Public Speaking, Presentation & Leadership Skills

Have you ever felt your heart beat really fast, your hands shake, or your stomach twist into knots before you have to speak in front of others? Maybe you worry you’ll forget your words, or that people will laugh at you. If you feel this way, you are not alone! Even well-known speakers and actors get nervous before talking to a crowd. The good news is, there are some very simple things you can do to help yourself feel brave and calm. Let’s learn these easy tricks together, so the next time you need to give a talk or presentation, you can shine! 1. Take Deep Breaths When we get nervous, our bodies react by breathing quickly and feeling tense. An easy way to stop this is to take deep breaths. Close your eyes if you want. Breathe in slowly through your nose, counting to four. Hold your breath for two seconds. Breathe out gently through your mouth while counting to four. Doing this a few times tells your body to relax, and your mind starts to feel calm too. 2. Prepare and Practise, Practise...

Hey there! Have you ever found yourself sitting through a technical presentation, struggling to stay focused? Maybe the slides were packed with tiny text, or the speaker rattled off jargon that left you scratching your head. We’ve all been there. But what if you could be the presenter who makes everyone lean in rather than zone out? Today, let’s talk about how you—yes, you—can use audio-visual (AV) tools to breathe life into your technical presentations. Whether your audience is full of industry pros, new learners, or an international crowd, the right AV choices can make your message clear, memorable, and even fun. Why Should You Care About Audio-Visuals? Let’s be honest: technical subjects can be intimidating—or even boring—if presented badly. But you have a secret weapon at your disposal! Audio-visuals are more than just eye candy. They help break down tough ideas, keep everyone on track, and appeal to different learning styles in the room. Some of us are visual thinkers,...

Every Saturday I take my son to his music teacher, the different ways of practice that his teacher teaches him is equally applicable to public speaking. Whenever he made a mistake, she got him to start from a few notes before the mistake and carry on a few notes after the mistake, rather than going back to the start each time. This meant that the part of song that needed the most practice got it, rather than becoming excellent at the first part of the piece and then gradually getting worse as it went on. She also made him practice in various styles and speed. This kept him interested and also started making him versatile. It is good idea to aim to memorise your speech and have notes or cue cards to refer when needed. But as you get confident you should aim to become less reliant on your notes and to leave the script behind at times and just go with the flow. You may find yourself with a different audience to what you prepared for and they may appreciate a different angle on yo...

Nobody Cares! Believe it or not, it's true - not single person in your audience cares about you. You and your story. You and your success. You and your obstacles. You and your genius ideas. Even if your mom, spouse, or kids are in the audience - they don't care about you either. Humans are an egotistical lot. Only they care about is themselves. To be honest we love our name the most, even if we say to others even sometimes ourselves that we don’t love our name. That doesn’t mean we don’t like other person, we hear the story of success and adventure, because it affects us, it gives us the ambition and push to start believing that we can do. Why do you think, that underdog stories are the most successful stories in the world. Its one and only because it’s helps us to believe that we can do it, we also can be the best, in short it suits our egoism. While constructing a speech this is the first thing that we have to make sure, that in our speech there is something...

Tips for improving vocal Variety Have you ever listened to a recording of your voice and cringed?  Perhaps you were surprised about how nasally or high-pitched it was, or how hard you were to understand. Perhaps in that moment you wished for a more soothing, pleasant-sounding voice. It must be remembered voice of every person is unique and engaging, we only have to train to remove the distractions in our voice, that  suppress  the quality of our natural voice. We have discussed about vocal variety and its importance in previous post . Here we will be discussion about few steps to remove the distractions and improve our voice quality for public speaking. Step 1- Speak-up .    It's important to be heard when you speak, so raise your voice! If you tend to whisper, mumble or speak with your head down, it is much easier for people to get distracted and start ignoring you. Please note that this doesn’t mean you should be shouting from the word go. Shoutin...

Maximum NUMBER of presentation ARE USELESS Well, your presentation may be wonderful, I like to think mine are, but maximum presentation are. The title of the article is an overstatement, it is to catch the attention – but there’s a serious point behind what I am trying to point out. Quite a few of the persons are nervous because there presentation means something in its own right. They are fearful of the judgement of the quality of the presentation, the draft of the presentation. Your presentation doesn’t mean anything on its own. It’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. Example In your day to day activities you come through reports. Suppose there are two reports: One is written in fantastic font. The binding is great, there is a beautiful cover page, but there is no summery / conclusion, it is just an amalgamation of many points of what is happening without a logical flow. Whereas there is another report on the same project which is not that good looking, b...

Be yourself Probably you have come across this advice more often than not. Certainly I’ve come across this advice about making presentations in quite a few places over the years. It seems to be quite good but somewhat limited and occasionally wrong. When this is said, it is generally meant to be good – usually spoken by a friend just before a terrified speaker goes up on stage in a last minute attempt to reassure them that all will be well – but the truth is that being a good speaker requires more than being yourself. If one need to be yourself to be a good speaker, then everyone of us would have been a good speaker. In other words - You need to “be yourself” and you need to “perform” at the same time – in other words you need to be yourself and have good presentation skills. Difficult? Of course it is or we all would be doing it. Think of the techniques to help you to perform the day to day activities like walking. Once we know how to walk,...

Differences Count When You Are Presenting You’ve got a big presentation coming up and you know that you want to make a difference and have the audience walk away with a good understanding of the complex info that you are going to present. What can you do to really make sure that you key points get hammered home? You want to get your understanding itched into the audience. You want to surprise them with your presentation. What can you do? Setting the stage on fire can be great but impractical way to accomplish this. How about two simpler ways that us technical folks always seem to forget as we pull together our presentations? Audience Attention is drawn to perceptible differences Let’s say that you’ve got a slide that contains one of the key points that you want to make to your audience. There are probably other things on that slide (like a title?). You need to make sure that your key point, be it a number, a comparison, a figure, etc. jumps out at your audience. All o...

Persuade person with elegance At some point everyone tries to persuade someone else for something. It may be selling a product or lobbying for a promotion or even just trying to win a debate competition.  As we face challenges from the person/persons we are trying to persuade, we try to be push harder.  But, the harder you push the more people have a tendency to get defensive and back away. This is one of the most important challenges faced by a leader / person when one tries to get the work done from his / her subordinates / colleagues. Good persuasion is a skill. It's a give and take allowing for people to move at their own pace with some steady nudging. Some are good at it but others needed to learn it from scratch. But both have to continuously practice it. There are a number of effective and inoffensive considerations and techniques that can help with pleasant persuasion. Make it discreet Often, talking through a point gets lost. People have a strong...