Turning Difficult Customers Around
Usually if you can’t see them coming, you can hear them, or at worst smell the burning rubber. Difficult customers can be the bane of our lives, the kind of people who take up large chunks of our valuable time nit-picking away at seemingly trivial issues and actually costing us money in the process – the kind of folk we’d like to shepherd gently in to a barrel of over-fermented port and roll over the cliffs of Dover (we shall call this Plan A). But it’s not always the best remedy for our irritation and here’s...
read more9 Key Slide Show Tips
These tips come from years of not only training and coaching presentation skills delegates, but assessing them too. These are easily the most basic errors that inexperienced presenters make on their visuals. These errors have a catastrophic impact on audience perception and apart from immediately labeling you amateurish, will detract from your message and your outcome. These tips apply to both users of Keynote and PowerPoint. If you can eliminate these 9 errors, your visuals will look crisp and interesting. Error 1. Too much text. Apart from...
read moreShould I Care About What I Wear?
In a word, yes, because your audience will see you before they hear you. Therefore their first impression will be about how you look. Once you speak, your words and tone of voice will rapidly temper their opinion. However, once you’ve finished, the lasting impression you leave will remain affected by the image they remember. Weeks down the line, the mental image could well remain whereas the specifics of what you said will have almost disappeared. They will remember if you were “good”, if the presentation impressed them and whether or...
read moreLook After Your Voice
The possibility of losing your voice before a speech or presentation rates right up there as one of the greatest fears facing presenters and facilitators. The voice is a powerful but fragile instrument capable of the finest and most subtle nuances. We should really be looking after it properly. Here are some simple but useful tips in caring for your voice: Don’t get involved in cheerleader-type screaming activities – ever. Singing gently en route to the venue is recommended. If you don’t know any songs, scales will do, and it’s not...
read moreRafael Nadal and the #1 Presentation Fear.
It is accepted by many presentation skills practitioners that the fear of making a fool of oneself is central to all other fears. The specific one I wish to address here is mentioned regularly during programmes or lectures that I’ve delivered – the fear of addressing high level business people or “superiors”. I recall having similar fears when I started out in business. Specifically my fear was selling to older, more established people. A more experienced colleague pointed out to me that emotionally people are very similar regardless...
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