Presentation Skills

Chief Brody’s hands may have started to sweat and shake as he instinctively backs up away from the mortal threat, his mouth goes dry, his neck flushes and his voice wavers. He’s seen the shark, and he thinks that he and Quint and Hooper need a bigger boat to catch the shark.  The Chief’s autonomic […]

Originally published with Forbes Coaches Council, February 2019. Death by PowerPoint. Or as Dilbert put it: “PowerPoint poisoning.” It’s software that is so despised that it has been banished by Amazon and banned from military strategy meetings. It’s easy to hate on PowerPoint. After all, it’s often the single common denominator between all the boring presentations and too-long meetings we […]

Have you ever sat through a meeting, or a conference call, or a presentation, and thought to yourself, “Oh my god… I wish this person would get to the point…“? Yeah. Me too. Many, many times. We all know what it feels like to have our time wasted by someone who just won’t, or can’t, get to the […]

Communication clarity is really hard in the 21st century… a mantra I have recited over and over in this space. It’s hard because of the noise, the competition for mind share, and shrinking attentions spans. But often the best way to combat difficulty and noise is to focus on the most simple, basic elements of […]

The question I’m asked most often in workshops and coaching sessions is, “I get really nervous when speaking; can you help me eliminate my anxiety?” And my answer is that having at least some anxiety is actually a good sign. It means that, at that moment, you’re engaged. You are plugged into your audience and […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council, February 2019 Think about the best leader you’ve ever seen. What made her compelling? Many of us would say, “She just had ‘it.’ Her charisma was off the charts.” It may be hard to believe, but “it” — that combination of confidence, authority and personality that makes an executive engaging and inspiring — isn’t necessarily an […]

The first car stolen or “captured” in the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds” was a 1999 Aston Martin DB7. While Nicholas Cage had an entire minute to capture the car in the movie, in the corporate world, you have just ten seconds to capture your audience’s attention. In my last post, we showed you why capturing attention […]

One of the things I listen closely for in our workshops is a certain kind of vocabulary that we call “weak” or “qualifying” language. And when I hear it, my coaching sensors start ringing loudly. Words or phrases like “sort of,” “kind of,” “pretty much,” or “basically,” can be toxic for the speaker and dramatically […]

“Did the speaker first capture the audience’s attention?” This is perhaps the most critical coaching question we ask in our persuasive communications workshops. What’s the big deal? Well, it’s a noisy, “this one goes to eleven” world out there, and it’s only getting noisier. How are you going to be heard in that world? If you can’t capture […]

Do you find it easy to persuade people? That’s a broad question, with an answer that is likely to be some version of, “Sometimes.” Whether someone is easily persuaded depends on a lot. The size of the ask, the environment and situation you’re in, the kind of person you’re trying to persuade, and other variables […]