Business Communication. Sharpen your communication skills.

You might imagine that listening and speaking under pressure is a natural ability - you either have it or you don't. In fact, with good preparation and a structured approach you can develop the confidence to be spontaneous and articulate when presenting a proposal, public speaking, strengthening your case or selling your ideas. This lively course will show you a four-step system for doing this, so that, even under pressure, you can speak accurately, fluently and flexibly.

Outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• demonstrate your improved skill in planning to listen and quickly understand questions
• use ‘pause gaps’ and improve your use of honouring silence
• utilise methods of improving confidence and perceived confidence through addressing your physical presentation and vocal abilities
• utilise a range of easy to use talk structures to respond to any question
• quickly translate ideas to speech.

Content

• How to build your thinking and speaking on your feet 'identity'
• What the 'client' perceives is what matters
• Creating perceptions of confidence when listening
• Creating perceptions of confidence when responding
• A beginning, middle and ending, and other talk structure techniques
• How to build your fluency and flexibility with 'under fire' practice

Delivery modes

• Face-to-face, presenter-taught workshop
• Online workshop via the platform Zoom

Delivery style

This workshop is one of a trilogy of courses that Michael Kelly delivers. It repeats the core principles and reinforces the content of the courses: Presentation Skills: Plan and Deliver Memorable Presentations and Communication Strategies for Becoming an Inspiring Leader. However, the focus of this course is on projecting confidence in any pressured interaction, including Q&A at the end of a group presentation, responding to ad hoc questions in a sit-down meeting and handling chance encounters with senior executives.

One process of the course involves ‘repeated practice attempts’ of a technique, followed by feedback. These practice attempts can seem artificial to some people. Michael’s fieldwork with his top performing clients indicates these practice attempts with feedback are critical to improving his clients behaviour in real interactions. In effect, these top performers focus and care more about improving, than about any artificialness involved in the practice attempts.

Materials

Course materials are provided electronically using Dropbox

Extras

Watch Michael Kelly's Seven Network, body language analysis of Prince Philip’s funeral.

Getting the most from your attendance

You're making an investment of your time and money by enrolling in this course. Here are three suggestions to help you reap benefit from your attendance:

• Consider what work colleague/friend you could teach an idea/technique to. This means, arrange a five minute catch-up appointment with a work colleague/friend the next work day after your course to teach that person the most memorable idea/techniques you learned in the course. This 'teaching' will help you retain the idea/technique. Until you can teach an idea/technique to other people you don't really know it yourself.
• Plan to participate/volunteer. In all of Michael Kelly's courses, he offers various opportunities, throughout the day, for you to have additional attempts at practising techniques/interaction types. The people that volunteer for these opportunities get more worth from the course. So come prepared to participate and volunteer.
• Before the course day write down in one sentence or phrase a specific thing/behaviour/attitude etc. that you'll like to exit the day with. You'll get the opportunity to share this thing/behaviour/attitude at the start of the day.