A lot of presentation skills trainers will tell you that you should be able to control your nerves and ‘overcome’ them. Personally, I think that’s rubbish and what you should do is ‘use’ them. Why? Because the fear (which is what nerves are, really) kicks off your fight-or-flight reflex and stimulates your [...]
One of the biggest reasons people book themselves onto our presentation skills courses is their fear of presenting – there are lots of techniques we cover on these days, but some of them need a build-up.
However, here’s a stand-alone, specific tip for anyone suffering from an attack of performance nerves – be it in [...]
During our public presentation skills training course last week we were using some ‘famous presentations’ as texts for an exercise and someone was lucky enough to be working on Martin Luthor King’s fantastic “I have a dream”. Interestingly these famous words didn’t make an appearnce until well into the speech as you cans ee for [...]
I’ve been saying this for years as part of our voice training and here’s some legally-based support using voice work to identify criminals in the same way as fingerprints are….
http://expertpages.com/news/voice_forensic_tool.htm
Interesting stuff! Basically what it means is that your voice can uniquely identify you, and that re-inforces the point about you being the presentation, [...]
As many of you will know, I’m writing this from Newcastle upon Tyne - and it’s RSC season up here. Almost all of our theatres are taken over by the good folks from Stratford for a couple of months.
Amongs some of the things they’re doing are a series of workshops on Voice and - [...]
I spent some time this week in London, working with a female professor, attending meetings full of presentations. The fact that the Prof I was with was female didn’t matter one jot – she was the best in the world at what these people needed to know about….
….except that it did matter.
Why? Because being [...]
Today’s Times contains an article about voice/confidence/health. It’s got some useful tips - although there’s the common mis-understanding about the words you use only accounting for 7% of the meaning of a communication. (See my earlier blog - 7% rant) but it’s generally good stuff.
There’s an interesting point that about a third of us are [...]
Yes, okay, obviously! I’ve seen people start their presentations with a complete freeze, during which they even ‘forget’ to breathe and I’ve seen people hyper-ventilate. Neither is pretty!
The latter is particularly interesting: I’ve just come across some research that suggests that over-breathing (such as when you’re presenting and nervous) for as little as only one [...]