This one’s a re-post: enjoy! I can’t help with fear of death, or apocalypse, or zombies. But the fear many of us experience when we have a high-stakes presentation or meeting coming up? I have a suggestion. Most of us can describe an interpersonal situation we don’t want to be in. The three situations we … Read more
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There’s a difference. You can prepare yourself. You might memorize your speech, or choose your outfit. You could review your notes just before you go on. But preparing for your audience is different. It requires thinking about the entire experience from their viewpoint. What do they want to hear? How do they hope to feel … Read more
Sometimes it feels like there’s a school of thought in public speaking training that “more is more.” Do more with your voice, more with your gestures, more with your movement. If some is good, more must be better! My view on this is that it gets confusing for the audience when we load up every … Read more
Someday you might do a talk where you use notes, or you have a teleprompter. If you do, please think about this: Our instinct is to look at the next thing we have to say as we’re coming to the end of the current thing we’re saying. We sort of capture the rest of the … Read more
This is one of the most important things to know when you are preparing a speech or a presentation. Audiences are selfish. Many people fear that the audience is judging them—that is usually misplaced. Most audiences are willing, and even excited, to see what you have to offer. But we’re not there for you. We … Read more
A structured presentation lets the audience know where they are in the experience, and what to expect. We call this “signposting.” An obvious example of signposting is when we say something like, “I’m going to explore three points. Let’s start with this one.” The speaker is saying to the audience, literally, “we’re beginning here with … Read more
Speakers and presenters sometimes get feedback from an audience that they seemed “rehearsed.” If you said this to an orchestra or a corps of dancers, it would be a compliment—of course they rehearsed. It would be a very weird experience to watch musicians or dancers who were unrehearsed. But when people say it to speakers, … Read more
This post originally came out in August of 2020. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the concept of “good enough,” and you’ll see more about that in this space soon. (Thanks, KH!) We can’t be great at everything. It is reasonable, and smart, to decide to focus our skill and resources on getting really … Read more
“The last thing in the world that I want when I’m onstage is to be boring.” A client said this to me recently during a conversation we were having about the challenge she’s facing as she tries to shift the presentation culture of her nonprofit. “When we talk about this, they say all the right … Read more
I got to tour Emily Dickinson’s house recently. It’s a museum now, in Amherst, Massachusetts. Our tour guide had worked at the museum for seven years, and let me tell you, she LOVES what she does. I had the idea for this blog post about 20 minutes into the tour, when we were in the … Read more
