Fearless Presentations

We have a great TechFind that is an Online Speech Creator. It is very helpful if you are trying to design a speech or presentation. On this episode, we step away from the how to present effectively and focus more on the why. Presentation training and communication skills are essential in today's business world. This episode explains why that is.

A couple of months ago, my father passed away. Even though I'm the middle child, I'm the only sibling who is a professional speaker. So, my brother and sister turned to me to deliver the eulogy. Being a professional speaker, you'd think it would be very easy to design a 10 minute speech about my dad. However, I have to confess that, not only was the speech fairly difficult to create, but I was also really nervous when I stood up to speak. So, I thought it would be a great idea to let you know what I did. That way, you may be able to have fewer challenges if you are ever in a similar situation.

Quite often, when we are designing speeches and presentations for a professional audience, we discount the value of entertainment and humor. In reality, though, a good presentation is both informative and entertaining. Your speech has to be both. If you aren’t providing the audience with information that they didn’t already know, then you are wasting their time. If you aren’t providing some type of entertainment along the way, though, you will likely bore your audience so much that they will lose interest. So adding an appropriate amount of humor to your speech is very valuable to keep your audience engaged throughout your presentation.

How do we get the most bang for our training dollar? The answer is to design better and more efficient training sessions that maximize the application of the training content in the real-world.

Face it, most people hate meetings. Most people don't want to sit through boring presentations either. So, if you want to get your audience to want to listen to your presentation, you have to make it "Audience Focused". Focus on what the audience wants to hear, not what you want to tell them.

If you have to give technical presentations in your career, one of the most difficult challenges is to deliver the technical presentation to a non-technical audience. Doug Staneart offers a few tips that will help. These presentation skills also help non-technical people deliver better technical presentations as well.

In past episodes, we've talked about how to better design presentations, and how if you design your presentations a little differently, you can reduce public speaking fear. However, what do you do if someone just gives you a slide deck and says, "Okay, go deliver this." This episode gives you a few tips that can help you deliver a more "canned" presentation or a presentation that someone else designs for you.

In the last podcast, we spoke about venues where you can practice your public speaking skill. In this episode, Doug Staneart shows us a few ways to use your public speaking confidence to market yourself or to market your products or services to the public. Some of these venues are ones where you can market yourself or your company, so that you can be perceived as an expert in your industry. Other venues are ones where groups will actually pay you to speak to them.

One of the most common questions that participants in our 2-day presentation class ask us after completing the class is, “Now that I feel more confident, where do I go to practice to continue to get better as a speaker?” In this session, Doug shares a few ways to find speaking venues who are always looking for good speakers, and how to build a solid reputation as a good speaker so your reputation grows.

Impromptu speaking or speaking off the cuff is one of the most challenging types of presentations for most speakers. This episode give a number of tips that you can use when speaking on an impromptu basis that will help you clarify your thoughts and persuade your audience.

In this episode, Doug Staneart shares a few public speaking secrets that he uses as a presentation coach to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a presenter so that he/she can improve as a public speaker. Doug also uncovers a few hidden secrets about personality temperaments as well.

Podcast interview with Susan Schoenfeld who explains a few of her public speaking secrets for attorneys and other professional business people (accountants, engineers, doctors, architects, etc.)

Podcast interview with Tom Antion where he talks about how design professional keynote speeches, how to create an additional revnue stream from speaking to groups, and how to use public speaking as a platform to increase your personal brand.

In this podcast, we add a little more detail about how to make your presentation more persuasive. Although we focus a lot on how to design sales presentations, this process works well whether you are selling a product or service, or if you are an executive trying to sell an idea.

We back up a little in this podcast to explain exactly where public speaking fear comes from and how to eliminate that stage fright in just three simple steps. Doug Staneart, CEO of Fearless Presentations ® gives away a few public speaking secrets that have helped the 2-day Fearless Presentations ® classes have such a success helping people over the last two decades.