Dec 28

Public Speaking – Vocal Tips

A few weeks ago at my local Toastmasters club in London, I had the privilege to see a former member of the club be a General Evaluator. The speaker in question, Phillip Khan-Panni, is now a professional. What struck me when I saw him speak was how resonant, rich and, in the words of my old vocal coach, “fruity” his voice sounded. I realised how important vocal exercises were for public speakers.

It reminded me that in my pursuit of achieving my speaking goals within Toastmasters I had neglected to give adequate attention to maintaining and improving my vocal range. The thing is it wouldn’t be that difficult for me to get my voice “fighting fit” again as it was trained for 3 years at drama school. Continue reading

Dec 07

Fear of Public Speaking – articles

I recently wrote a couple of articles on the fear of public speaking as an experiment for this new website that I’m trying out. I’m pleased to say that they both got published. Woo-hoo!

Here’s the lowdown…

The first article is titled: “Top 5 Tips for Overcoming The Fear of Public Speaking” and was picked up by prosportspeaker.com and can be read by clicking on that link.

The second article simply titled: “Public Speaking Fear” can be read on a language tutition website DandAEnterprises.com

Who knows where I’ll go from here. The site that I’m trying out is a monthly paid subscription site that allows article writers and publishers to suggest and request material. But the thing is I’m a member of about 3 membership sites at the time of writing so I’ll have to see.

Dec 06

Effective Presentations

Through one of my agencies I was recently put forward for a job working for the U.K. programming department of an international television company. They were looking for a research assisstant who could research and put together presentations.

It sounded relatively ideal, but unfortunately the job got cancelled. When I spoke to my agency about other similar roles they informed me that my PowerPoint skills aren’t up to scratch. Which, if I am honest, is completely accurate.

I’ve spoken elsewhere on this blog about structuring a speech and the same is applicable to presentations too.

But it got me thinking. From my experience of various slide and PowerPoint presentations, it doesn’t matter how well you are able to use the equipment or software because if your ability to present isn’t up to scratch then no amount of clip art graphics or cool animation is going to be able to help you.

People who have to give presentations in the business world often lack these key fundamental skills. I was reminded of this when I was writing an article on the subject earlier today.

You need to be able to structure your presentation away from PowerPoint first. You need to understand your message and the points that you have to convey.

But don’t just fill up slide upon slide with text and images.  Information overload (which is quite common in this day and age) can turn your listeners off. Or, at worst, send them to sleep.

I came across a PowerPoint slide show on the blogosphere called “Death by PowerPoint“, that for me nicely sums up some essential dos and don’ts when it comes to using Power Point.

By the way, I did end up doing a full day’s training with PowerPoint version 7 (not sure how useful that would be) and I went through the software from basic to advanced. But now I just need to have a play around with the software in my own time to increase my familarity.

Here’s that link again: Death by PowerPoint

Nov 20

Seminar Presentations

I came across a public speaking tip by Heidi Miller over at Talk It Up! blog. It works well as a sort of follow on from my last blog post. Heidi talks about seminar presentations. Here’s a quick extract from that article:

Public Speaking Tip #6

“Here’s the thing. For most seminar presentations at conference, you have an hour. You are not going to be able to change our lives in an hour. You are not going to be able to give us 10 things we are going to be able to absorb and implement in an hour. You are not going to be able to change our entire way of thinking about something in an hour…”

She’s absoutely right of course.  Of the speakers I’ve seen who don’t have any specific training other than being in a managerial position, most do exactly this.

They try to cram in a lot of infomation, without sparing a thought for us listeners who might not even know where to begin to implement any suggestions. Or even to understand the exact take away value from what they are telling us.

I certainly learnt something from Heidi’s article.

To read the full article click here.

Nov 16

7 Tips for Conquering Public Speaking Fear

We’ve all heard about how people’s number fear is public speaking. The comedian Jerry Seinfeld had this to say on the fear of public speaking:

“The number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Number two. That means most people would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy”.

Although the line is funny,  to me it just doesn’t seem right. People’s number one fear is still public speaking.

So I decided to come up with a few tips that might help people conquer the public speaking fear. Here’s my Top 7 Tips that I’ve put together in order to help reduce that top spot ranking: Continue reading