Background checking on the fly

In this series targeting some strategies to help know your audience, I have given two tips that will help you be prepared and target your speech with specific information. First, I told you that you need to plan on arriving early and connecting with the attendees one on one to...
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How to Talk to … Judges

I’m going to branch off in this series about knowing who you’re speaking to in order to talk about the two audiences everyone in the legal profession knows best: judges and juries. This will have real-world application to legal professionals and is the culmination of decades of...
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Pitch-perfect client presentations

A good client pitch should be a dialogue, not a monologue.When speaking to an important client, it’s tempting to want to impress them with PowerPoint presentations that have lots and lots of bullet points and complicated graphics. This is euphemistically called a “dog and pony...
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How to talk to … a Board of Directors

Prepare properly for a Board presentation and it could be the key to advancing your career. I’ve been talking in the past few weeks about how to get to know your audience before you begin. But I’d like to switch the focus for a bit to how to approach different types of audiences....
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A sneaky tip: Use the attendance list

As we’re all aware, there’s a world of information about us, singly and in our respective groups and affiliations, available online. That is something that should concern each one of us, but since it is also a fact of 21st century life, it can provide you with a means to find out...
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Speak to your audience, not down to them

Recently, I posted one of my favorite short tips: Arrive early. Arriving early to lower the barriers may sound like common sense, but believe me, there are speakers who would rather do anything than lower barriers. When it comes to knowing how to speak well and how to consider...
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Six questions to ask about your audience

Can you imagine going to a dinner party where the host and hostess put out all their favorite dishes and beverages without any consideration for the dietary restrictions or tastes of the group they were serving? It would be a breach of etiquette at the very least, and result in a...
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Public speaking isn’t a mystery

I have spent the last 25 years working with attorneys, CEO’s, Non-Profit leadership, and executives helping to improve their presentation skills, and I know that I have helped all of them improve significantly. But I also think that part of my job is to de-mystify Public...
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Finding the time to be a brilliant speaker

Well, I admit it. I had no idea it had been so long since my last post.  I kept thinking I had posted that Power Point note “just last month” and I could get to another post soon. Speech preparation is like that too.  Most people I speak to, when I teach public...
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Power Point tip: Be CRAPpy!

I just came across this great blog post on Power Point: How to Create Pro Slides in Less Time: Don’t Worry, Be CRAPpy by Chiara Ojeda on Six Minutes, a popular and comprehensive Blog about Public Speaking Skills. Chiara’s post gives some great before and after examples of...
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