Business Communication. Sharpen your communication skills.

Every time you present to someone it forms an impression, giving you the potential for gain or loss. Over time, if you maximise the number of positive impressions you leave when you present, it will give you an edge in getting others to act, and in producing the outcomes you want.

This presentation skills training course will enable you to be perceived as articulate and competent – through how you plan and deliver presentations. You’ll learn how to handle presentation fears and nerves, and how to understand your audience. You’ll learn how to open and ‘hook’ an audience to listen, and how to choose, plan and structure your content. You’ll learn how to handle Q&A and how to make a memorable impression, and when and how to use (and not use) PowerPoint.

The philosophy of course, is that a presentation can take many forms – from a one-on-one presentation, to a small meeting presentation, to a boardroom presentation and to a large audience presentation. The content is applicable to all these environments.

Outcomes

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

• improve your skill in handling presentation fears
• utilise techniques in understanding your audience, and in forming the key message you want the audience to retain and/or act upon
• appropriately choose presentation content
• structure a presentation
• use a variety of methods to open a presentation, connect with an audience and close powerfully
• look and sound confident, and be perceived as articulate
• better handle Q&A
• identify the key idea/technique(s) you need to develop after the course, to reinforce your new learning.

Content

• How to handle presentation fears and nerves
• The Open-Middle-Close structure to use for any presentation
• How to understand your audience and choose your content
• How to use your audience understanding to form your key messages you want the audience to retain and/or act upon
• How to structure your presentations
• How to open and connect with an audience, and close powerfully
• How to look and sound confident
• How to handle Q&A
• When and how to use, and not use, PowerPoint

Delivery style

While this face-to-face workshop covers the planning and structuring of presentations, it is weighted more to the delivery side of presenting. Elements of content development and curation are covered but not in an in-depth manner. The course does not cover slide design and development.

This course is one of a trilogy of courses that Michael Kelly conducts for CCE. It repeats and covers the core speaking principles and some content of the courses: Communication Strategies for Becoming an Inspiring Leader and Listen and Speak Under Pressure.

It is highly interactive and requires your involvement in the various presentation methods. Safe environments are provided for you to practice and hone your speaking throughout the day.

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 client’s behaviour in real interactions. In effect, these top performers focus and care more about improving, than about any artificialness involved in the practice attempts.

Extras

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

Getting the most from your course 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.