1. Call the venue to specify how you’d like the room set up well before the event, confirm in writing after the discussion and expect that it won’t be done when you get there. 2. Arrange to show up early on the day to check out the room set-up and that all of the equipment…
Paul had just finished his presentation and the room was dead. His boss, a notorious bully, said, when asked, if he had any questions, “Yes, I’ve got a question for you. What was the last half hour about?” Paul said “Er, what do you mean? I’ve just told you haven’t I?” Boss said, “No, you…
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…
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…
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…
I’ve spent 15 years or so travelling the world and talking to thousands of people in the course of my work and I’ve learned some interesting and painful lessons about English as the lingua franca of international business. It’s also a real niche area of work for me now as there are hundreds of companies…
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…
Whenever you get up to speak you will make an impression on every member of your audience, you can’t not make an impression, even though you may not mean to. You’ll always leave some trace or memory of you with them, because while you think your presentation is about the content, the audience thinks that…