I paused to speak with a friend this week, a legend in radio, who shared with me what Graham Kennedy believed was his secret to success in connecting with an audience. The pause. Now, some of you will be asking; ‘Who the hell is Graham Kennedy? He was a pioneer – an award-winning entertainer, movie…
Business Insider interviewed me last week on the best way to avoid ‘death by PowerPoint’ and improve public speaking and presentation skills. I talked about the simplest and most powerful technique – the ‘B’ key. Otherwise known as blanking the screen during a slide show. They published the piece on Friday as ’10 Reasons You’ll…
Poise is a lovely word. It implies ‘calm’, ‘balance’ and ‘assuredness’ and it underpins powerful delivery skills. Most speakers don’t have poise because they don’t fully understand the (normal) anxiety that comes with public speaking. The ‘Stress Response’ to danger/uncertainty/fear actually causes us to shrink, tighten and contract our muscles. When you understand what’s happening to you – and when…
Parkinsons’s Law controls how you write a speech. I know it controls how I write a speech. When I ignore it’s power, productivity bleeds out of me, soaking the floor under my desk. “Work expands to fill the time allotted to it.” Parkinson’s Law That’s Parkinson’s Law. So, if you have an hour to do something,…
In a previous article, I talked about a condition known as over-efforting, where we use far more energy than is required for a particular activity. This is quite common in public speaking, as people think they need to perform and exaggerate their voice, gestures and body language to have greater impact on the audience. And…
If we fail to overcome the inherent communication barriers, our experience and intelligence are wasted. Genius has no value if it can’t be communicated clearly. Objective thinking is needed to vanquish these communication barriers. Understanding them is the first step. Communication barrier 1: All words are vague Vague is everywhere. Without an agreed context for…
The universe has no end but you need to end a speech well if you want people to remember your message. 6 steps to capture your audience and end a speech or presentation.
The Vivid Speech Outline template will help you prepare a speech or presentation in half the time. You can download this tool as an editable Speech Outline template PDF. The Speech Outline process walks you through… The Speech Outline process helps you to craft a compelling message your audience will remember, and structure your ideas into chunks – so your…
Last week a client aggressively urged me to watch ‘the best leadership speech ever’. He’s a pretty good leader himself, with a world class creative team of over 100 people. I watched it this weekend and it’s pretty good. The video is long – 50 minutes – but here’s what you get: A unique piece of public…
How does Steve Jobs plan a speech? The structure of Steve Jobs speeches varied depending on his goals for the communication event. But he always had 2 things; a clear take-home message and an engaging structure. For example, this speech tells an amazing story and shares unique life lessons, but it’s also a wonderful example of…