Know Your Audience: What You Don’t Know May Hurt You

When you think of the perfect speech in your mind, what do you see? Do you see yourself up on a stage giving a speech, reaching the end, and then having everyone stand up and applaud until their hands grow tired? Nice picture. However, all too often that doesn’t happen. There are lots of reasons … Read more

Dennis Quaid Gives A Keynote Speech – Real Life Speeches

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

Real Life Speeches: George Halvorson, CEO Of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.

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

D.O.A.: Why Presenters Hate Bad Introductions

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

The Presenter Super Memory System – The Details

I recently had an opportunity to deliver a 45-minute keynote as part of a training session kick-off for a group of IT Mangers. I decided that in order to boost my creditability with this hard-nosed group, I needed to stay in eye contact with them and not be looking at my notes. This meant memorization. … Read more

The Presenter Super Memory System – An Overview

Congratulations – you’ve been invited to speak for 30 minutes. Remember – don’t use any notes! If you got this offer could you do it? As though standing in front of a group of people was not scary enough,  now you have to find a way to shove 30 minutes (that’s 1,800 seconds) worth of … Read more

How To Write The Perfect Speech

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

Just How Does One Create A Keynote Presentation?

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

Paid Presentations: How To Become A Professional Speaker

Not everyone dreams of becoming a paid presenter; however, as we labor over a speech we have all had that thought that started something like “I am NOT being paid enough for all that I do”. Considering how many people are terrified of public speaking, if you can do it and do it well, why … Read more