Most advice about public speaking is about confidence, which is the part that cannot be handed to anyone. This is about structure — which can, and which is what makes the confidence follow.
This is aimed at the people who present because their job requires it: a weekly meeting with the team, a proposal in front of a client, the annual numbers to the whole company, a pitch to a bank.
Those are the moments where being unclear is expensive, and they happen far more often than a keynote does. Nobody in a company of forty people needs to give a TED talk. Several of them need to run a meeting that ends with everyone knowing what to do.
Every talk has one job: a decision taken, a doubt removed, a thing started. Most bad presentations are bad because nobody decided which one, so they try to do all three and do none.
What has to be said first for the second thing to make sense. Done properly, this removes most of the nerves on its own: you stop fearing you will lose your thread, because there is one.
Voice, pace, hands, what to do with a hostile question. Practised in the room, in front of the others, which is uncomfortable and is the only way it works.
Everyone has one. Talk to us about what would have to change for it to be easy.
