Presentation Skills

“Practice puts brains in your muscles.” ~Sam Snead Over the last few months, we’ve published a series of blog posts both here and at Forbes.com on Communication Leadership, and building a presentation, speech, or other communication. How we assess our audience, how we build our message, how we document, and how we deliver that message […]

Have you ever listened to someone who speaks really well? Who gets to the point? Who makes the point clearly? Who doesn’t waste your time and makes the message valuable? It is SO nice when that happens, right? It is so refreshing when a presentation or a conference call or an important conversation is efficient […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council at Forbes.com on September 8, 2017. Authenticity and confidence: These are the key elements of a great speech delivery, but developing these elements can feel like bottling lightning. Sometimes we seem to think they are qualities you are either born with or not. People say, “I’m just not a […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council at Forbes.com on August 23, 2017. When I teach a seminar, I often ask about the attendees’ process of putting together a presentation. “How many here start their preparation by opening up a new PowerPoint, or pulling out an old slide deck and repurposing it, or taking a […]

Getting people to listen to you in today’s modern workplace is hard enough. We write about that challenge all the time. But once you get people to hear you, your challenge is not over. Getting people to hear you is a great first step… but only a first step. The next step, which is also […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council at Forbes.com August 8, 2017 What’s the first step in crafting a persuasive presentation? For many people, the agony of the blank page sends them straight to the slide deck. Maybe you have a template to work with, maybe you can pull up some visually interesting data, maybe you […]

Originally published with the Forbes Coaches Council at Forbes.com July 25, 2017 For years, I’ve been intimately involved in the process of training Olympic-level athletes for the U.S. Olympic Sailing Program, both as an athlete myself and eventually as Chairman and Team Leader for all of U.S. Olympic Sailing. At that level of competition, there […]

Speaking well can be pretty hard. Speaking in a way that captures attention, and helps you achieve your business goals can be intimidating for lots of people. It is hard, in many ways. But the keys to success can also be pretty simple, if you think about it the correct way. So let me make […]

Today’s post is an add-on to our post earlier this week about the importance of bringing empathy to your work. Public speaking is a big — in some cases, debilitating — fear in many people. In most cases we see, that fear stems from being called out, challenged… or, just plain wrong… in front of […]

  I was in the midst of a great workshop recently, when I was asked a question I had never heard before. The participants in this workshop were really friendly and jovial, and we had a nice casual banter going all day long. And towards the end of the day, one of them said, “You […]