Mumbling, stumbling, worrying, trembling, sweating and fearing are the outcomes of the low delivery skills. In this course, we are not going to teach you how to replicate the best bits and traits of the acknowledged speakers. Dumb replication of someone’s successful behavior may help you only to the extent. That extent is the situation. When you are facing a different context, a different situation such “skills” might not work at all.
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Instead, we try to get to the core issues that stand behind the troubles with delivery and start honing your skills from there. Topics we are going to cover:
1) Preparation — how to deal with fear and anxiety
2) Voice, pace and gesture — how to speak, stand and move.
3) Getting live feedback — how to interact with the audience.
4) Taking Q&A and Improvisation
So don’t meddle, start the course and make your delivery better.
Course 3 of 4 in the Presentation Skills: Speechwriting, Slides and Delivery Specialization.
Syllabus
WEEK 1
Preparation
This week is about preparation. Preparation is the key to dealing with anxiety and fear, various technical, semi-technical faults and live mistakes. We will cover the proper ways to rehearse, ways to deal with faults and mistakes.
WEEK 2
Voice
This week is about key principles of delivery: how to spread attention between audience, yourself and material, how to visualize and feel in order to appear more passionate, how to do semi-warm-ups (if only needed) and how to speak with an audience.
WEEK 3
Contact
This week is about the contact with your audience. Connection with the audience is the most important part of the delivery. No connection — you are talking to abyss, your message is lost. But there is no single ultimate indicator whether you have the connection or not. It is more like a cloud of small nonverbal and verbal signs: faces, gestures, smartphones, questions and so on. So you need to look for, decode and response to the feedback.
WEEK 4
Q&A
This week is about Q&A and improvisation. Q&A’s are risky, because you can be caught off-guard and look stupid, but in the same time exciting — live demos are always more fun than screencasts; and important, because anyone can memorize a somebody else’s speech, but only the author can answer tough but valuable questions. So we are going to cover some basic dos and don’ts and then my proven algorithm of dealing with questions.
