Fearless Presentations

We just finished a five-part series about How to Start a Public Speaking Career. If you haven't had a chance to read (or listen to) that series, it will help you understand the concepts that we talk about here, much more clearly. In this session, we are going to cover how to promote yourself as a professional speaker. In the earlier sessions, we talked about how to get experience speaking wit...

This is part five of a five-part series about how to start a public speaking career. In the past posts, we focused on how to use public speaking within your current career, both as an income stream and as marketing. We also covered a session on how to become a professional speaker for an established speaking company. In this session, we will cover a few step-by-step items that will help you create...

We are continuing our series on How to Start a Public Speaking Career, and in this session, we will show a shortcut by working for an organization that is already established. Just as a recap of what I discussed in the first post, the advantages of this route is that the company the speaker is representing has already done the hard work. They have already created the content, vetted the content, a...

This is part three of our sessions on How to Start a Public Speaking Career. In the last session, we talked about the easiest way to begin as a professional speaker — by Speaking within Your Current Industry. In this session, we are going to show you a few simple ways to use public speaking to promote or market your product or service. In fact, using a speech to promote a product or service is a f...

One of the easiest ways to become a professional public speaker is by speaking to groups within your current industry. In this article, we will show you a number of ways to get paid as a professional speaker without having to change careers. This article is a continuation of our previous article, How to Start a Public Speaking Career . Although this is just one of the three routes that we will cov...

Being a professional speaker is a very lucrative and rewarding profession. But, if you have never actually made money from speaking before, you may be looking for how to start a public speaking career. Just as an FYI, the way that I did it is not the ideal way to become a professional speaker. In fact, when I give advice to new speakers, I tell them to do the opposite of what I did. However, over...

One of the more challenging parts of any presentation is the very first part. If you are wondering how to introduce yourself before starting your presentation, you are in good company. For most of us, once we get the first few sentences out, our nervousness will diminish pretty significantly. So, this initial self-introduction is really important. If we struggle here, our nervousness will increase...

Want to know what not to do during a presentation ? (I know it isn't grammatically correct, but that is what people are typing into search engines.) Well, here are 10 of the biggest public speaking mistakes that presenters make. This is a list of what we call the 10 deadly sins that turn off audiences. Use it as a checklist for yourself. If you find that you sometimes do one or two of these i...

I was doing article research this week, and I came across a statement by a world-renowned public speaking coach that made me stop dead in my tracks. This coach was answering the question, "If I’ve only got five minutes for a speech, how do I get my key points across in an interesting way?" The speaker answered by saying, "Five minutes is too short a time to persuade an audience of a...

I spent years (the better part of a decade) studying everything I could about presentation skills and how to deliver powerful speeches. Years later, I became a presentation coach. I had been coaching speakers for a few years before I got an interesting call from a prospective client. “We have a group of five presenters who are competing for a $300 million project. This contract is vital to the gro...

Okay, so you may not want to be a motivational speaker (and live in a van down by the river). However, all of us, at one time or another, will want to be a more inspirational speaker. Sometimes, we just want to motivate our team. In other situations, we may be asked to speak at an annual meeting and want the audience to see us as being an inspirational leader. Whatever the case, there are times wh...

Filler words are a natural part of everyday conversations, and in fact, if they aren’t there, you’ll actually sound strange (or even fake) to the audience, so you don’t want to eliminate the filler words altogether. However, that doesn’t mean they have to be a major part of your speeches and presentations either. Overuse of the filler words has the potential to detract from your message, so as you...

I received a comment from a website visitor last week thanking me for the blog and asking if I would cover tips for ESL presenters (English as a Second Language). I was actually shocked to realize that in the last four years, we haven't written anything about this topic. We actually have a step-by-step way to help ESL presenters deliver confident presentations in English. English as a Second...

Have you ever heard a great speaker end an amazing talk with a lousy “Thank you,” or worse, “That’s all folks, any questions?” Such endings are anti-climactic. You went through all that effort to deliver a good presentation and that’s how you end it? That is a real shame when it happens. To your audience, it’s like a great fairy-tale with a sad ending. A dud, a runner who had cramps a couple of st...

Quite often, when we are nervous speaking in front of a group, we do innocent-sounding things to help us be less nervous. However, many of the things that people do to reduce public speaking fear actually CAUSE PUBLIC SPEAKING FEAR. Below are seven of the biggest things that people do to reduce stage fright that is actually more likely to make you nervous. If you feel nervous when you deliver pres...

This part five of a five-part series on the four main presentation styles. Last week, we covered the Authoritative Presentation Style which has the opposite strengths and weaknesses of this style. In the prior two weeks, we covered the Energetic Presentation Styleand the Analytical Presentation Style (Technical Presentations). This week, we will cover the strengths and weaknesses of the Empathetic...

A few weeks back, I gave an overview of the four main presentation styles. Last week, we covered the Energetic Presentation Style. The week before, we covered the Analytical Presentation Style (Technical Presentations). You’ll remember from the last two sessions that the Analytical Presenter and Energetic Presenter are polar opposites in the way that they like to present. The Energetic has high en...

A couple of weeks ago, I gave an overview of the four main presentation styles. Last week, we covered the Analytical Presentation Style (Technical Presentations). This week, we will cover the strengths and weaknesses of the Energetic Presentation Style. This is the style of presenter that is more “direct” and “emotional”. Just as a review, by direct, we mean that this style of presenter will often...

Last week, I gave an overview of the four main presentation styles. This week, we will cover the strengths and weaknesses of the Analytical Presentation Style. This is the style of presenter that is more “indirect” and “logical”. Just as a review, by indirect, we mean that this style of presenter will often be more detailed and thorough. By logical, we mean that this style will focus more on facts...

Ask most presentation skill experts what the ideal presentation style is, and you will likely get a variety of answers. Am I supposed to start with a story? Am I supposed to tell jokes? Are visual aids more critical to performance or is the content itself more important? Do I have to warm the audience up, or should I just get right to the point? The answers to these and other presentation techniqu...

I wrote an article back in 2013 called Increase Security and Income with Presentation Skills Training. I wrote it to tout the value of investing in yourself. For the last couple of decades, we have seen thousands of people increase their income and job security by investing in professional development classes. So, when I originally wrote the article, I researched how much a Master's degree co...

Many of you know my background. I didn't set out to be a presentation skills coach. I was just a guy who had a challenge with public speaking. I studied and practiced for years, and I figured out a few secrets that make presenting much easier. I spent the first 10 years of my career learning everything I could about public speaking. I spent the next five years training thousands of people in...

Many of you know my background. I didn’t set out to be a presentation skills coach. I was just a guy who had a challenge with public speaking. I studied and practiced for years, and I figured out a few secrets that make presenting much easier. I spent the first 10 years of my career learning everything I could about public speaking. I spent the next five years training thousands of people in the s...

This part three of a three-part series on webinars. In this episode, I’ll show you a few of the technical secrets about how I deliver the actual webinars. I’m going to cover which of the paid-for webinar services that I recommend, how to deliver webinars for free, and which platforms are trending right now. If you missed either of the first two sessions, you can access them by clicking these links...

Continuing in our three-part webinar series, in this episode, we cover how to create webinar content to help you maximize audience retention. In the last episode, we covered 7 Important Things that You Should Know about Webinars before you start. Next week, we’ll cover a few of the technical aspects of how to deliver webinars. These are some of the most useful ways that I have found to create webi...