Fearless Presentations

Latest Episodes:

How To Memorize Your Speech In 60 Minutes May 20, 2019

Show notes

Looking for a quick and easy way to memorize an entire presentation quickly? Well, the solution to how to memorize a speech in minutes will likely surprise you. In this article, we will cover a few important points. First, we will cover the big mistakes that most people make when they design a presentation that makes memorizing the presentation much harder. Next, we cover a few memory techniques that are common among professional speakers. (These tips are fantastic, and they work really well.) However, in the third part, I will show you how to actually design your entire presentation where you won't have to memorize ANYTHING! If you use this technique, your audience will see you as being absolutely brilliant, and your speech will also be fantastically easier to deliver.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/in-a-hurry-heres-how-to-memorize-your-speech-in-less-than-60-minutes/

How to Gain Enthusiastic Cooperation from Your Audience May 13, 2019

Show notes

One of the most important aspects of many speeches is the ability to be persuasive. There is an art to creating a persuasive speech, but there is also a lot of communication skills that are important to the process as well. In this session, we will help you develop and strengthen communication skills that will help you use your words to gain enthusiastic cooperation from your audience.This is part five of our series on Improving Communication Skills. In part one, we talked about how a great communication coach can help you improve your communication skills more quickly. Next, we showed you a few simple things that you can do to shut down a heckler or someone who is peppering you with negative questions. In part three, we gave a number of ways to build trust and rapport with your audience. Then, finally, last week, we covered a few conflict resolution tips.SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-gain-enthusiastic-cooperation-from-your-audience/

A Few Simple Ways to Avoid Conflicts when Presenting Your Ideas to Groups May 06, 2019

Show notes

Eventually, if you present often, you will be required to deliver content that the audience either isn't in agreement with or, about which, your audience will be argumentative. It takes a skilled presenter to be able to deliver content like this in a way that doesn't create a conflict with the audience. We are continuing our series on Improving Communication Skills, and this week, we will cover a few ideas that will help you avoid disagreement and resolve conflicts. Before I cover these tips, however, keep in mind that if you follow the guidelines that we teach in our blogs, podcasts, and in our classes, you will be able to design presentations that are "audience-focused." These types of presentations are less likely to create conflicts with your audience. So, if you find that you have to create a presentation that you know your audience is going to disagree with, be sure to go through some of our earlier sessions like How to Design a Presentation and Making Your Presentation Title Audience Focused.

This is part four of our series on Improving Communication Skills. In part one, we talked about how a great communication coach can help you improve your communication skills more quickly. Next, we showed you a few simple things that you can do to shut down a heckler or someone who is peppering you with negative questions. In part three, we gave a number of ways to build trust and rapport with your audience. In the final sessions, we will show you how to use your words to gain enthusiastic cooperation from your audience.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/a-few-simple-ways-to-avoid-conflicts-when-presenting-your-ideas-to-groups/

Building Trust with a Group Using Good Communication Skills Apr 29, 2019

Show notes

When you stand up to speak in front of a group, you want to appear confident. However, of equal importance is the ability to build trust and rapport with your audience. Your audience will not believe you unless they first trust you. In this session, we are going to give you a few, simple communication skills that will help you build solid trust with your audience. Incidentally, these same skills will help you build trust and rapport within any relationship.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/building-trust-with-a-group-using-good-communication-skills/

4 Strategies for Handling Hecklers While Giving a Speech Apr 22, 2019

Show notes

If you practice great presentation skills and focus on designing your presentations on what your audience needs and wants, you will likely not have much trouble with hecklers. However, it only takes a single mad-at-the-world heckler to quickly turn your presentation masterpiece into modern art. So, when you are rudely interrupted, you will want to have a strategy that calms the heckler and makes you continue to look like the expert in the room. One of the more recent occurrences in social media is the birth of "internet trolls." While internet trolls and hecklers have a couple of things in common, such as mean and offensive language, internet trolls are able to hide their real identities in fake online accounts. The majority of them aren’t really mean in real life. Hecklers, on the other hand, are braver in a way that they’re confident in attracting negative attention to themselves without masking their identity. Online trolls can be ignored. Ignoring a heckler while giving a speech is not so easy, though, and can cause you to lose credibility in front of your audience.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/4-strategies-for-handling-hecklers-while-giving-a-speech/

A Good Communication Coach Can Help Shore Up Communication Weaknesses Apr 15, 2019

Show notes

A good communications coach (formal or informal) can help you identify communication strengths and weaknesses. Years ago, I was having coffee with a colleague. He mentioned that he had just had a session with his "personal coach." During the session, this coach helped him the layout, in pretty good detail, so strategic goals that he should be focusing on. Between you and me, the whole discussion seemed weird to me. Honestly, I thought that this "coach" was, most likely, a con-artist. I had heard about these people who had never really accomplished anything in their lives, but who paid for some weekend certification to get a certificate to become a certified life coach. After he mentioned his session, I, in my sarcastic way, told him, "Man, I could have told you that for free."It's funny, because, I guess I'm a skeptic by nature. So, if you are trying to sell me on the value of something new to me, you'd better have some solid proof. Interestingly, just six years prior to that conversation, my communications coach had helped me increase my financial success by almost double. I just didn't realize that she was a "communications coach." I had been working for an oil company. At the time, the price of oil was at rock bottom, so chances of advancement were slim. In fact, my company had just started laying off people, and I was one of the last guys hired. I had spent four years getting a university degree that was specific to the oil industry, so I was terrified about what I was going to do for a living. Out of desperation, I ended up taking a three-month leadership development course. The instructor for this course was not a fly-by-night teacher who gained her experience from a seminar. Instead, she was a highly successful business person who had also trained with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the area. She was able to shave years off of my learning curve.
In fact, less than a year after finishing her leadership class, I changed careers and quickly been promoted into management. I was making more money in my monthly bonus checks than I had made at the oil company. The funniest part about that conversation I had with my colleague was that, if I had never met this leadership coach, I would not have ever been at that table, having coffee in the first place.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/a-good-communication-coach-can-help-shore-up-communication-weaknesses/

Online Training Best Practices that Supports Your In-Person Training Sessions Apr 01, 2019

Show notes

So how do you create an online training course that people don't hate? Six months ago, we set out to recreate the online version of The Fearless Presentations ® Course. To be blunt, when we started, I just assumed that we would just update the videos of the old version, make it look prettier, and be done. However, the more we updated the more opportunities that we noticed. I think my biggest obstacle at the beginning was my preconceived notions about online training.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/online-training-best-practices-that-supports-your-in-person-training-sessions/

Modern Examples of Training and Development Programs for Employees in 2019 Mar 25, 2019

Show notes

The world is constantly changing. In the past, businesses thrived when they created a single new product or idea and brought it to market. Today, though, businesses thrive by adapting to and adopting best practices that are constantly evolving and changing. One thing is for certain, if you stay still or rest on your laurels, you will fail. The world of training and employee development is also evolving. If you are training and developing your employees the same way that you did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, heck, even just a couple years ago, you are likely falling behind many of your competitors. In this episode, we are going to delve into some modern examples of training and development programs for employees. We could call this 2019 Training and Development Models, and the title would be quite descriptive.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/modern-examples-of-training-and-development-programs-for-employees-2019/

7 Qualities of a Good Public Speaker that Every Presenter Should Know (And Emulate) Mar 18, 2019

Show notes

What are the most important qualities of a good public speaker? What makes a great presenter? What are the qualities that allow one orator to get up in front of an audience and memorize the crowd while another fails? Well, science may offer the answer to these questions. When I first started teaching the Fearless Presentations® classes, I did so because I knew from my own experience that the more self-confident a presenter appears to an audience, the more respect that the audience will have for that presenter. In addition, chapter one of my first book was about enthusiasm, because I knew that out of all of the characteristics of a good speaker, enthusiasm was the absolute, most important. Over the years, though, our instructors have worked with over 20,000 presenters. Some had a natural presence in front of groups. Others, however, had to develop a public speaking skill in order to be perceived as being a great public speaker. Below are the seven qualities of a good public speaker that we have identified as the most important. In addition to our observations as public speaking coaches, we have also added the scientific proof that we also uncovered along the way.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/7-qualities-of-a-good-public-speaker-that-every-presenter-should-know-and-emulate/

Why Do I Still Get Nervous When I Speak in Public? Mar 11, 2019

Show notes

I was teaching a presentation skills class in Houston this week, and I had two separate participants pull me aside at two separate breaks and ask the same exact question... "Why do I still get nervous when I speak in public?" This question is very common (both during a presentation class, and sometimes, even afterward). When you understand the answer to this question, though, you have a much better chance of eliminating your public speaking fear for good. The answer has three parts.
First, many of the things that we do to reduce public speaking nervousness will actually cause the nervousness. Second, fear, of any kind, can be conquered if you both reduce the risk of failure and have a series of successes in a short period of time. Finally, the way that the Fearless Presentations® class works is that, as we cover new stages of delivering presentations, the stages get more complicated. So, the process is designed to make participants continually experience higher levels of nervousness but also allows them to experience success at each stage. Let's cover each of these three areas in a little more detail.
SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/why-do-i-still-get-nervous-when-i-speak-in-public/

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