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…
1. Get people to take themselves and their presentations more seriously · Get people to do fewer but better presentations · Get people to prepare as if their reputations depended on it 2. Show how you can gain a real competitive edge in business by simply being a bit better than the kind of presenter…
You’ve probably sat through hundreds of them in your time. Hours of PowerPoint type talking, gigabytes of bullet-pointed slides and a few charts that carefully combine the unintelligible and incoherent. If you’ve worked in corporate life over the past few years, you’ll have seen it all. Dull content gingered up by the occasional use of,…