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…
I started flicking through the book and read a few parts of it and I was overtaken by an awful sense of dread. A light went out forever for me, and it’s all Cliff’s fault. Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is a REALLY GOOD BOOK. In my mind, it was me who was going to write…
If you buy into the fact that charisma is a skill that can be learned just as simply as walking, juggling and whistling, then how do we get good at actually doing it- Try 1- Connecting with your own emotional state– ie recognising how you feel about you, your subject and the place you’re in…
I once saw charisma defined as- “the ability to transfer an emotion that the speaker has to his/her audience.” I thought it was a pretty good definition because it offers the chance that maybe, just maybe charisma is a skill that can be learned and used as a conscious strategy for all people seeking to…
I’m often asked how someone as clumsy as me can be a professional speaker, and it’s a good question that I think I can answer with a bit of help from Geoffrey. Geoff was a client of mine a few years ago. He was a gentle ,kind, thoughtful man with no visible ego, and he’d…
Maybe I’m in a bad mood today, but there’s a bit of a rant. I got the idea the first five minutes of a speech by a management consultant in 2008 so don’t think I’ve made it up. It was a quite brilliant mix of cliché, banality and diffidence that delivered a well deserved 30…
You’re an experienced presenter in your own language, you have a working vocabulary of over 20,000 words, you can improvise, answer questions, use metaphor, jokes and the vernacular, what do you do when you’re faced with an audience of native English speakers? That little voice in your head can start you thinking all of those…