It’s been almost 40 years since I first started speaking and presenting to people from the front of the room. The number of people I have addressed over those years would be literally tens of thousands, and they fall into three distinct groups that reflect where I was working at the time.
The first groups, back in the early 1970s, were people who had come to hear a talk on meditation, at a time when meditation was generally thought of as something weird, strange, ‘foreign’, and that only hippies or the like would do!
Each week, on Monday evening, I would give a talk at the library on Kensington High Street in London, where sometimes five people would show up, sometimes twenty five. Giving these talks gave me the opportunity to learn and practice a fundamental presentation skill called ‘framing’.
Basically, every point you make in a presentation needs to be 'framed', that is - given a context. If you don't do this, your audience will come up with their own context, which may well not be the one you intend. The what, why, and how of framing, the different kinds of frames, and when specifically not to frame is a large subject, but one that we cover in depth on ‘Presenting with Presence’.
The second groups I worked with were on Personal Development programmes here in Australia. The major learning here was how to build rapport, trust and safety with a group, enough for them to be willing to open up, talk and self disclose in ways they might never have done before.
The importance of building rapport and trust was underlined by one of my teachers who basically said, “..until you’ve built rapport, there is no point at all in going any further into the content you want to deliver. Rapport comes first!”
The third groups have been in business and corporate trainings. The first time I stood up in front of an in-house business group was different to anything I had done before, and with a shock I realized what it was – many of these people didn’t want to be there! Up until then I had had the privilege of standing in front of people who had chosen, and in most cases, paid to be there. Over time I learnt another major lesson in presentation – how to enroll people in feeling it would be worthwhile for them to be there, even though they may not have chosen to be there in the first place!
These are just a few of the elements that go into effective presentation. If you’d like to learn more about these and many other factors that make presentations more impactful, come and join us for a weekend on Presenting with Presence. It’s an investment in yourself!
Presenting With Presence runs on November 13th and 14th. The cost of the program is $570. Join Robert Meredith and Barry Quin on this exciting weekend journey ...
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