Public Speaking & Presentation Skills Training

Our presentation training courses are created to meet your exact needs and cover every aspect of presentations and public speaking from compelling content to dynamic delivery.

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking,” says comedian Jerry Seinfeld.  “Number two is death…this means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” We’d add that listening to a really boring presentation delivered in an uninspiring way might feel like death sometimes.  But it doesn’t have to be like that.

We come to clients’ offices around the world and we also use a variety of high quality training venues.  We’ll also accompany senior speakers to events to support them with last minute tweaks to the presentation and confidence inspiring rehearsals.

We’ll start by looking at your current abilities.  Because our courses are practical and experiential, we often ask participants to prepare beforehand a presentation on a non-work subject.  Not only does this warm them up but it allows us to explore with the group what makes a good presentation, before we look at messages relating to your work.

What do you want to say?

We’ll then work with our presentations courses participants to really hone down their messages.  What exactly are you trying to say? Is it really appropriate for your audience? What’s your aim with this presentation – what do you want your audience to think, to feel and, most importantly, to do?  So many people we work with, even senior business leaders, struggle here.

Structure

You’ve got so much to say but where do you start?  Which idea goes where and what follows on from what?  In our presentation courses we’ll show you how to develop a structure for your presentations that will help them to flow and enable audiences to follow them easily.  We’ll show you how to create an attention grabbing intro through to a conclusion that has impact and will inspire and motivate your audiences to feel and to act in the way that you want them to.

And there are other things that we’ll talk about.  Here’s a thought – why is it that you’ll binge on a box set or watch a film for a couple of hours or find yourself captivated by an evening at the theatre and yet, sitting through a 30 to 40-minute presentation is, well, agony?  Our speech writer will help you to import some of the elements of compelling drama into your presentation so that your audience are far more likely to want to pay attention when you speak.

The language lab

Clichés and corporate bull – we’ve all been exposed to it far too often.  During our presentation training courses our speech writer helps participants to find new and imaginative ways of expressing your ideas.  Your language is intensely personal – it says as much about you as your clothes and manner. We can teach you how to use the rhetorical devices that make the greatest speakers stand out and the little psychological tricks that marketers use for persuasion.

Stories

The best communicators tell stories.  And so does everyone else – when they’re not doing a presentation.  It’s what we human beings do all the time in our everyday lives – but somehow people often forget to do so when they’re delivering presentations.  Tell someone some facts and two parts of the brain are activated – Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, the bits that deal with language processing. However, tell someone a story and up to seven of their brains’ various regions will fire up.  Depending on the content of that story these areas might include the primary visual cortex, the auditory cortex and the motor cortex among others. The more areas of the brain that are fired up the more engaging and memorable your message will be.  We’ll help you to identify and tell great stories.

Delivery

Once you’re completely happy with what you’re going to say we’ll equip you with the skills you need to say it.  Our voice and body language coach will show you how to “own the space” so that you have presence and gravitas. We’ll help you to think about how you hold yourself in front of your audience in order to enhance your message and the mood that you’re looking to create.  Our experts will teach you the voice skills used by actors so that you sound confident and authoritative with the kind of variety that keeps people wanting to hear more.

Most of all, we’ll give tools and techniques that you need to manage nerves and to turn that inevitable adrenalin rush from a negative, confidence sapping disadvantage into a source of energy that will drive your presentation and boost your performance.