to … Read more
Hopefully by now everyone at least knows that you can seriously damage your audience if you create and use poorly designed PowerPoint slides. The number one offence that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that a slide that has been overloaded with text and numbers (a) doesn’t work, and (b) puts your … Read more
So perhaps you’ve had the opportunity to do some public speaking in the past, shucks maybe this is how you are currently making your living. As with all things that we’ve done a few (or many) times, we have a tendency to start to become just a little bit, how shall I say this, complacent? … Read more
You know, it’s always the little things that set the real pros apart from the rest of us. When it comes to speaking in public, having a really good introduction for yourself can be the key to getting your speech off to a great start. I must confess that I had forgotten just how powerful … Read more
We’ve talked about the fact that group meetings, especially for technical teams, can be a large expense and a big waste of time if not set up and run correctly. These are great opportunities to communicate with the entire team and you really don’t want to blow it. If you get picked to set one … Read more
Every technical organization seems to have a big annual meeting of some sort. The last one of these that I attended was put on by an Executive Director at a firm who liked to do these twice a year. He would fly in all of his direct reports and have them spend 30 minutes each … Read more
So there I was, on one of those conference calls with way too many people and all of a sudden it started to happen. The moderator would ask a question of someone who was on the call and that person would say “Huh? I’m sorry, but could you repeat the question?” This happened over and … Read more