Are you intimidated by public speaking? When you attempt it, do you have trouble imparting your message, or even keeping your audience from zoning out?
ExecEd can help.
Back in the depths of the COVID shutdown, Brad Stratton, director of the Center for Business Communication at the Darla Moore School of Business, explained on this blog how to better communicate on Zoom. He and his fellow instructor Karen Kalutz can still help you with that. But now, they’re also focusing on that situation that many find far more intimidating: A room full of real people staring at you and waiting for you to say something worth hearing.
The course is called “Sharpening Your Message/Delivering with Confidence.” It’s a two-day workshop mostly taught as a Custom Solution, but also sometimes offered as an Open Enrollment class. Simply put, it’s designed to help middle- and senior-level executives and managers become more effective speakers.
Participants will “learn by doing,” the course description specifies.
“We put people up on their feet and ask them to speak,” Karen explains. She and Brad use that to determine “what is working, and how can we capitalize on that strength.” They also see the weaknesses, and help the speakers overcome them.
The aim is not only to relay tips on how to do speak successfully, but to instill confidence, which makes such success possible.
By the time the workshop is over, participants should:
- know the best techniques;
- be able to effectively analyze audiences and tailor messages to them;
- identify a natural speaking style and be comfortable with it;
- be able to think quickly and make unrehearsed presentations;
- deliver presentations as both lectures and guided discussions; and
- answer questions succinctly and effectively.
“Anybody can be a good speaker,” says Brad. The course doesn’t promise to “turn you into Martin Luther King,” but it does relate basic principles that Dr. King and other great speakers have employed with such great effect. One of those is preparation. MLK didn’t just deliver the “I have a dream” speech off the top of his head. He had spent months preparing.
Karen says she is always dismayed to see a speaker take to the podium without notes. “It’s hard to deliver a compelling message that isn’t planned,” she says. Workshop participants are taught to hammer out a rough draft, “sit down and read that thing out loud,” and then cut anything that might hide their message.
Brad says it’s “like painting a house: the hardest part is the prep work” – clearing the space and scraping, choosing a color, buying the paint, gathering the brushes and other gear. “The actual painting is easier.” This course teaches how to make it easy.
And it works. He loves hearing later from participants who months later run into him and say, “Hey, you remember that presentation I was working on? It went really well!”
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