Speak With Confidence
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
The one thing most people never pay attention to when presenting – CONTEXT
What does that title mean? The actual context for your listeners is what they have experienced before they begin listening to you speak. The framework can include such things as: Local or global political breaking news Weather Challenges with the venue or room Personal issues Foremost in their mind is anything that your listener has heard, said, felt, or experienced just before giving you their attention. If you can observe their body language and
3 Ways to Handle Questions Confidently
Questions are an essential part of meetings. When questions are asked, there is interest; that’s a good thing. Questions can be a test not only for your knowledge of the content but your confidence in what you are representing. The 3 techniques below will help you prepare for inevitable questions. 1) Restate– In restating the question you are NOT adding any new information or changing the meaning. This is really important. Changing the meaning does not always mean words,