It will help you to get the most out of this blog, if you have a clear picture in your mind of the kind of presenter you are now vs the Fit, Focus & Flair model we use in our work with our world-class clients. If you’re committed to improving your presentation skills, I’d like…
Yes you’ll most often be presenting to a group of people, but remember that that group is composed of individuals with their own particular needs, wants and preferences. Making something relevant to one person is no more complex than for businesses or departments in an organisation. It just takes a bit of care….
I was talking with a friend last night and he’s a no-nonsense sort of man, the Chief Operating Officer of a global consultancy. He’s had to learn the skills of business development and selling on top of his ‘day job’ and he’s done a pretty good job of it too. Here’s what Phil said- “For…
Steve was a guy I worked with many years ago and he was a great role-model as a presenter. He showed me that it’s OK to look to amuse your audience as long as there’s a serious point lurking in the background and he taught me the value of a story to make a powerful…
I love ‘Masterchef’, a televised cooking competition in the UK, where would be Michelin starred chefs are brought in, placed under lights and lightly grilled until they explode. It’s great telly and I’ve learned a whole new language too. I thought reductionism was what Marxists did in argument. But no, in cooking, as I’m sure you…
When you’re presenting a subject to an audience, you’re looking for ‘relevance’, to make the thing you’re talking about fit a need that they have. Of course you are or what’s the point in speaking? So you could say that the real skill of a presenter, whatever the subject, is the ability to make it…
Great public speakers are really good at sounding like they mean what they say. They practise it, they check for it and they rehearse it because it’s so important. That doesn’t make them liars, unless they’re pretending, it makes them professionals. How many speakers have you seen who seem like they don’t really believe what…
Flair is, to many people, an indefinite thing. Some people have it and some people don’t. It’s often counted as innate, something that one person is born with and others are not. I don’t see it that way. If we consider what flair is, it could be defined as “having the ability to do a thing that…
Retention: In a vast scientific study into memory and retention in education, (Gillian Cohen, Martin Conway and Nicola Stanhop, March 1992) showed that after a lecture or presentation: Rapid forgetting occurs in the first two years after learning. Thereafter memory stabilized and remained at above chance levels for the remainder of the period. Knowledge, still…