The Premier Blog For Quickly Improving Your Public Speaking, Presentation & Communication Skills
Bored audiences will get up and walk out of your speeches. How would you keep the attention of 400+ engineers who were attending an industry dinner event that they didn’t really want to be at on a weekday evening? I recently had the opportunity to be the master of ceremonies at such an event – … Read more
Man, as though giving a speech wasn’t hard enough already, then you go ahead and throw that gender thing in there and all of a sudden it gets that much tougher! It can be a challenge when you are asked to talk to an audience made up of members of the opposite gender. How can … Read more
If you really want to connect with your audience and make an impact in their lives, then you’re going to have to discover out how to speak with power. The trick is that power is a tricky thing – you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it, you’ve got to find it and hold on … Read more
How does that children’s rhyme go? “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Bull! If there is one thing that presenters dread more than forgetting their lines, it’s having someone add to their speech without an invitation. Unlike President Obama we don’t have a flock of Secret Service agents … Read more
When we are given an opportunity to address a group, we spend a great deal of time preparing what we are going to say and how we are going to say it. This is all well and good, but we may be forgetting one critical factor: our audience may not be able to hear us … Read more
I just got back from spending the better part of a week up in Chicago at a big health care conference (HIMSS09). This was an amazing opportunity for me to sit back and watch somewhere in the neighborhood of about 100 different presenters get up and do their very best job at communicating. One of … Read more
Even if you don’t work in the world of high-finance, you surely know who Alan Greenspan is. He was the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. There’s no question that this guy is smart, but can he deliver a good keynote speech? Where It Happened While attending the recent HIMSS health … Read more
We can talk about how to be a better communicator all we want, but in the end it comes down to learning – and we all do this in different ways. One great way to discover what a speaker should (or should not) do is to watch ’em in action. This time around we’re going … Read more
We spend all of this time coming up with our next speech, getting each and every word just right, practicing the speech, the gestures, the pauses, only to get killed before we even open our mouths to speak. How does this crime occur? Simple – whoever is running the show delivers a bad introduction and … Read more
So you’ve been invited to a wedding, a retirement party, or some other celebration in which friends and family are going to gather in order to honor someone. There will probably be some sort of food served, drinks will flow, and then someone will do it – they’ll stand up and give a toast. Oh, … Read more