How to Connect with your Audience when Presenting

The public speaking world is awash with hundreds of techniques to make your presentation/speech ‘effective’ ‘have impact’ ‘be persuasive’, ‘entertaining’ … the list goes on.

But what purpose underlies all these techniques? It is to CONNECT.

Presenting is communicating and communicating is about connecting with the person/people in front of you.

That’s all very well you might say, but how do I connect?

Let’s start with 10 things we don’t do to connect when presenting:

Blog, Communication skills, Influencing, Presentation Skills

Leadership and that ‘vision thing’

It goes without saying that having a vision is a necessary quality of an effective leader or leadership team; followers can’t follow without a vision to follow!

But the best visions that work are the simple ones. They work because they demonstrate three things:

  1. Where we are going and why that is relevent to each individual.
  2. How exactly we will get there and that getting there is possible.
  3. What the vision means to each person and this is communicated well.
Blog, Communication skills, Leadership, Team building

Where does communication go wrong?

There’s no doubt – we all tend to take communication for granted. But as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, “The problem with communication… is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” We believe it to be a straightforward process and that when we say something the other person understands us fully and we, of course,…

Blog, Communication skills, Influencing, Listening, Management skills, Personal Development, Self Management

A simple way to make your presentation more professional

Here at Business Learning Solutions we are getting asked more and more to do presentations training and coaching in multinational companies. And I see managers and directors who have been giving presentations for years making the same mistake over and over again. What is the common mistake most of them make? – There is no structure to their…

Blog, Communication skills, Management skills, Presentation Skills