Speak With Confidence

Know Your Listeners

Knowing your listeners is key to preparing an effective presentation. Nothing puts listeners into a speaker’s pocket better than a speech that zeroes in on their specific needs. Your listeners will be more likely to respond positively if they feel that your research has helped you prepare specifically for them. Answers to the following 10 questions will provide you with most of the information you need to know about your listeners before you speak. This

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What’s Your Theme?

Technical and business presentations can be difficult for both speakers and listeners. Using a theme sentence will be very helpful. A theme is the most important idea or bit of information that you want your listeners to take away. If they forget everything else, what is the one thing you want them to remember? That is your theme. Author Dennis Becker View all posts

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How to Convince Your Boss to Pay for Presentation Training

Today’s motivated and driven employees know they need continual training to keep up with and thrive within a competitive and fast-paced corporate world.  That training may require an approval process, whether it’s a boss, decision-maker, or others. In Brendon Burchard’s book High-Performance Habits, he explains in Habit Four, “Get Insanely Good at Key Skills (Progressive Mastery). Determine the five major skills you need to develop over the next three years to grow into the person

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There Are Only Three Ways for a CEO to Persuade Someone (Part 1)

The role of a biotech CEO involves effective communication between leaders, managers, board members, and shareholders. Because Boards advise and direct management teams on crucial decisions, CEOs must communicate the vision, metrics, and progress of the organization. This blog, based on our extensive research, explains that there are only three ways to persuade someone of something. Part 1 will share the first tool and be sure to read Part 2 and Part 3 in this series to learn the other two

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Team Meetings:  What Google can learn from Communication Coaches

In the communication field, there is a lot of  buzz about Google’s Project Aristotle, a meticulous, in-depth study of what differentiates high-functioning team meetings from others. With all due respect for the yearlong study of over one hundred Google teams, we communication coaches have been helping teams and leaders foster productive meetings for years! Google’s key findings, which we back with our experiences 100%, reveal that high-performing teams: Support an atmosphere of psychological safety and

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Four Effective Tools to Control Your Fear of Speaking 

Fear of speaking means more than sweaty palms and a shaky voice. Your concerns can prevent upward mobility in your field, cause you to lose funding, and unfortunately, stunt the growth of your company.   Your specific fears when speaking in public will be different from your colleagues. Sometimes it means you don’t speak up as often in team meetings, or you become flustered when you speak publicly. For others, a fear of speaking can be more subtle,

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Use Humor to be More Effective in Presentations 

People want to do business with people they like.  Making someone smile or chuckle will have the effect of:        Quickly building rapport       Connect you and your information with positive feelings       Lower your listener’s defenses creating a more receptive mindset   Studies have shown that humor can also increase the retention of information and help you be more persuasive.  Ineffectively using humor can backfire and make your listeners think you are incompetent, lack judgment, and other adverse

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Practice Strategies for a Biotech CEO Demystified

One of the statements most often spoken by anyone faced with a big presentation is “I need to practice.” For life science startup CEOs and leadership teams, this is in many cases, a topic of conversation. “I need to practice.” “We need to practice.” “We need to schedule practice.” “This presentation is critical because it influences our funding.” It is common to think practice is easy, but it is not. It is not easy to

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